Turkey is said to be ready to send a delegation to China for talks on working with Chinese experts to develop a discovered rare earth deposit, despite widespread international skepticism over Ankara’s claims.
If the Beylikova deposit near Eskisehir in Central Anatolia has the potential to deliver profitable results, it could attract Chinese electric vehicle makers to Turkey, given their need for rare earths.
When Turkey described the deposit, local news reports gasped, referring to officials estimating that the deposit could supply the world’s need for rare earths for a thousand years. But that figure has since been widely questioned.
When refined from other metals and processed, rare earths can be used to make vital parts for products like electric vehicles, wind turbines and solar panels. They are therefore essential to the energy transition. In addition, the defense industry sees reliable supplies of rare earths as crucial to producing high-quality military hardware, it reports BneIntelliNews.
As things stand, the world is hugely dependent on China for its rare earth supplies. For a global and Western economy in particular that tends towards clean energy and therefore decolonization, depending on a single supplier, without taking into account Russian or Mongolian or Iranian supplies, which although significant, are affected by political considerations that have led to sanctions, is a major setback to transformation: Beijing has in fact already implemented restrictions on rare metals and in particular on those usable for the projection of chips, and electric batteries for the vehicles of the future.
In this tug of war, the Turkish claim, until it turns out to be boasting, to have such a deposit remained a political claim to enter into closer relations with the de facto “monopolist”, i.e. Beijing.
We will see if the Ankara government will release the exact details and data of the alleged Thousand Year Deposit.
Maddalena Ingroia
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