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Rescue operation underway in Shaft 11. (Photo: GIWUSA) 78 miners found starved and dehydrated to death in South African police operation against unlicensed mining Originally published: Peoples Dispatch on January 22, 2025 by Pavan Kulkarni (more by Peoples Dispatch) | (Posted Jan 24, 2025) https://mronline.org/2025/01/24/78-...n-police-operation-against-unlicensed-mining/ The bodies of 78 artisanal miners, starved and dehydrated by the South African Police which had trapped them underground since last August in a crackdown on illegal mining, were retrieved from the Buffelsfontein gold mine’s Shaft 11 last week. Dozens more bodies and body parts allegedly remain in the Shaft 10 of this abandoned mine in the town of Stilfontein, 150 km southwest of Johannesburg. Without retrieving the dead bodies or searching for survivors in this shaft, the police have announced the end of the rescue operation, which they had prevented for months until a court ordered it on January 10. Beginning on January 13, the rescue operation was concluded on January 16, hauling out 246 emaciated survivors from Shaft 11. Even as they struggled to walk, with little muscle left on their bony frames, most of them were arrested by the police for illegal mining. “There has been an explosion of unlicensed, artisanal mining in recent years,” explained Mametlwe Sebei, president of the General Industries Workers Union of South Africa (GIWUSA), to Peoples Dispatch. With the deepening of neoliberal de-industrialization, companies have abandoned an estimated 6,000 mines over the last two decades, without properly sealing the entrances. Left in the lurch, large sections of the mining community, unable to find other jobs amid the worsening unemployment crisis, have been eking out a living from these abandoned mines. Descending on ropes without adequate safety gear into the dark bowels of some of the deepest mines in the world, they dig for leftover deposits of gold. The government estimates that it loses a billion dollars annually due to this illicit mining. In the absence of government oversight, crime syndicates have capitalized on this underground economy. To address this problem, “we have to develop a regulatory regime that allows licensing of artisanal miners and provides them with proper equipment to ensure they work safely, efficiently and productively,” maintains Sebei. “According to the government over 2,000 of these abandoned mines still have substantial deposits of minerals. If capitalized, it can become a source of employment for hundreds of thousands of miners and unemployed people across the country,” he added. Instead, the government has criminalized the artisanal miners, who are among the poorest of the poor working class–mostly migrants from neighboring countries. Crackdown on the mine in Buffelsfontein A nation-wide crackdown on such miners was launched in December 2023 under the name Operation Vala Umgodi (Plug the Hole). In August, the police came for the miners in Buffelsfontein, abandoned by a mining company in 2014. Chasing away the workers on the surface who were operating the pulley to lower down food, water and the miners themselves into shaft 11, the police removed the ropes, trapping the miners 2 km underground with no supplies. “There are makeshift shops underground, where miners can buy food and water for gold,” Sebei said. But without fresh supplies from the surface, underground stocks quickly ran out. It was November by the time the first tranche of food and water was permitted by the police after protests by the community, said Sebei, who was involved in the months-long legal battle to secure their rescue. “But they dismantled the pulley again.” Even after a court order in December instructing the police to permit community members to supply the miners underground, “police repeatedly interfered with the pulley system and blocked the supplies,” he added. “They were demanding that the miners should come out and surrender. But there is no lift, no staircase, there was no way the miners could come out of Shaft 11” without the pulley and ropes, he explained. Severed body parts in Shaft 10 Desperate, many of the stranded miners made a treacherous journey to Shaft 10 which has a pole they were hoping to climb back up. Crawling for 3 to 4 days in narrow, dark, flooded tunnels, often “with no sense of direction when their lights ran out of battery”, the miners who had not perished enroute reached Shaft 10, Sebei said. “Climbing from its bottom to the surface took another three days on average,” he added. Weakened by hunger and dehydration, many of them, unable to continue holding on to the handlebars of the pole, fell back to the bottom of the 2.5 km-deep shaft. The impact of their falling bodies against the handlebars they had already climbed below “cut them to pieces”. Those who successfully endured this climb were arrested. Since November, over 