The answer to China’s near-total control of the world’s rare earths is, according to Washington and Tokyo, sitting in mud six kilometers beneath the Pacific Ocean, next to an island roughly the area of a few city blocks. The two governments announced plans this week to develop deep-sea mining around Minamitorishima, a flat Japanese speck more than 1,900 kilometers southeast of Tokyo that holds a weather station, a runway and a population of dangerous snails. Beneath it, in layers of seabed mud, lie rare earth deposits that a joint US-Japan statement said could meet centuries’ worth of industrial demand.
The plan grew out of the March meeting in Washington between Trump and Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, where the two leaders pledged cooperation across the mining, smelting and processing chain for the elements that go into missiles, radar, electric vehicles and every modern phone. The target is the most direct possible challenge to China, which refines more than 90 percent of the world’s rare earths and has spent the past year tightening the tap: Beijing has placed refining know-how on its export control list and put new limits on a dozen rare earth elements, including europium and terbium, the ones most needed for magnets and screens.
A deposit worth the trouble
The geology is real. Japanese researchers first mapped the deposits around Minamitorishima in 2011, and surveys put the reserves in the hundreds of millions of tons of rare-earth-rich mud, with some estimates ranking the site as the world’s third-largest known rare earth reserve. The island anchors a Japanese exclusive economic zone of roughly 429,000 square kilometers, which means the project sits in Japanese waters, not in the international seabed where mining rules are still being argued over. Japan has already tested the machinery: in February it retrieved rare earth sediment from the seabed in a pilot operation, the first time the mud had been brought up from those depths.
The depth is the problem. The deposit sits at 5,000 to 6,000 meters, deeper than any mine ever attempted on land or sea, and the mud must be pumped to the surface through pipes in water under enormous pressure. No seabed mining project anywhere in the world has reached commercial scale, despite decades of exploration and mapping. The economics are unproven, the technology is untested at this depth, and even the most optimistic timeline puts any production years away. Skeptics have begun calling the project a mining mirage: a strategic statement dressed as an engineering plan.
A race against China’s calendar
The politics, however, are not a mirage. Every month of Chinese export controls raises the price of the bet. The US and Japan have watched Beijing weaponize its rare earth dominance the way it weaponizes everything else it controls, and both countries have concluded that doing nothing costs more than attempting the impossible. The Minamitorishima project is the most ambitious of a family of efforts, from the US-Japan pact on critical minerals to American investments in Australian and African processing, all aimed at breaking a monopoly that has held for two decades.
The honest assessment is that the seabed is not going to save anyone soon. Even if the mining works, the bottleneck is not digging the mud up; it is refining it, and refining capacity outside China barely exists. The US-Japan statement promises cooperation on the whole chain, but building a smelter takes years and billions, and China’s head start is measured in decades. What the announcement does accomplish is different: it tells Beijing that its export controls have an expiration date, that the customers are willing to drill six kilometers of ocean to escape, and that the monopoly will not be accepted forever. Whether the mud delivers on the promise is a question for the engineers. Whether the signal was received is a question already answered in Beijing’s next export control notice.
The snails on Minamitorishima, meanwhile, are probably safe. The island itself is not the target. The mud below it is, six kilometers down, where the answer to China’s monopoly is supposed to be hiding. The question is whether the answer is real, and the world will not know until someone pumps a million tons of Pacific mud through a pipe that has never been built.
Sources: The Japan Times (Bloomberg), FT, AP, GKToday, WIRED