China Hits U.S. with Rare Earth Export Restrictions

This month, China’s Ministry of Commerce blocked seven rare earth elements from imports to the U.S. The vulnerability of rare earths—and in general, critical minerals—to supply chain disruption is one of the many reasons why decarbonizing the U.S. would endanger the reliability and security of our electric grid. 

The seven rare earth elements restricted by China in April are scandium, yttrium, samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, and lutetium. China had already banned exports of gallium, germanium, and antimony shipments to the U.S. in late 2024 and restricted graphite exports. These minerals are essential for high-tech and national defense applications, including electric vehicle motors, wind turbines, lasers, radar systems, and advanced electronics. 

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) compiles its annual mineral commodities survey, assessing how reliant the U.S. is on imports for critical minerals. In 2024, the U.S. was net import reliant on foreign countries for 80% of all the rare earth compounds and metals used here. China comprised 70% of that, and many of the minerals imported from other countries (Malaysia, Japan, and Estonia) were mined in Chinese-controlled mines elsewhere and only processed there. China processes 99% of the seven rare earth minerals restricted in April. Even the only American rare earth mine sends its materials to China for processing. 

The New York Post reports that China’s export controls are “causing chaos” in the “car supply chain,” with automakers having six months or less of key materials in reserve for their operations. This predicament would only be worsened if electric vehicles made up a larger component of U.S. consumer demand—either by choice or by policy like the Biden administration’s de facto EV mandate in 2024, which would have required EVs and hybrids to comprise 70% of all new vehicle sales by 2030. 

This is true as well for materials critical to building solar panels, wind turbines, and utility-scale batteries. Joshua Antonini, of the Michigan-based think tank Mackinac Center, explains it well: 

‘China dominates each of the major stages in the supply chain’ for the main magnets used in wind turbines, the Department of Energy notes. ‘Even more significantly, this concentration of production in China increases at every downstream stage, rising from a 58% share of annual global rare earth mining in 2020 to a 92% share of annual global magnet production…’

Solar panels are primarily made up of glass and silicon. They also contain polymers, aluminum, copper, and silver. Polysilicon is produced from refined silicon, and 93% of its global production capacity is located in China.

Utility-scale battery systems predominantly consist of lithium-ion batteries, which use lithium, graphite and cobalt. These are the types of batteries used in most electric vehicles. China holds about 60% of global lithium processing capacity, the world’s largest graphite reserves (with nearly a third of the world’s graphite and around 77% of global production), and three-quarters of global cobalt refining capacity.

The domestic mining capacity that would be needed to ramp up production to meet an ambitious net-zero goal would be next to impossible. Permitting a mine in the U.S. is a lengthy process that, Antonini writes, “takes five times longer than it does in Canada or Australia,” and averages almost 13 years. Funneling critical minerals into the U.S.’s net-zero ambitions would serve only to promote weather-dependent technology that destabilizes the grid and impacts reliability. 

The U.S. is on the right track to increase domestic supplies of critical minerals by speeding the permitting process. The Department of the Interior has invoked FAST-41 for several mining projects, implementing an executive order designed to identify priority mining projects in the U.S. 

The U.S. should continue its work to secure a reliable domestic supply of critical minerals. Our modern economy, including the electronics that consumers want and the clean-energy technology demands fueled by market forces, can be supported in part by domestic mining.