China will build a strategic stockpile of rare earths
Date:2010-04-15Excessive mining, blind competition, "sell the turnip price of gold"
Our country is the first on reserves and output of rare earth in the world and it is universally acknowledged the big country. China's largest rare earth producers are Bayan Obo in Inner Mongolia and Liangshan Prefecture in Sichuan province. Rare earth has rich and excellent optical, electrical, magnetic, superconducting, catalytic and other properties, and is widely used in the field of cutting-edge science and technology, known as "industrial monosodium glutamate" and "mother of new materials".
Due to excessive exploitation and blind competition, China's rare earth resources have not been effectively protected and developed, and the resource benefits have not been shown, the industry insiders jokingly "the turnip price of gold".
"In order to control the total amount of rare earth mining products from the source, the Ministry of Land and Resources explicitly proposed in 2009 to 'suspend the processing of applications for rare earth mining rights', but in practice it has been stopped." Inner Mongolia Department of Land and Resources related personnel said. Despite this, the supply and demand situation of rare earth mineral products in our country is also not optimistic. Even though the Ministry of Land and Resources has set a relatively low target for total mining compared with the other two ministries, it has not changed the situation that supply of rare earth minerals exceeds demand and exports are cheap.
The outflow of rare earth resources to overseas market is very serious. In 2005, the annual export volume of rare earth increased 9 times compared with that of 1990, but the price decreased by more than 55 percent. In recent years, enterprises in some developed countries have made large-scale investment to set up factories in the rare earth resource areas because the purchase of rare earth raw materials in our country is not restricted by quotas. Inner Mongolia alone has nearly 10 foreign-owned factories. These enterprises have successfully circumvented China's export quota by purchasing rare earth raw materials and metals in large quantities locally and then transporting them abroad for further processing or reserve after simple processing. Foreign enterprises get the primary products, purified products value-added 10 times. Until 2009, more than 90 percent of foreign midstream rare earth products were imported from China. Japan, Europe and the United States are betting on cheap "Chinese goods" and even mothballed their own mines, relying on Chinese rare earths to meet the demand of their industries and high-tech fields. China's implementation of rare earth products quota system has been violated to a certain extent.
Stimulated by overseas market, domestic rare earth mining is indiscriminate. The disorderly development of a variety of illegal small workshops has caused a large loss of rare earth resources. Over the years, China's recoverable reserves of rare earths have fallen from more than 80 percent of the world's reserves a decade ago to 52 percent today.
The establishment of strategic resource reserve system is urgent
Xu Guangxian of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and other academicians have called for China to establish a strategic reserve system for rare earth resources as soon as possible, strengthen the protection of rare earth resources and regain the international pricing power.
According to Xu, due to the weak awareness of intellectual property protection, the rare earth separation technology, which was promoted only in the former three state-owned rare earth plants in Baotou, Shanghai and Pearl River, has spread, and China's rare earth production capacity has quickly reached 120,000 to 150,000 tons, exceeding the global demand of around 100,000 tons. Unbalance of supply and demand and mutual pressure price lead to the big drop of rare earth products, which makes our country's rare earth industry in trouble.
In view of this, Xu Guangxian called for the country to set up a special fund as soon as possible to buy rare earth products when prices are low to build strategic reserves. The state shall strengthen macro-control over the exploitation of rare earth resources, develop them in a scientific way, control the total volume and adjust the structure so as to protect the precious strategic resources.
During this year's two sessions, Huercha, a deputy to the National People's Congress and mayor of Baotou, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, proposed that "without rare earth, there would be no high and new technology", calling for the formulation of a development strategy for rare earth high-tech industry as soon as possible, a clear direction for the integration of rare earth industry and high and new technology industry, and the establishment of a national rare earth resource reserve.
Khorcha suggested that the development of rare earth industry should be included in China's 12th Five-Year development plan and Baotou should be built into the country's largest rare earth industry development and application base. At the same time, it has formulated policies to support the rare earth industry, actively guided the domestic rare earth industry to optimize its layout and adjust its structure, encouraged the industry to expand into the field of application, established a national rare earth resource reserve, paid attention to the purchase and storage of rare earth resources, and set up special rare earth support plans to coordinate the whole process from research and development to industrialization, so as to guide the healthy and rapid development of the rare earth industry. It has also increased support for basic rare earth research, and set up rare earth research and development centers and other research institutions
From: China Defense Science and Technology website
