The bottleneck issue: the pace of opening new mines
We have seen up to now that geological depletion of REEs is less
of a concern. Any supply constraints on Nd and Dy are more likely
to be a bottleneck issue: Can the development on the supply side
keep up with the speed of the development required on the demand
side, i.e. the speed of demand growth from renewable energy
development required e.g. to meet the climate change challenge.
This supply bottleneck aspect comprise, then, both the challenge of
opening new mines at a sufficient speed and the challenge of the
monopolistic supply situation, where supply is currently concentrated
mainly in one country, China (see Fig. 1).
For REEs in general, however, China may well be dominating
supply at present, but this same degree of dominance is not found
on the location of the reserve estimates as such, meaning that it can
change over time. The known reserves of REEs are quite equally
distributed between China and the rest of the world (see Fig. 1). This
further suggests that developing new mines outside China is an
attractive option for different countries and manufacturing companies
in order to avoid the sole dependence on China for REEs.
As described earlier (see Section 1), there are approximately 200
ongoing exploration projects for REEs mining outside China.
However, at the moment we can see only a few promising projects,
which are expected to start their production before 2020 (see
Table 5). All of these potential mines seem to have high Nd content
but on the other hand these mines have comparatively poor
content of Dy. China is blessed with almost 72% of the known Dy
reserves (see Fig. 1) at higher ore grades, which makes it possible
for China to mine Dy at an economically more feasible level
compared to the rest of the world. Moreover, as seen from Table 5,
new mining operations outside China do not seem to be able to
meet the development on the supply side, even if carried out fully.
This shows that China is very likely to play its dominant role in the
primary supply of Dy also in the medium-to-long term future.
But as previously illustrated, recycling can over time (beyond
2050) provide almost 50% supply of Dy, and thus lessen the Chinese
dominance and geopolitical supply risk from the monopolistic
supply situation. Finally, technological development and substitution
are believed to decouple our dependency on a specific element
like Dy. This is beyond the scope of this article, but a focus point of
further research.