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There’s been an unexpected discovery of rare earth elements in Sweden that’s getting a lot of attention. Rare earth minerals are used in items like our phones, computers, batteries, electric vehicles and wind turbines. Rare earth production is largely dominated by China so the thinking is the West will benefit from this new discovery. But as Straight Arrow News contributor Peter Zeihan explains, the discovery isn’t really that big of a deal.
Excerpted from Peter’s Jan. 16 “Zeihan on Geopolitics” newsletter:
A state-owned mining company in Sweden has just stumbled upon a million metric tons of rare earth metals…but what does that mean? Any addition to the rare earths supply is great, but I don’t see this moving the needle much.
These metals aren’t all that rare, they’re not difficult to process and they’re not all that expensive…plus we won’t be seeing any of these metals hit the markets for at least 10 years.
While this is a nice discovery for the Swedes, plenty of countries have excess processing capacity should a need arise.