1,500 miners had surfaced before the rescue commenced on January 15, according to the police. They had either managed to climb out of Shaft 10 or journeyed on to shafts of neighboring mines, Sebei said. The police used the first few miners they arrested “in dubious press conferences to claim that they have options to take other exits, but choose to remain underground” to evade arrest. “But when I spoke to those miners, they refuted everything they told the media. They had been pressured by the police. They told me all the miners were desperate to come back up. That was evident because every time we sent a rope down with supplies, a miner came back up with it. Not once did the rope come back up empty. Every time the police disrupted the pulley, miners died underground,” he told Peoples Dispatch. But too weak to crawl to other shafts, many stayed behind, dying a slow death from starvation and dehydration while awaiting rescue. “We are going to smoke them out” “We are not sending help to criminals. We are going to smoke them out,” cabinet minister Khumbudzo Ntshavheni said in November. Instead of dismantling the pulley, if the police had offered to lift the miners out of Shaft 11 after cutting off supplies, everyone could have been arrested without loss of lives or incurring the expenditure for the rescue operation, Sebei argued. But insisting that the miners had other exits they could take, the police blocked supplies and stalled rescue for months. Finally, on January 10, in a case brought by Zinzi Tom for the rescue of her 26-year-old brother Ayanda, the Pretoria High Court ordered a rescue operation. A crane was brought in to lower down a cage into Shaft 11. But the state refused to provide search-and-rescue professionals to go underground. The company it had hired for the rescue operation threatened to leave unless two people from the local mining community volunteered, Sebei said. The deathly stench In an act of repentance for his past, 36-year-old Mzwandile Mkwayi, who was released from prison in 2021 after serving a seven-year term for robbery, volunteered for the mission, along with Mandla Charles. Pooling in money, community members organized rituals and ceremonies to protect the duo from evil spirits, before they were lowered in the cage into the deathly stench at the bottom of Shaft 11 where dozens of the bodies were decomposing. After hauling 78 dead bodies and helping up another 246 survivors, they were welcomed by their community as heroes. But their heroism has left them scarred. Mkwayi is unable to eat the meat. Survivors had reportedly told him that apart from cockroaches, many of them had sustained by consuming human flesh of their fellow dead miners. Rescue volunteers intimidated Mkwayi has not been provided with counseling. Instead, the police arrested him after he spoke to the media, claiming that he had missed community service, in violation of his parole terms, said Sebei. After 48 hours in jail, he was released with a prohibition against speaking to the media. “This is a clear attempt to intimidate and silence him, preventing him from revealing the testimony of atrocities at Shaft 10,” GIWUSA said in a statement. “Mkwayi is one of the only two witnesses to the scene of more extremely horrific and massive deaths at Shaft 10,” GIWUSA said. Severed limbs and other body parts of the miners, who fell to their deaths midway through their climb, still hang from the handlebars of this pole their bodies crashed against during the fall, added Sebei. Headless torsos lie in the bottom of Shaft 10, which the police insisted was a viable exit. The other volunteer, Charles, has not been unreachable over the phone after the first few interviews he gave to the press. Having argued in court that the Shaft 10, which is scattered with body parts, was a viable exit for the miners, the police want to suppress the truth about the “horrors of Shaft 10”, Sebei maintains. Plumes of smoke rising from the area after an explosion heard by the local residents prompted rumors that the police had bombed this shaft in an attempt to destroy evidence amid calls for an inquiry. While refuting this claim, the police are not allowing anyone at the site to verify, said Sebei. Several miners, including Ayanda Tom, whose sister Zinzi brought the case in which the court ordered the rescue, remain missing. “The survivors last saw him two weeks ago,” Sebei said. Convinced that no rescue was arriving after months at the bottom of Shaft 11, he set off crawling in search of alternative exits. “We believe” that many miners including Ayanda “have been in Shaft 10, possibly dead, injured or too weak to get to Shaft 11 to be rescued,” GIWUSA said in its statement. Demanding a professional rescue team be sent down this shaft with sniffer dogs to retrieve the dead bodies and search for any survivors, it added: We cannot accept a situation where hundreds of community members know all the names… of miners who went down