Europe is racing to copy China's rare earth strategy.

Europe is racing to copy China's rare earth strategy.

Europe is scrambling to build its own rare earth supply chain, increasingly recognizing that mineral extraction is not enough to challenge China's dominance, Bloomberg reports.

What Europe is looking to do is recreate the model that helped China build its dominant position:

Continuous state backup.

Investment in the entire supply chain.

Ability to process on an industrial scale.

The Nordic region is central to Europe's strategy, and Sweden's state-owned LKAB is leading the charge - extracting rare earth elements as a by-product of its iron ore operations at Melberget.

Several major projects are taking shape:

Sweden: LKAB has pumped about $85 million into a pilot loop processing plant, with a full-scale facility likely to be operational in the early 1930s.

Norway: LKAB is the largest shareholder in rare earth refiner REEtec, and the Penn Carbonatite complex, estimated to contain 15.9 million tonnes of rare earth oxides, is progressing towards development with a publicly-backed pilot processing plant.

Finland: The Sokli project may require up to 1.67 billion dollars in development costs.

Getting its strategic raw materials projects off the ground will cost the EU more than $48 billion under the Critical Raw Materials Act - an uphill battle against China's commanding position. China controls around 60% of the world's production of rare magnets and over 90% of the refining capacity.

substack | talk.