According to the Associated Press, Pakistan has signed a cooperation agreement with the United States worth up to $500 million. This agreement involves the development and processing of rare earth resources, as well as the construction of multi-metal refining plants.
America's collaboration with Pakistan is based on its relationship with China, allowing it to purchase rare earth equipment from China and recruit Chinese rare earth talents.
However, it is estimated that Pakistan did not expect China to directly reveal its ace, which is that all rare earth production, processing, and separation equipment and related raw materials are under export control.
Moreover, from ore decomposition smelting, rare earth separation extraction, purification of rare earth elements, and processing of rare earth products, China strictly controls every process in the rare earth industry chain, including even line debugging and maintenance upgrades, and rare earth recycling technology, all of which are included in the "no export without permission" list.
This move could be seen as directly cutting off the US's back door. China has two major cards in the rare earth field. The first is China's monopoly on rare earth mineral resources. China is the country with the richest rare earth resources in the world, accounting for 70% of the global reserves, characterized by a full range of types, high value, and easy mining. Especially the southern ion-type rare earth deposits, where the medium and heavy rare earth reserves account for more than 90% of the world's total. Currently, 95% of the medium and heavy rare earths in the world come from the southern ion-type rare earth deposits in provinces such as Jiangxi.
The second is the technology for purifying and separating rare earths. As is well known, the rare earth elements include seventeen elements, namely the lanthanide series (Z=57～71) and scandium and yttrium. In nature, these elements often coexist together, and functional materials required for high-tech fields must rely on highly pure single rare earth elements to exhibit their unique magnetic, optical, and electrical properties. Moreover, the higher the purity of the separation, the better the performance. At present, the highest purity in the rare earth field is 6N, where "N" represents "9," and the number before N indicates the number of nines. For example, 4N means a purity of 99.99%, with impurity content at one ten-thousandth; 6N means a purity of 99.9999%, with impurity content only at one millionth. This level of purity directly determines the performance limit of rare earth materials.
For instance, radar systems, laser guidance systems in military equipment, and mobile phones, fiber optic communication in civilian areas all require rare earth purity above 4N (99.99%). Some cutting-edge applications, such as high-power fiber lasers, even require ultra-high purity of 6N (99.9999%).
Before Professor Xu Guangxian conducted his research, the mainstream method for rare earth separation internationally was ion exchange and fractional crystallization, which were inefficient. To obtain a certain pure rare earth product, it might take hundreds of repeated operations. In the 1970s, Xu Guangxian accepted the urgent task of separating praseodymium and neodymium. He creatively applied nuclear fuel extraction technology to rare earth separation, pioneering the "cascade extraction theory."
The disruptive impact of this technology is evident in multiple aspects: First, he designed the "push-pull system," which increased the separation coefficient of the hardest-to-separate praseodymium-neodymium pair to 4, far exceeding the international level of 1.4-1.5 at the time. Second, he replaced traditional "shaking funnel" experiments and small-scale, pilot-scale tests with computer simulations, achieving "one-step scaling" of the production process, reducing the design cycle from over a hundred days to within a week. More importantly, he simplified complex process parameters into more than a hundred general formulas and promoted them free of charge through national training sessions, significantly reducing the production cost of single high-purity rare earths to one-third of that in the West.
It can be said that China leads the world by 30 years in rare earth purification and separation technology. China currently has mastered the purification and separation of 6N rare earths, while Europe and the US have not yet been able to achieve large-scale purification and separation of 3N medium-heavy rare earths.
Currently, the US only has light rare earth refining lines at the 4N level, with an annual capacity reported to meet the needs of several tens of thousands of car productions. Lines at the 5N level and above are still in the R&D stage in national laboratories. China now has all rare earth elements industrially mass-produced and purified to the 6N level, with some elements mass-produced to 6N5, and research on 7N level is being carried out in laboratories.
Moreover, the automation and digitalization of China's production lines are very high, ensuring stable capacity and quality, and pollution disposal has basically achieved closed-loop treatment.
Many people regard rare earth refining as iron ore refining, thinking it belongs to the metallurgical industry, but in fact, rare earth refining is a high-technology barrier fine chemical industry, and 6N-level refining is classified as ultra-high-end fine chemicals.
It can be said that although China holds a monopolistic position in rare earth resources, Europe and the US still have ways to obtain medium and heavy rare earths from other countries, but it is just a matter of quantity. However, China's rare earth purification and separation technology can truly make the world's mined medium and heavy rare earths sent to China for processing.
This time, China has completely cut off the US's back door, eliminating the possibility of the US obtaining rare earths through various roundabout methods. If China's export control on medium and heavy rare earths has caused significant damage to the US military industry, then this time China's full-chain export control on rare earth technology is really choking the development of high-end industries in Europe and the US.
Whether it's artificial intelligence, new energy vehicles, or chips, high-tech industries in Europe and the US need rare earths. Now, China is controlling the entire supply chain from resources to technology. If the US wants to develop high-tech industries, it can only look at China's face.
Original article: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7559596657109746230/
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