>>514065603
>So China is the only place these minerals occur, or wat?
Rare earths are not as rare as the name implies.
But the ability to extract it is.

Look at pic rel for instance, the US is playing with the big boys in Titanium production.. if you only look at the first stage.
So you go through mining (mineral extraction) => refining it to titanium sponge (stable and pure intermediate material) => shaped refined steel.

The US extracts 200kt of minerals, but only makes 0.5kt of titanium sponge.
Russia produces 40x as much sponge and China about 440x as much, despite only having 15x more ore extraction.
The US together with Canada, Australia and Norway produce 1719kt ore, and together with Japan they make 59,5kt titanium sponge.
But Japan account for 99.2% of all western titanium sponge production, despite mining none of it.

Based on the discrepancy between mining and production in the west It looks like virtually all "western" titanium production is done by shipping the ore to Japan and maybe China for refining.
In the traditional west, as in North America and Europe, there is barely any capacity to make this.
And getting titanium production (refinement) up and running on any relevant scale will take at least two decades from the decision to start.

In China, Russia etc, due to the access of a trained work force, they can double their capacity in less than a quarter of the time it takes the west to get going.
They also have the energy infrastructure to handle it, we don't.
In fact, we can barely make stainless steel in in the EU anymore and Sweden can't build new factories to refine steel... (even though that is due to "green" politics)