100bn
... is the tonnage of rare earth deposits that lie beneath the Pacific in an arc of “game changing” geological temptation stretching to the east and west of Hawaii, according to scientists at the University of Tokyo.
Forget the word “rare”: massive piles of the 17 minerals on which most 21st-century technology depends are simply sitting there, waiting for someone with machinery capable of reaching 6,000 metres down to the ocean floor to scoop it all up.
There is, the breathless Tokyo researchers say, 1,000 times more of this precious stuff beneath the waves than on dry land. For a world fretting about the tenfold increase in rare earth metal prices since 2009 and China’s 90 per cent monopolistic market lock on global production, here — at last — is a shot at salvation.
The discovery appears to draw a line under an era of uncertainty for rare earths. Big importers such as Japan fear that China would cheerfully use its monopoly as a strategic weapon — by cutting export quotas, as it has done, and forcing high-tech manufacturers to bring their jobs and industrial secrets to China.
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The Japanese discovery probably will make no immediate difference to anything. Governments around the world have finally woken up to the threat implied by China’s rare earth monopoly and the market is starting to do what it does best when prices are rising as fast as they have been: matching supply with demand. Plans are well under way to tap rare earth resources outside China and barely a week passes in which a Japanese company does not announce some innovation that allows it to use 60, 70 or 80 per cent less rare earths in their products.
Analysts at Goldman are even forecasting a global surplus by 2013, long, long before a single gram of rare earth minerals has been extracted from the Hawaiian coast.
But that does not make the Pacific discovery unimportant. Nearly two decades ago, China vowed to become to rare earths what Saudi Arabia is to oil, a mega-supplier with the global market power to torment both friend and foe. Although China’s rare earth deposits were big, they were by no means the only ones in the world, so to achieve its dream Beijing used a resource it had in abundance — human lives with no legal protection, whose mass leukemia was almost invisible to the outside world.
China used this resource, which included the women and children near the mines as well as the men down them, to undercut and bankrupt every other producer around the world as they struggled to meet environmental protection and health-at-work standards that China didn’t have.
The painful truth is that the technology made possible by rare earth metals has little to do with the cut and thrust of mineral diplomacy and lots to do with consumers’ wilful blindness to the suffering that goes on upstream. If that changes, and the market starts demanding rare earths that didn’t come from next-door to a choking Chinese village, then a 100 billion-ton trove 6,000 metres below the middle of an ocean is no bad thing.