U.S. Scientists Tap Seawater to Break China's Rare Earth Monopoly
India Proposes Stricter Vehicle Emission Rules To Cut Oil Consumption Haley Zaremba is an energy journalist and researcher with more than a decade of professional experience covering global energy systems, land and natural resources, and… Competition for critical minerals used in the energy, manufacturing, and tech sectors is heating up to be a major geopolitical flashpoint around the world.
The supply chains for essential ingredients for clean energy manufacturing like lithium, cobalt, magnesium, and nickel, are dominated by China, creating a precarious concentration of global supplies.
But the United States is hoping to even the playing field by sourcing certain critical minerals from seawater through the use of cutting-edge technology.
Today, China supplies about 85-95 percent of the world’s refined rare earth minerals, and is home to a whopping85-90 percentof the world’s rare earth mine-to-metal refining.
Chinese refineries produce 68 percent of the world’s cobalt, 65 percent of nickel, and 60 percent of EV-battery-grade lithium.
This extreme concentration creates a dangerous precarity in global energy security.
“If producers of these substances decide to restrict access to their customers as a political lever, if prices shoot up, or if more industries develop an appetite for them and eat into the supply,” Vox reports, “companies could go bankrupt and efforts to limit climate change could slow down.” But for Beijing, control over global critical mineral supplies provides a huge leg up both economically and geopolitically, especially as global demand for these materials continues to balloon in size.
The International Energy Agencyprojectsthat global demand for critical minerals by the clean energy industry will at least double, and possibly even quadruple, by 2040.
That range depends on the world’s rate of clean energy adoption, but the higher end is looking likely as global clean energy growth has been kicked into overdrive by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Critical mineral demand growth will largely come from electric vehicles and battery storage, with lithium seeing the fastest rate of growth.
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“A world powered by renewables is a world hungry for critical minerals,” UN Secretary-General António Guterressaidat a Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals in 2024.
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