into the shaft and who were not rescued, and now they are just expected to accept that those miners are trapped down there forever. If they are alive, they will die gruesome deaths and if they are dead, their bodies will never be found. Lives of survivors in danger Lives of the survivors who were rescued also hang in the balance. They are in danger of life-threatening malnutrition, typhus and heavy metal toxicity which “may cause multiple organ damage”, warned Healthcare Workers 4 Palestine—South Africa (HCW4P-SA). “Due to a combination of factors such as immune-compromise due to malnutrition and prolonged time in damp, enclosed spaces, the risk of contracting TB is high and poses a significant health risk if left undiagnosed. Without proper screening and treatment, there is also a significant risk of spread” of the disease. Pointing out that the preliminary assessment by on-site paramedics is not adequate to screen for these risks, HCW4P-SA has called for “urgent in-hospital assessment”. However, the police have hospitalized only 32 of the 246 survivors to hospital as of Tuesday, January 21, holding the rest in custody. “All the miners currently hospitalized and some at the detention facility are exhibiting refeeding syndrome, a potentially lethal condition that occurs when malnourished individuals suddenly consume food or fluids, leading to severe electrolyte imbalances. These imbalances then trigger heart and kidney failure, and eventual demise, if not properly managed in a hospital setting,” the Mining Affected Communities United in Action (MACUA) said in a statement on January 20. Doctors treating the hospitalized miners, shackled to their beds despite being barely able to walk, have “informed us that they have never seen this kind of starvation before… They have advised that it would be difficult to assess the health of those” held in police custody “without performing tests on them” in a hospital, the statement added. With legal representation from Lawyers for Human Rights, MACUA has raised concerns with the attorneys of the state and the Health Minister, that “without an individual and comprehensive medical assessment of each detainee rescued from shaft 11, including laboratory analyses and radiological imaging, there is an imminent risk of severe health consequences, and even possible death.”
Australian miners benefit from new Chinese restrictions on rare earth exports Sector ‘ideally positioned’ to take advantage of disruption to global supply chain Chinese mines account for production of about 60% of the world’s rare earths, but Australia is also a rich source © FT montage/Getty Images/Dreamstime Nic Fildes in Sydney https://www.ft.com/content/61508e6a-bf1b-4d0c-8b92-37e7b20702e8 When China increased restrictions on exports of rare earths last Friday, escalating a trade war with the US, several small Australian miners bucked the global market sell-off to register big gains. Shares in Lynas Rare Earths, Northern Minerals and Arafura Rare Earths rose on investor bets that they could be long-term suppliers of the materials western buyers need to deliver modern energy and defence systems. Lynas and Northern shares have risen more than 10 per cent in the past week, in contrast to a wider sell-off among Australia-listed miners. Australia has been positioning itself as a key supplier of critical minerals — including rare earths used in electric vehicles and wind turbines — for more than a decade. Up to now, China’s dominance has made breaking through difficult, say analysts. But following China’s latest export controls, Perth-based Lynas has said it is “ideally positioned”, along with peers such as Northern and Iluka Resources, to take advantage of disruptions to the global supply chain. Tom O’Leary, managing director of Iluka, said Australian companies could provide a secure source of essential materials to global suppliers. “The need for a sustainable rare earths industry is clearly intensifying,” he said. China’s latest measures — restricting exports of seven rare earths and permanent magnets — targeted so-called medium and heavy metals used in the defence, robotics and energy industries. In practice, a car company operating a factory in China would still be well supplied with the materials it needs but may find scarce supplies for any of its factories elsewhere, said stockbroker Ord Minnett in a note. “The message would be that if the US wants high-end permanent magnets, the factories need to be in China,” the note said, adding that defence firms could “forget” about supplies. “China does not want its rare earths returned in the form of missiles,” it said. The new Chinese controls highlight the extent of global companies’ dependence across multiple sectors — defence, energy, transport and medical — on a single source of supply, said Shane Hartwig, chief executive of Northern Minerals, which is looking to develop a rare earths deposit in Western Australia. “It is evidence