STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
I'm Steve Inskeep in Beijing, where President Trump is about to arrive for a summit with China's president. No matter what happens at their meeting here, the U.S. and China will remain rivals. Each country has denied the other access to vital industrial materials. And that is driving each country to try to end its dependence on the other. China's move was to block the supply of rare earth minerals, forcing the U.S. to back down in its trade war and try to find its own supplies.
Before coming to China, our producer Taylor Haney visited a mine in Wyoming with two mining executives.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: So this is the mine pit here. You know, we're driving down into it.
TAYLOR HANEY, BYLINE: Down a ramp of red earth straight into black. It's very dramatic.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yeah. So you can see the coal seams quite easily.
INSKEEP: The executives are Scott Kreutzer and Michael Woloschuk - and you heard them say coal seams. This is an abandoned coal mine outside Sheridan, Wyoming, within sight of the Bighorn Mountains. The Ramaco company says it found rare earths within that black coal.
HANEY: Can you see any of the rare earths and critical minerals with your naked eye?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: No. No, you can't.
HANEY: They're like pixie dust.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: No. But we are able to use noninvasive portable assaying to get indicative information on what the grades are.
INSKEEP: Assaying - testing that thick layer of black coal.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Most of the rare earths and critical minerals that have been banned by China, we have here in this deposit.
INSKEEP: The Ramaco mine is not producing anything yet. They're still learning how to efficiently separate the minerals from the coal, but it's part of a U.S. effort to reduce dependence on China. We talked it over with the head of the mining company, Randall Atkins.
RANDALL ATKINS: When you refer to me on the air, you can just call me Randy.
INSKEEP: Randy Atkins is based in Kentucky, where his company traditionally mines coal. He bought the Wyoming mine back in 2011.
When you bought this, you thought it was what?
ATKINS: I thought it was a reserve of thermal coal that had been around for a hundred years that they had stopped mining over 50 years ago.
INSKEEP: Atkins thought he could revive that mine to supply coal-fired power plants. But the company had hardly acquired the property when the market for coal collapsed.
ATKINS: I said, OK, if that's the state of the world, let's figure out what else you could use coal for. That process put us in touch with the government. They, independent of us, were doing a analysis on where you could find rare earth throughout the continental U.S. We sent them samples of our cores, and they came back about a year later, said, we think we've found something very interesting. You look like you've got significantly high concentrations of medium and heavy magnetic rare earth.
INSKEEP: I'm fascinated by this story because it sounds like you thought you were buying a dog and found out you bought a cat.
ATKINS: I thought I bought a dog. I thought I could scrub the dog up a little bit and sell it to somebody. As it turned out, I found something that's completely unique. And the amount of rare earth that we found just on a third of the site would probably satisfy U.S. requirements for over a hundred years.
INSKEEP: Can you name for me some of the substances - just rattle off names - that you believe are in there and then name for me some of the products that would use them?
ATKINS: High-purity gallium, high-purity alumina, high-purity quartz, scandium, terbium, dysprosium, germanium.
INSKEEP: None of those words - and some others that he said - mean anything to most people, but we use tiny amounts of those substances all the time. Now, if you're using this in semiconductors - chips, that is - and magnets, you're using them in basically everything in the modern world.
ATKINS: Pretty much.
INSKEEP: I'm looking at a laptop computer here. It would be in that laptop?
ATKINS: It would indeed.
INSKEEP: It's got your website open, and there's a picture of a fighter jet. It would be in the fighter jet?
ATKINS: Bingo. Let me give you a list of what some of these things are used for. Gallium - semiconductors, power electronics, UV photodetectors and sensors, the F/A-18 Hornet. Scandium - it's used in hard battery storage. It's used to light-weight planes, 3D printing. It's also used in 6G drones - which is a growing business, for those of us who didn't know much about drones. Germanium - fiber optics, solar cells, infrared optics, semiconductors, high-power communications.
INSKEEP: He went on to mention magnets, wind turbines, electric vehicles, MRIs and your phone.
What excites you about this?
ATKINS: Well, it is really the new oil. Rare earth to the 21st century is going to be the oil of the 20th century. That is where the power dynamics are going to be, as we already have seen from what happened last year, vis-a-vis China and the U.S. - and, frankly, China and the rest of the world in terms of their sort of embargo of their rare earths. And it's fascinating to be on the front line.
INSKEEP: What did you think about when the United States and China had its trade talks, and Trump had his tariffs, and China had the rare earths, and the United States - to some extent - had to back down?
ATKINS: In a sense, having played the card as dramatically as they did last year, they've kind of opened Pandora's box because the rest of the world candidly will never trust China again. So as a result, the world has turned its attention, focus and investment to trying to - in a very short period of time - extricate themselves from this complete dilemma because it's a vial of what you and I would look at and say that looks like powder, but that powder powers the modern world.
INSKEEP: We were talking with an analyst who said, that's a weapon you get to use one time - and they've used it the one time. She thought maybe it only lasts five years. What do you think the time frame is where China can be dominant in this and other people catch up?
ATKINS: I think we will begin to catch up over five years. Will we have solved the problem? I doubt it. Maybe technology will accelerate that process. Who knows? But the sheer mechanics of building the factories that make this kind of oxide is a pretty daunting proposition.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: Randy Atkins says his Wyoming mine is still years from production because it's hard to separate rare earths from the surrounding rock. It's taking long enough that some of the company's shareholders have sued. Atkins says the suit is without merit, although the challenge for the United States is real. We are reporting from Beijing this week, and tomorrow, we visit a Chinese company that's adapting to American pressure - the tech firm Huawei. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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