Western start-ups seek to break China's grip on rare earths refining
By Ernest Scheyder
ALEXANDRIA, Louisiana (Reuters) -Start-up tech firms are racing to transform the way rare earths are refined for the clean energy transition, a push aimed at turbocharging the West's expansion into the niche sector that underpins billions of electronic devices.
The existing standard to refine these strategic minerals, known as solvent extraction, is an expensive and dirty process that China has spent the past 30 years mastering. MP Materials, Lynas Rare Earths and other Western rare earths companies have struggled at times to deploy it due to technical complexities and pollution concerns.
Rare earths are a group of 17 metals used to make magnets that turn power into motion for electric vehicles, cell phones and other electronics. While U.S. scientists helped develop solvent extraction for rare earths in the 1950s, radioactive waste from the process gradually made it unpopular in the United States.
China began to rapidly expand in the industry starting during the 1980s and now controls 87% of global rare earths refining capacity, according to the International Energy Agency. That prowess has helped propel the country's economy to the second-largest in the world.
Emerging Western rivals now offer the tantalizing prospect of processing the minerals in faster, cleaner and cheaper ways, if they can successfully launch.
«The existing rare earths refining process is a nightmare,» said Isabel Barton, a mining and geological engineering professor at the University of Arizona. «That's why there are so many companies promising new methods, because we need new ones.»
Interviews with nearly two dozen industry consultants, academics and executives show that if one or more of these novel processing technologies
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