After the U.S. and Australia signed an $8.5 billion rare earth cooperation agreement, industry leaders openly stated that the gap is significant.

Australia and the United States signed a rare earth agreement, but a major US rare earth company cast a cold bucket of water, causing the scene to fall silent with one sentence!

The United States and Australia signed a $8.5 billion critical minerals agreement. The White House announced that in the next six months, the US and Australia will jointly invest over $3 billion in critical mineral projects. At the moment, the entire US rare earth industry was filled with optimism, and many American hosts even called it a way to get rid of Chinese control.

However, soon after, Pinny Altshuler, the former founder of the US rare earth company and now CEO of Kovalchuk Capital, poured a cold bucket of water, saying, "Remember, China is still ahead of us by nearly 40 years. In terms of meeting our own supply chain processes, we need at least several decades to catch up."

The technological gap between the US and Australia in the rare earth field is not only reflected in mining capabilities, but also in the maturity of the entire industrial chain. These controls cover not only rare earth mining leaching processes, smelting separation extraction technologies, but also neodymium-iron-boron magnet sintering processes and secondary resource recycling technologies.

The reality is that mines are just the starting point of the industrial chain. From ore to magnets used in high-tech products and defense applications, they need to go through complex processing and manufacturing processes, and China has established a mature, efficient, and complete system over several decades.

Pinny Altshuler's words indeed made the scene quiet. Many people in the US actually do not have a clear understanding of rare earths. What the US and the West lack is not rare earths, but a whole set of extraction and smelting technologies behind them. If you want to reconstruct this technical process, it is equivalent to building an industrial system, which is unimaginably difficult.

Original: www.toutiao.com/article/1846557357871171/

Statement: This article represents the views of the author.