of the ability of China to assert that dominance. It helps to provide evidence that single-source supply chains are a risk, from China or anyone else,” he said. Chinese mines account for production of about 60 per cent of the world’s rare earths, but the country processes nearly 90 per cent of them. After China, geologists say Australia has one of the richest sources in the world of high-grade rare earths — a set of 16 metallic elements. It already mines heavy rare earths, including dysprosium and terbium or DyTb, which are essential in the manufacturing of magnets that can operate in very high temperature environments such as electric vehicle motors. The next step for Australian companies is to refine the metals either domestically or offshore, but such efforts will take time to come online, analysts said. Lynas, which is backed by Japanese investors keen to find an alternative to Chinese supplies, specialises in lighter metals that it mines in Western Australia and refines in Malaysia. It said in February that production of NdPr — light rare earths — grew 22 per cent to a record 2,969 tonnes in the six months to the end of December. Lynas is not yet refining heavy rare earths, but will start to produce DyTb at its Malaysian facility to export to magnet makers from the middle of this year. It is also building a rare earths separation plant in Seadrift, Texas, funded by the US Department of Defense, which Ord Minnett said would now probably be expedited after being held up by US “red tape”. Iluka Resources also plans to start to refine DyTb from 2027 at a new heavy rare earths refinery in Eneabba, a remote part of Western Australia, having secured A$1.6bn (US$960mn) in loans from the Australian government last year. Daniel Morgan, an analyst with Barrenjoey, said Lynas was well-positioned, but the A$7bn company had not been “adequately compensated” in terms of its valuation for its strategic position in building itself up as the world’s largest supplier of rare earths outside China. Net profit in the six months to December 31 slumped 85 per cent despite its expansion and increased production, as rare earth prices remained volatile. Gavin Mudd, director of the Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre located within the British Geological Survey, said more government support was needed for Australia to build its rare earth supply chain. “If we are to create diversified, resilient and responsible supply chains for rare earths, governments of the world need to make sure that we build not only mines but refineries, manufacturing plants and recycling facilities,” he said. In response to the Trump administration’s imposition of a 10 per cent tariff on Australian imports last week, Canberra has already said it would establish a strategic critical minerals reserve. That could be used as leverage in future trade negotiations, with the US having targeted rare earth deposits in Greenland and Ukraine in recent months. It could also be significant in providing a benchmark price and non-commercial demand for rare earths that would support the industry. “It’s an opaque market that is dominated by a single supply chain. Some form of support would be helpful for us,” said Hartwig.
How China Took Over the World’s Rare Earths Industry China seized mines and built factories. Japan took note and invested in Australia. But the United States did little despite concerns about control of supplies. Song Zuokai, 81, peering at a rare earth mine in Baisha, in China’s Guangdong Province in 2010. China nationalized and consolidated the mines in the south into a single state-run company,Credit...Christie Johnston for The New York Times By Keith Bradsher Keith Bradsher, who has covered China’s rare earth industry since 2009, reported from Beijing, Ganzhou and Longnan, China. April 16, 2025 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/business/china-rare-earths-us.html China shook the world in 2010 when it imposed an embargo on exports of crucial rare earth metals to Japan. Panicked Japanese executives appeared on television to warn that they were running out of the critical raw materials. The embargo, prompted by a territorial dispute, lasted only seven weeks. But it changed the global supply chain for these metals. When the embargo was over, China took forceful control of its mineral bounty. Top officials in Beijing rooted out corruption, crushed smugglers and consolidated the industry under state control. The world was put on notice, especially Japan and the United States, two of China’s biggest customers for rare earth metals used in everything from cars to smartphones to missiles. Governments from both countries drafted detailed plans for how to mitigate their dependence on China. Japan has largely followed through on its plans and today can source the minerals from Australia. Not the United States. Even after 15 years, the country is still almost entirely reliant on China for the processing