U.S. innovation could finally start to blunt Beijing’s control over critical minerals.
The West may have found an unexpected way to chip away at communist China’s dominance in the production of critical minerals: extracting metals from oil wells, waste streams, and discarded electronics in an attempt to scale up processing technologies at home.
Instead of waiting years for new mines to open, a wave of startups is turning to existing resources to recover metals that Beijing has controlled for decades.
“Chevron’s wells in just three [Texas] counties can actually produce the world supply of rhodium,” Eric Herrera, CEO of MaverickX, recently told The Epoch Times.
Rhodium is the world’s most valuable precious metal, prized for its ability to neutralize toxic emissions.
It sits alongside a wider class of materials that make up the hidden components in smartphones, electric vehicles, renewable energy, and even weapons.
Geostrategic Weaponized Tools
Rare-earth elements such as neodymium and dysprosium are not actually rare. They are abundant but difficult to separate, while minerals such as lithium, cobalt, and tungsten are deemed “critical” because modern economies and defense systems cannot function without them.
Currently, China controls roughly 90 percent of global capacity for the processing, smelting, and separation of all such materials, as well as for the manufacturing of magnetic materials.
This means that while the United States, Australia, Brazil, India, and parts of Africa are racing to establish new mines, most of their concentrates will still have to travel to Chinese refineries.
Beijing knows the leverage this monopoly provides and used it most recently during a trade spat with the United States by restricting exports of rare earths, germanium, and other critical materials this year.
In 2010, China cut off rare-earth exports to Japan for about two months during a territorial dispute.
Meanwhile, Western companies are seeking to confront China’s processing advantage by leapfrogging it.
Replacing China
Herrera’s company is developing methods to recover more metal from existing ore and waste, juicing rocks and discarded electronics for all they are worth.
He told The Epoch Times that he also believes that part of the solution lies under American oil fields.
He said his process can use oil wells to yield not only rhodium, but also titanium, nickel, vanadium, cobalt, copper, and more.
“The oil here in Texas is 19,000 feet deep, about 110 stages,“ he said. ”Each stage has about 110,000 gallons or 20,000 gallons of water to use that’s already permitted, that’s already set up, and the infrastructure is already deployed.”
“All we have to do is add our chemical to take the metals out, and then separate the chemicals. … That’s much, much faster, much cheaper as well,” he said.
Herrera said the oil industry can also move more quickly than traditional mining operations. For major companies, it takes at least five to 10 years for a new technology to reach a mine site.
It also uses existing infrastructure. Moreover, unlike a mining project, a well can be shut down with minimal disruption, whereas killing a copper mine is far more consequential, he said.
That speed, Herrera said, may allow Western companies to compete with China’s processing advantage in a “slow and steady” way.
“I don’t think it’s going to happen all at once,“ he said. ”I think it’ll be subtle, a couple of wells first, more wells, then fields, then entire plains of oil, all of those will have to be going at full capacity to take it away from China.”
“We’re not at that level yet, I think in a couple of years we can get to that level, and if we all do it at once, then yes, then China would absolutely respond,” he said, noting that the same technology could be deployed in other major countries with metal-rich geology, including Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia, whose hot shales are known to contain extractable uranium.
By Owen Evans
