Turkey Probably Hasn’t Found the Rare Earth Metals It Says It Has

With a gaping tunnel carved deep into the rock behind him, the Turkish energy and natural resources minister, Fatih Dönmez, took to his podium to reveal the big news. He proudly announced that the ground below his feet was positively bursting with rare earth elements—694 million tons’ worth. Enough to rival China, he added.

In the two weeks since, breathless news stories have hailed Turkey’s “discovery” of this gargantuan bounty. “Move over China,” one report read.

There are 17 rare earth elements, and many of them make their way into a bewildering list of high-tech products—from cameras to telescopes, x-ray machines, and missile guidance systems. Take neodymium, used to make magnets in the motors of electric vehicles and wind turbines. Or cerium, which is an important material in catalytic converters. Some rare earth elements get added to metal alloys to strengthen them.

Because they’re used in so many important products, they are of “strategic significance for the economic and military security of the West,” a paper published by Germany’s Federal Academy for Security Policy states.

And while there are actually plentiful deposits of these prized elements scattered around the globe, to date no one has rivaled China when it comes to extracting and processing them. Seventy-eight percent of all rare earth materials imported to the United States between 2017 and 2020 originated in China, according to the US Geological Survey. China also produces more than 80 percent of the world’s total rare earth refined products—compounds of these metals that are easily processed further and have all sorts of uses. The rest of the world more or less relies on China for its supply of these materials, though the country is also the largest consumer of rare earth elements.

That Turkey’s deposits could potentially upend this situation makes for a good headline. But we should take it with a sizable pinch of salt, says Kathryn Goodenough, principal geologist at the British Geological Survey. “The idea that this is some massive new reserve that we didn’t know of before is just plain wrong,” she says, adding that without a formal estimation of these resources that meets the standards of the global mining industry, it’s impossible to know the full extent of the recoverable, high-grade rare earth elements present in Turkey—and that’s what really matters.

A story in the Global Times, a publication owned by the Chinese Community Party, included a statement from the state-backed Bao Gang United Steel Group that critiqued the Turkish energy minister’s claims. “If the reserves are in the form of rare earth oxides, such scale of reserve should rank number one in the world, ahead of China,” the comment read, referring to the refined compounds containing these metals that are readily consumed by various industries worldwide. The alleged 694 million tons likely refers instead to preprocessed minerals, the statement continued. (Only after painstaking processing of these minerals are you left with the sought-after metal oxides.)