of rare earth metals. As a result, American automakers, aerospace companies and defense contractors have been left vulnerable. suspended all exports of certain rare earths, as well as the even more valuable magnets made from them. These small yet powerful magnets — no bigger than a ring for a person’s finger, yet with 15 times the force of a conventional iron magnet— are an inexpensive and often overlooked component of electric motors. They are used in electric and gasoline-powered cars as well as robots, drones, offshore wind turbines, missiles, fighter jets and many other products. A rare earth magnet at an MP Materials facility in Fort Worth, Texas. These small yet powerful magnets are a component of electric motors. Credit...Business Wire, via Associated Press The American failure to devise an alternative to its dependence on Chinese supplies has spanned Democratic and Republican administrations. “U.S. policymakers for 15 years have done very little to address the risk of dependence on China for rare earths, and specifically rare earth magnets,” said Milo McBride, a specialist in critical minerals at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. Rare earths, he said, are “the most strategic minerals of all the minerals that have been discussed for the last several administrations.” Beijing’s 2010 embargo against Japan was undermined by Chinese organized crime syndicates that controlled much of the industry in south-central China in collusion with local officials. The gangsters had been smuggling up to half of China’s annual rare earths production out of the country. Weeks after the embargo ended, Beijing took revenge. Government forces acting under national security orders stormed the valley near Longnan in Jiangxi Province where much of the world’s heavy rare earth minerals were produced. They seized the privately run mines and jailed thousands of people across southern China. Regulation of the industry was transferred from local governments to Beijing. A mine for heavy rare earth metals outside Longnan in south-central China’s Jiangxi Province. The minerals are crucial for everything from electric cars to drones, robots and missiles.Credit...Keith Bradsher/The New York Times The mines were later nationalized and consolidated into a single state-run company, China Rare Earth Group. During a visit last week to the valley without the knowledge of the local authorities, there was no sign of the thugs who used to guard southern China’s rare earth mines. China has recently developed its own magnet industry instead of shipping the materials to magnet factories in Japan. Beijing has poured money into building advanced magnet factories in Ganzhou, a city near Longnan. China now produces 90 percent of the world’s magnets. Further construction was underway at two of Ganzhou’s largest magnet factories last week. A factory making rare earth magnets in Ganzhou, China. The country produces 90 percent of the world’s magnets.Credit...Keith Bradsher/The New York Times China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, said in a speech in 2020 that it was important for China’s national security that the West’s supply chains remain dependent on his country. “We must build up our strengths and consolidate our international lead in industries where we have an advantage,” he said a few months after visiting Ganzhou’s most advanced magnet factory. He called for “intensifying the dependence of international industrial supply chains on China, forming a powerful capacity to counter and deter deliberate supply cutoffs by foreigners.” Japan also took far-reaching actions after the 2010 embargo. Its manufacturers began holding enough rare earths in inventory to meet up to two years of their own needs. They also started looking overseas. The conglomerate Sumitomo Group, with financial backing from the Japanese government, helped support the development of Lynas, an Australian mining company. Lynas mines and refines 60 percent of Japan’s light rare earths, which are mixed with small quantities of heavy rare earths to make rare earth magnets. And the company is preparing to start refining heavy rare earths for Japanese manufacturers this summer in Malaysia, although initially in tiny quantities. Jars containing rare earth minerals produced by Lynas, an Australian mining company, from its Mount Weld operations.Credit...Melanie Burton/Reuters Japan’s biggest magnet manufacturers — Proterial, Shin-Etsu Chemical Company and TDK Corporation — have moved some production from Japan to China to have reliable access to rare earths, and also to Vietnam, where labor costs are low. But they have also kept considerable production in Japan. The U.S. rare earth magnet industry started with a subsidiary of General Motors in northern Indiana in the 1980s. But factories shut down and moved to China and Singapore. After the embargo in 2010, the Japanese company Hitachi Metals, which changed its name in 2023 