For decades, public discourse around critical minerals centered on resource geography: which nations held the largest subterranean deposits of neodymium, dysprosium, and terbium. That metric fundamentally misunderstood industrial reality.
Raw monazite and bastnäsite ores are relatively abundant worldwide. The genuine choke point has always been hydrometallurgical separation: hundreds of sequential solvent extraction stages requiring dangerous reagents and exacting temperature calibration.
“Digging rocks is mining; separating adjacent lanthanides with identical atomic charges is high-order inorganic chemistry.”
