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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.

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 in the United States’ efforts to stake its claim in the Arctic as other nations try to leverage the Law of the Sea treaty to advance their positions:

“Alaska is America’s foothold in the Arctic. …This will prove incredibly important. We don’t see it now, but the strategic resource value of this single state could drive U.S. growth and competitiveness in the decades ahead.”

Unfortunately, this realization has yet to sink in in the United States, at a time when even non-Arctic countries like China have their eye on the Arctic’s natural resource treasures and are making their presence felt. The bottom line according to McGroarty:

“We need to be more serious. The resource wars of the mid-21st century are already under way in the Arctic.”

Click here for the full piece (subscription required), and here for more background on the race for the Arctic’s resources.

Two years after China’s Rare Earths embargo on Japan and subsequent supply shortages put the until-then largely obscure group of critical minerals on the map, tensions between the two countries are reaching new heights, with the specter of war looming. At the heart of the current tensions lies a territorial “tug-of-war” over five tiny – [...]

The race for Arctic riches is getting more crowded, with another player throwing its hat into the ring via Greenland as point of entry. According to a Reuters news story, a Korean state-owned company has inked an agreement with a Greenland mining firm “to seek opportunities for joint minerals projects, exploiting deposits of rare earths [...]

As reports about China’s restrictive mineral export policies continue to dominate the resource news cycles, don’t expect Beijing to slow down its aggressive pursuit of access to critical metals and minerals around the world. According to China Daily’s European edition, senior Chinese industry officials have announced that Chinese miners will accelerate the exploration of overseas [...]

Earlier this month, China’s President Hu Jintao paid a three-day visit to Denmark. Danish officials were quick to dismiss speculations that Arctic issues were on the agenda, but the fact that “the leader of the world’s most populous country decided to visit a nation of 5.6-million for the first time in 62 years” only two [...]

While many of us in the continental U.S. are enjoying record-breaking temperatures this March, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton probably needed her down coat as she embarked on her new mission: laying the groundwork for a common EU policy on the Arctic. Traveling near the North Pole earlier this month, Ashton made a case [...]

Having intensified over the past few months with Russia reportedly willing to risk a new “Cold War” over the area’s vast resources, the geopolitics of the Arctic’s race for mineral riches has just been elevated to a whole new level with China having thrown its hat into the ring. According to the Wall Street Journal’s [...]

Working to implement a “strategy to reverse years of neglect and decline in its Far North,” Russia appears ready to re-embrace a Cold War, according to a detailed story in the Toronto Star.  Home to vast mineral resources including oil, zinc, and gold, for example, the Arctic is viewed by Russia as its strategic future, [...]

A handful of countries situated near the top of the world are racing to firm up their territorial claims to untold amounts of oil, natural gas, gold, zinc, copper and other metals. A new piece from the U.K. Guardian highlights this renewed scramble for resource rights beneath the Arctic icecap. I treated this story in [...]