to Proterial, responding to concern from the administration of former President Barack Obama, built a rare earth magnets factory in North Carolina from 2011 to 2013. The Hitachi Metals factory, with several dozen employees, had higher costs than the giant complexes being built in Ganzhou. American companies proved unwilling to pay extra for magnets produced in the United States and switched to Chinese suppliers. Hitachi closed the factory in 2020 and the equipment went into storage. The MP Materials rare earth open-pit mine in Mountain Pass, Calif., the only active rare earth mine in the United States.Credit...Steve Marcus/Reuters Today the only active rare earth mine in the United States is in Mountain Pass, Calif. Its operator, MP Materials, plans to start ramping up commercial production of rare earth magnets at the end of the year at a factory in Texas. But even when running at full speed, the facility will produce in a year the equivalent of a day of China’s production. Chinese factories supply thousands of tons of rare earth magnets each year to the country’s manufacturers of electric cars and offshore wind turbines — two industries that Mr. Trump has criticized. Like magnet production, rare earth mining has also had an uneven history in the United States. The Mountain Pass mine produced a majority of the world’s rare earths from 1965 until 1995, when China began flooding the global market with all manner of low-cost exports. The mine closed in 2002, partly because of ever stricter environmental regulations by California. A $1.5 billion upgrade started in 2010, but mining did not resume until 2017 — and then the mine had to ship its ore to China for processing at low-cost refineries there. Only now has the mine begun refining a large share of its production. A forklift operator arranging bags of bastnaesite concentrate for shipping at the MP Materials rare earth mine.Credit...Steve Marcus/Reuters Zoning and environmental regulations make it hard to open a rare earth mine in the United States. Opening a rare earth mine in the United States takes 29 years, said Mark Smith, the chairman and chief executive of NioCorp Developments, which has obtained construction permits to build a mine in Nebraska. “You can spend a whole career getting a mine up and running,” Mr. Smith said. By contrast, mines in China can be opened quickly and do not have to undergo the same kind of rigorous regulatory approval. Underpinning all the problems is that the global market for the minerals is tiny next to other kinds of mining, like copper. Few American companies have wanted to make big investments in rare earths only to face the risk, as Hitachi found, that customers prefer cheaper products from government-backed industries in China. “U.S. companies have been reluctant to take the plunge,” said David Sandalow, who oversaw critical minerals policy in the Obama administration. Li You contributed research. Keith Bradsher is the Beijing bureau chief for The Times. He previously served as bureau chief in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Detroit and as a Washington correspondent. He has lived and reported in mainland China through the pandemic.
The Mine Is American. The Minerals Are China’s. A Brazilian rare earths mine backed by American investors illustrates China’s grip over the strategic minerals that underpin the modern economy. A photograph provided by the company shows the facilities of Serra Verde, a rare earths mine in Minaçu, Brazil, that is under contract to sell nearly all its product to China. Credit...Serra Verde By Jack Nicas Reporting from Rio de Janeiro April 16, 2025 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/world/americas/brazil-mine-rare-earths-china.html The gaping pit alongside a tiny town in rural Brazil has all the elements to solve the West’s sudden problem of finding critical rare earth metals — vital for building electric vehicles, wind turbines, guided missiles and robots. Opened last year and backed by American investors, it is the only mine outside of Asia producing significant quantities of some of the hardest-to-find rare earths. With China controlling most rare earths and now withholding the strategic metals amid an intensifying trade war, the U.S. government last month quietly disclosed that it wants to finance the Brazil mine’s expansion. But there is one hitch. The mine is already contracted to sell its rare earths to China. “They were the only customer who could process the product and separate the product,” said Thras Moraitis, chief executive of the company behind the mine, Serra Verde. “Prescient planning by the Chinese over many, many decades has put them in a position where they have very strong control.” The Brazil mine lays bare that, when it comes to the minerals vital for tomorrow’s economy and battlefields, the West is way behind and has few good options to catch up. China dominates the mining and processing of rare earths, a