2 weeks Ago By Harry Stevens
In 1886, a French chemist dissolved holmium oxide in acid. Then, he added ammonia. Toiling over the marble slab of his fireplace, he repeated the procedure dozens of times.
Finally, voilà: He’d extracted a new element. More than a century later, Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran’s painstaking discovery — which he named dysprosium, from the Greek for “hard to get” — is a crucial ingredient in the powerful magnets used in wind turbines and electric vehicle motors. If the world is to succeed in its efforts to slow global warming, it will need dysprosium.
It will also need a suite of other rare earth elements and minerals that many of us first heard about this week when China announced export controls that would effectively cut off the global supply of seven rare earths. , part of the country’s retaliation for President Trump’s steep new tariffs, has exposed the extent to which the global energy transition depends on raw materials produced by China. It’s , as my colleague Max Bearak and I reported this week.
China supplies to national security and the economy. Among those critical minerals are lithium, cobalt and nickel, components of the rechargeable batteries that power electric vehicles and store energy on the grid when the weather is unfavorable for wind and solar generation. China refines or mines significant portions of the world’s supply of all three, and Chinese companies have acquired major stakes in mineral-rich countries: nickel in Indonesia, cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, lithium in Zimbabwe.
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