The common wisdom among the elites in Western capitols and among the “captains” of the Western industry is that the critical minerals supply issue is one that can be always solved by an increased allocation of capital, better known as “raising the offering price to increase the supply.” This is nonsense, for critical technology minerals, but a person can realize this only if he has studied and gained a basic, general, understanding of geology, mining, and economics and has the ability to reach logical conclusions based on reproducible, independently verified data. The absolute quantity of natural resources available to humanity is limited, first and foremost, by geology and then by technology and, finally, economics. It’s not how much money it would cost, but rather how much of our productive economy we are willing to give over for the extraction, refining, processing, and fabrication of products based on lithium, or cobalt, or the rare earths, or all three and even more of t
China on Thursday officially set up the China Rare Earth Group Co, an industrial conglomerate through merging several key producers of the important mineral resources, China s national assets regulator said.