The G7 met in France this month and did something governments rarely do with critical minerals: they attached an actual number to the rhetoric. By 2030, no single supplier should provide more than 60% of the group's rare earth and magnet imports, with hopes of getting that down to 50% after. Read between the lines and that's an admission of how dependent the West still is. China currently controls over 90% of global rare earth refining and roughly 95% of magnet production, the actual choke point, not the mining.
That last bit is where I'd pump the brakes on the excitement. Digging up rare earth ore is the easy part. Refining it into usable oxides, then turning those into the magnets that go in EVs, wind turbines and missile guidance systems, is the genuinely hard, decade-long, environmentally fraught bottleneck. Japan started trying to de-risk its supply in 2010 and 15 years later is still roughly 75% reliant on China. A 2030 deadline for the rest of the G7 should be read with that history in mind.
For the three Australian names getting attention, the picture is uneven. Lynas is the only one actually producing at scale, with US and Japanese offtake deals already locked in and revenue that's more than doubled in its latest quarter. Arafura is still financing its Nolans project in the Northern Territory, no production yet. Australian Rare Earths is earlier again, an exploration story at its Koppamurra project, pre-revenue and far more speculative.
My take: this is a genuine policy tailwind, but it's a tailwind for builders, not a guarantee for everyone wearing a rare earths ticker. Lynas benefits from being years ahead of the policy, not because of it. Arafura and Australian Rare Earths are betting that government urgency turns into actual capital and approvals fast enough to matter. Given how long this sector takes to build anything, I wouldn't assume that bet pays off on the G7's timeline.
"The Middle East has oil, China has rare earths."— Deng Xiaoping, 1992
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