Rare Earth News

China to stop rare earth production in three mines

Three major mines in China announced on Tuesday, September 6, that they will be halting extraction of rare earth elements, which will likely tighten the supply in the world's top exporter of the valuable metals, Reuters reports.

Director of the mining management bureau of Ganzhou city Li Guoqing stated that three of the country's eight largest rare earth mines will stop production for an unknown amount of time by the end of 2011, the media outlet stated.

According to the Mainichi Daily News, the Jiangxi and Inner Mongolia mines are two more of the major production bases in China that are also affected by the nationwide limits imposed by the state.

China announced that resource depletion and environmental degradation were the primary reasons for the nationwide slowdown of the metals, and stated that its 93,800 tons of production and 30,184 tons of exports can no longer sustain the demand of foreign customers, the news provider stated.

With China stepping away from the market, investing in rare earth in countries across the globe has begun to pick up. In Quebec, discoveries of new deposits have interested several other countries, such as Japan, which uses the metals in production of many high-tech devices.