collection of 17 elements that are essential to the auto, semiconductor, aerospace and defense industries. While abundant in the Earth’s crust, they are difficult to extract and separate, and the United States and other Western nations have largely left the work to China. For some critical “heavy” rare earths — named because they have higher atomic numbers on the periodic table — China is essentially the only country that can separate and process them. Rare earths have become so coveted because they help make the powerful magnets needed for new cars, missiles and drones. While “light” rare earths make up far more of those magnets, heavy rare earths are also needed to keep the magnets from weakening or being destroyed at high temperatures. Heavy rare earths have overwhelmingly come from mines in China and Myanmar, which has sold its output to its powerful neighbor, because those countries have natural clay deposits rich in the elements. But recently governments and industry have become excited that another country — Brazil — also has an abundance of such clay deposits. “I’ve looked at 600 to 700 projects around the world, and in my view, Brazil has by far the best” access to heavy rare earths, said Constantine Karayannopoulos, a rare earths pioneer who co-founded one of the industry’s largest companies, Neo Performance Materials, based in Canada. “Brazil could be the game changer.” In 2010, China halted exports of rare earths to Japan over a territorial dispute, raising alarms that the world depended on China for such critical minerals. That same year, Denham Capital, a Boston private equity firm, invested in a nascent project called Serra Verde to mine those minerals in Brazil. Eight years later, the project was still trying to get off the ground and Serra Verde was searching for buyers to commit. There was essentially just one potential customer. Virtually no one outside of China could extract the heavy rare earths from the elemental sludge that Serra Verde aimed to sell. “You can dig it up,” Mr. Karayannopoulos said. “But nowhere in the West is there existing capacity to take that feed and produce separated dysprosium and terbium. After 14 years — and an additional $150 million from American and British investors — the Serra Verde mine opened last year in Minaçu, Brazil, a town of 30,000 in central Brazil built around a decades-old asbestos mine. Everything the mine extracted was already contracted to go to China. Mr. Moraitis, C.E.O. of Serra Verde, which is legally based in Switzerland, would not provide details of the contract but said the vast majority of his company’s product was committed to China until at least 2027. It hopes to then have enough production to begin taking new buyers. Other producers of rare earths are in a similar situation. MP Materials, a Las Vegas-based company partly funded by the Pentagon, mines and separates mostly light rare earths in Mountain Pass, Calif. Yet in a securities filing last year, it said it sold 80 percent of its product to China. An MP Materials spokesman said that the company has been reducing its sales to China as it can separate more itself. It sells the separated rare earths to buyers in Japan and South Korea, as well as to the U.S. National Defense Stockpile. MP Materials cannot yet separate heavy rare earths but it is building another Pentagon-funded plant in California that can. That joins other efforts across the West to separate heavy rare earths, including in France and Estonia. Those plants will likely take a few years to build, Mr. Moraitis said, but when they are ready, finding heavy rare earths is still likely to be difficult. Serra Verde hopes to produce a few hundred tons of heavy rare earths by 2027, which Mr. Moraitis said would double the supply of the elements outside of Asia. (The existing supply comes from small amounts extracted from existing mines, including as a byproduct of coal and uranium.) Other heavy rare earth mines in Brazil are years away. One project in France announced this year plans to extract heavy rare earths from recycled batteries. Mr. Moraitis said that since China restricted its rare earths this month, governments and industry have been calling. “There’s a greater sense of urgency in those discussions,” he said. Everyone now wants Serra Verde’s rare earths, he said, but they are going to China. “It’s really hard to not admire what they’ve managed to achieve,” Mr. Moraitis said of China. “And it’s very hard to compete against.” Jack Nicas is the Brazil bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of much of South America.
Quaterly chart, AUD versus TXBM. Generally, the trend of the AUDUSD is correlated with $TXBM Global base metals index which is correlated to Copper prices. Me thinks we could possibly be at the beginning of a new metals cycle. Most hit hard are all sorts, Lithium, rare earths, iron ore, nickel, copper, uranium..... I don't think we have seen the top for gold/silver yet.