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Against the backdrop of mounting tensions in the territorial dispute between Japan and China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, Japan has recently been stepping up its efforts to diversify the sources of its mineral resource supply.

Japan-based Sumitomo Corporation will import Rare Earths from Kazakhstan, according to the website Finance GreenWatch. With the backing of the Japanese government, which will also provide financial support, the company has formed a joint venture called Summit Atom Rare Earth Company LLP (SARECO) with Kazakhstan’s National Atomic Company Kazatoprom. Established in May 2010, the joint venture completed construction and opened its first factory earlier this month.

Sources expect that roughly 1,500 tons of REEs will enter Japan per year, which accounts for 7.5 percent of annual demand, which currently is about 20,000 tons.

Heavily dependent on especially heavy REEs from China, the Japanese government started negotiations including Australia and India, after China temporarily suspended exports to the country in 2010. The flare-up of territorial tensions in the East China Sea has provided new impetus for Japan to “lessen the diplomatic pressure China is able to exert due to its possession of natural resources.”

As the East China Sea, Africa, the Arctic, and other parts of the world increasingly turn into geopolitical battlefields of the global resource wars, the big question is: What (if any) is the United States’ mineral resource strategy? Hopefully the issue will be addressed and resolved after the dust of the Presidential elections has settled – our manufacturing base depends on it.

You wouldn’t necessarily expect to find Tungsten and Fluorspar mentioned in the same sentence as “Rare Earth Metals.” With its traditional applications in ballistics, the former is historically known as a “war metal,” while the latter has been an important component for chemical applications. And in spite of the fact that Tungsten makes the top tier of the American Resources Risk Pyramid in our Critical Metals Report, we don’t immediately think of supply concerns akin to the recent Rare Earths shortage.

However, as Analyst Ken Chernin explains in an interview with The Critical Metals Report, both Tungsten and Fluorspar display characteristics and supply scenarios that evoke parallels with Rare Earths Elements, with China once again playing a key role here.

Says Chernin:

Tungsten, when I first looked at it, read like a rare earth elements (REEs) story in that 86% of global supply came from China. In REEs, it’s around 95%. The Chinese government seems determined to restrict exports because it has made a significant investment in downstream, higher-margin industries using tungsten. Therefore, it is determined to keep what resources it has for itself.

As for Fluorspar, Chernin expects China, which has the purest Fluorspar and is the world’s largest Fluorspar producer according to USGS estimates, to become a net importer of the mineral in the near future.

Coupled with recent reports that Graphite is gaining in strategic importance, developments with Tungsten and Fluorspar show that resource policy cannot occur in a vacuum and that the strategic implications of mineral resource supply issues stretch far beyond the now often-discussed Rare Earths story.

E&E reporter Manuel Quinones explores U.S. mining interests in the Arctic and related geopolitical and legal issues in a piece for GreenWire. Portraying the region as a hotbed of territorial disputes precisely because of its mineral potential, Quinones quotes American Resources principal Daniel McGroarty, who points to the pivotal role Alaska can and must play (…) more

Our colleagues over at Technology Metals Research (TMR) — home of ARPN Expert Dr. Gareth Hatch — are hosting a free, content-packed technical webinar on rare earths, featuring not one but FOUR of the industry’s top technical experts. You can see who they are and reserve your spot by clicking here. Here are just a (…) more

While the importance of securing access to critical mineral resources and resource independence did not take center stage in any of the televised presidential debates, the need to ensure a strong manufacturing base was a recurring theme throughout the campaign season. As we have been pointing out, the latter is contingent on the former. Congressman (…) more

A recent opinion piece in Forbes Magazine points out that “The Rare Earths Shortage Isn’t Over Yet.” According to columnist Tim Worstall this is not for a lack of opportunities to mine Rare Earths around the world. The real “chokepoint,” he says, is the “ability to process rare earths,” an area where China’s near total (…) more

The Fraser Institute, Canada’s leading public policy think tank and the intellectual home for three of our policy experts, has teamed up with CRU Group, the leading independent business analysis and consultancy group focused on metals and mining, again to host their third Mining Business Risks Summit, to be held in Toronto, Canada, 1-2 November (…) more

American Resources Principal Daniel McGroarty addresses the issue of the United States mineral dependencies against the background of mounting Presidential campaign pressures in a piece for The Hill’s Congress Blog. Here’s an excerpt: When it comes to our mineral dependence, President Obama has talked about Rare Earths, talked about strengthening manufacturing, and talked about the (…) more

Graphite’s uses have long been diverse, but, according to the experts at Industrial Minerals Data, the “emergence of the Li-ion battery era” – with Li-ion technology being key to our everyday portable electronic gadgets – has the “potential to turn the industry on its head.” Coupled with the ostensibly endless potential applications for the “new (…) more

Dwarfed by Chinese production today, it may be hard to imagine that India was once the world’s leading Rare Earths producer. The country is now trying to gain foot hold in a market it dominated in the 1950s, and is hoping to benefit from a territorial dispute in the East China Sea. In the wake (…) more