Commentary: President Si “sleeps badly” and shuts down Europe. Green gold gives China incredible power and it’s still growing

Europe as a continent is already very vulnerable economically today and will become even more vulnerable with the development of green technologies. Due to the autocratic nature of the Chinese regime, it basically depends on the will of its President Xi Jinping, who already limited the export of some strategic elements and technologies last year, and it is better not to imagine what a complete ban on exports would mean.

Stock overview, or the ongoing mining of strategic elements published on the Statista.com website for 2023 was essentially unchanged from the last measurement, with two exceptions. China again expanded its reserves by 30,000 tons of production, and mining has grown significantly even in the military junta-controlled Myanmar, but the catch is that the sector there is controlled by China through semi-state companies. Green gold, as the rare elements needed for an emission-free future are sometimes called, is held by China in the share of 70% of all reserves in the world. Without these materials, electric cars as well as mobile phones, windmills as well as nanochips cannot do without. In contrast, the United States of America is the second largest producer of precious metals, but its production has not increased substantially, and compared to China, it is only one fifth of production.

Source: Statista.com

Bureaucracy increases dependency

About how difficult it is to obtain a mining permit on the territory of basically any EU state, or the Czech Republic knows how to start the whole process. Seven years have already passed since the intention to mine lithium at Cínovec, and according to the latest estimates, the first rock could leave the billion-dollar hill only in 2026. The same problem is being solved by the Swedish mining company LKAB, which in January 2023 announced the discovery of the largest deposit of rare earths in the Kiruna area. However, the head of the company, Jan Moström, immediately put the brakes on the journalists’ enthusiasm on the press: “If we look at how other permit processes have worked in our industry, it will take at least 10-15 years, before we actually start mining and delivering raw materials to the market,” he said. According to him, the decisive position is the EC, which should speed up the legislation in ensuring access to critical materials.

we wrote: Lithium at Cínovec for 300 years is a chimera. Let’s establish OLEC together with China and rule the world

Precisely because of the lengthy process, the European area of ​​supply and processing of precious metals is almost completely dependent on China. According to a Financial Times analysis, last year Europe imported around 98% of the elements from rare earths from China. Incidentally, the same newspaper estimates that the demand for electromobility will double by 2030. A certain hope for Europe dawned in the USA. MP Materials, which owns a mine and processing plant in Mountain Pass, reopened after previously closing in 2000 and as of 2018 produces 14% of the world’s consumption.

A log under the boiler

China indicated in the middle of last year that the future of a clean Europe is uncertain and strongly demonstrated where it will go in case of political need. Gallium and germanium, two rare metals important for the production of chips, solar panels and optical fibers, have been included in the licensed list of goods for Chinese exports since July for security reasons. At the end of the year, moreover, the government resorted to an equally harsh measure when it banned technology export for processing, which essentially affected every country that planned to develop refineries for these materials.

Cotton as a strategic element?

China dominates the old continent not only with precious metals. Chinese President Xi and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Lavrov do not hide their plans for the unification of the states of the Global South, respectively. to change the world order. In the war in Ukraine, it is China, among others, that is profiting on both sides of the conflict. It supplies optics and parts for helicopters to Russia, but it still supplies European arms companies as well indispensable nitrocellulose made of cotton. It uses Tase as a basic component of smokeless gunpowder for modern missiles and standard ammunition, and perhaps even worse, as Bloomberg reported, the supply route runs through Russia

In other words, Europe is dangerously dependent on China, and cutting it off for any reason would have unfathomable consequences that cannot be resolved in the short term and will not be without losses, whether economic or in terms of lives.