China dominates rare earth element production, supplying roughly 60 to 70 percent of the world’s mined output in recent years. But the full picture is more complex than a single country. Rare earths come from a handful of specific minerals scattered across the globe, and the supply chain from raw ore to usable material passes through surprisingly few locations.
What Rare Earth Elements Actually Are
Rare earth elements are a group of 17 metallic elements that show up in everything from smartphone screens and electric vehicle motors to wind turbines and military guidance systems. Despite the name, they aren’t especially rare in the Earth’s crust. The problem is that they rarely concentrate in deposits rich enough to mine economically, and separating one rare earth from another is notoriously difficult because they behave almost identically in chemical reactions.
These elements don’t exist in isolation. They’re distributed throughout minerals like bastnaesite, monazite, and xenotime. Bastnaesite is the primary source for “light” rare earths like neodymium and cerium. Monazite and xenotime tend to carry the “heavy” rare earths like dysprosium and terbium, which are rarer and more valuable because they’re essential for high-performance magnets used in electric vehicles and defense technology.
China’s Outsized Role
China has been the world’s largest rare earth producer for decades. The Bayan Obo mine in Inner Mongolia is the single largest rare earth deposit on the planet, primarily producing light rare earths from bastnaesite ore. Beyond its own mining operations, China controls most of the global capacity for processing and refining rare earths into the separated oxides and metals that manufacturers need. This processing dominance matters as much as mining itself, because turning raw ore into high-purity individual elements requires specialized chemical separation (mainly solvent extraction) that very few facilities outside China can perform at scale.
China’s influence extends beyond its borders. Between 2017 and 2024, roughly two-thirds of China’s rare earth imports came from Myanmar, according to Chinese customs data analyzed by the Institute for Strategy and Policy-Myanmar. Those imports are concentrated in heavy rare earths, particularly dysprosium and terbium, two of the most sought-after elements for permanent magnets. Much of this mining in Myanmar operates informally or illicitly, with ore crossing the border into China for processing.
Other Major Producing Countries
Several countries have worked to reduce China’s monopoly, with mixed success. The United States operates the Mountain Pass mine in California, one of the richest bastnaesite deposits in the world. Mountain Pass was a major global supplier through the mid-1990s before being undercut by cheaper Chinese production. It has since restarted, but the ore it produces still gets shipped to China for separation and refining, which illustrates the bottleneck: mining the rock is only the first step.
Australia mines rare earths and has built some processing capacity outside of China. Myanmar, as noted, is a critical source of heavy rare earths. Brazil and India have significant monazite deposits in coastal beach sands. India’s state-owned Indian Rare Earths Ltd processes monazite using sodium hydroxide digestion to extract rare earth concentrates. Other notable producers include Russia, Thailand, and Vietnam, though none approach China’s output or processing capability.
Why Processing Is the Real Bottleneck
Mining rare earth ore is the straightforward part. The real challenge is separating a mixed rare earth concentrate into individual high-purity elements. Because these elements share nearly identical chemical properties, separation requires running the material through dozens or even hundreds of stages of solvent extraction, a process where chemicals selectively pull one element out of solution at a time. Designing these separation circuits historically required years of bench-scale and pilot plant testing to get the process parameters right.
This is why China’s dominance isn’t just about having the biggest mines. It’s about having invested in the chemical processing infrastructure that turns mixed ore into the pure neodymium oxide for magnets, the europium for display phosphors, or the gadolinium for medical imaging contrast. Building equivalent capacity elsewhere takes billions of dollars and years of development, which is why new mines in the U.S. or Australia still depend on Chinese refineries.
How Little Gets Recycled
Given how strategically important rare earths are, you might expect aggressive recycling programs. In reality, very little is recovered. Most rare earth recycling feedstock currently comes from manufacturing scrap (metal shavings and offcuts generated during magnet production), not from end-of-life products. Collection rates for used permanent magnets sit below 15 percent, according to the International Energy Agency, held back by the difficulty of extracting small magnets from electronics and motors, plus the unfavorable economics of doing so compared to buying freshly mined material.
Projections suggest recycling could supply a meaningful share of demand by mid-century if collection infrastructure improves and processing costs come down. But for now, primary mining remains overwhelmingly the source of global supply.
Where New Supply Could Come From
Deposits exist on every continent. Sweden announced the discovery of a large rare earth deposit in the Kiruna region in 2023. Canada, Greenland, and several African nations have deposits at various stages of exploration. The U.S. Department of Defense has funded efforts to develop domestic processing capacity. Coal ash and mining waste have also been studied as potential unconventional sources, since rare earths tend to accumulate in these byproducts at low concentrations.
The practical reality, though, is that developing a new rare earth mine and building the associated refining chain takes 10 to 15 years from discovery to production. Environmental permitting adds further delays, particularly for monazite deposits that contain naturally occurring radioactive thorium. This long timeline means that for the foreseeable future, the global supply of rare earth elements will continue flowing primarily through China, whether mined there, in Myanmar, or processed from ore shipped in from allied nations.