It is easy to say Rare lands. The most difficult thing seems to be the give them a value. Yesterday United States and Ukraine have reached an agreement on the exploitation of precious mineral deposits in the country. Although it is still a draft, the Ukrainian president called it “acceptable” and the agreement could be signed as early as Zelensky’s visit to Washington, scheduled for Friday, February 28.
Trump demands that Ukraine you repay what the United States has already allocated for its defense against Russian invasion for three years now. Zelensky Instead, it conceives any commitment to economic cooperation as a warranty American military aid for the future.
Regardless of how the two signatories view the agreement, it still remains to be to estimate how much these Rare lands in Ukraine they can valere. The idea of using rare earths had come to Ukraine already at the end of the Baden administration to convince the United States to continue to support it from an economic point of view. Trump was enthusiastic about this news and on Fox News on February 11, reporting on his discussions with Ukrainian officials he said: "I told them that I want the equivalent of about 500 billion dollars in rare earths”.
Are Rare Earths in Ukraine Really Worth $500 Billion?
But the figure, according to some analyses, appears to be hypertrophic and, all things considered, the rare earths that could come from Ukraine could amount to a maximum of 2-3 billion.
The U.S. Geological Survey, an authority on the subject, doesn't even list Ukraine as having rare earths. Nor does any other database commonly used in the mining industry, it reports. Bloomberg. “Even if Ukraine were able to produce even 20% of the world's rare earths, that would be equivalent to about 3 billion of dollars a year. To reach the $500 billion Trump envisions, the United States would have to secure more than 150 years of Ukrainian production,” Bloomberg says.
This idea is also Gian Andrea Blengini, professor of raw materials at the Polytechnic of Turin in the Department of Environmental Engineering who was also a collaborator of the European Commission on the topic of rare earths: “The Rare lands, or critical metals, underground are worth absolutely nothing. The rare earths brought into the above ground as a mixture of rare earth oxides they are worth relatively little: the world production at the moment it is around 2 billion dollars a year and 60% is Chinese. The rest is distributed around the world,” Blengini told Radio24. This means that we are talking about very low numbers, a few hundred million euros potential at the mining level and therefore far from the 500 billion indicated by Trump.
It is the processes that multiply the value of rare earths
This is at the mining level. Things change when the oxides of rare earths, all mixed up, are starting to be separated and purified and when then the individual rare earth elements they become metals, alloys, magnets, wind turbines, electric car engines: “For each of these steps there is a multiplication of the commercial value for 10. If you multiply it by 10 a few times, when you get to turbines or cell phones, then yes, you can get to billions,” says Blengini. So if anything, those figures indicated by Trump concern the global market potential which would derive from the processing of rare earths, and not only them.
By the way, we also need to see what the composition of these rare earths, Blengini continues: if they compete a lot Lanthanum and Cerium are worth less. Unfortunately usually half of the rare earths are made up of these two elements, which must be eliminated: they also have a market, but are only worth 5/6 euros per kilo. Up to now Ukraine has never extracted rare earths, instead for other important elements such as titanium or magnesium metal or other base metals we are talking about a decidedly different importance.
Who has the separation plants?
But there is another element that we must keep in mind: when in 2012 the race for rare earths began following the potential conflict between China and Japan and with a subsequent widening of the problem to the European Union and the United States, in the space of less than two years we arrived at the discovery of 500 depots around the world. These deposits are everywhere, from Alaska to Madagascar. Some of these deposits have become mines, very few, and some mines have been reopened. “So at this moment the problem of rare earth mining I honestly don't see it” says the professor. “If anything, the problem currently is who has the separation systems of rare earths. So much so that the United States of America e Australia, which are large producers, still today bring their materials to be refined in China and the new plant announced in collaboration between Japan, Australia and the United States has not yet started up”.
