1 day ago
Michael Barnard
Last Updated on: 6th April 2025, 10:57 am
In April 2025, while most of the world was clutching pearls over trade war tit-for-tat tariffs, China calmly walked over to the supply chain and yanked out a handful of critical bolts. The bolts are made of dysprosium, terbium, tungsten, indium and yttrium—the elements that don’t make headlines but without which your electric car doesn’t run, your fighter jet doesn’t fly, and your solar panels go from clean energy marvels to overpriced roofing tiles. They’re minerals that show up on obscure government risk registers right before wars start or cleantech projects get quietly cancelled.
I’ve been on a bit of a critical minerals kick recently, starting to understand more about them and their roles in our economy. In addition to reading a lot of books and debunking some doomerist nonsense on the subject, I had the privilege of spending 90 minutes with Gavin Mudd, director of the critical minerals intelligence centre at the British Geological Survey, recently for Redefining Energy–Tech, talking about them, the West’s remarkable treatment of them as not critical for the past 40 years, and how hard it is for the West to actually rebuild capacity in the space (part 1, part 2). China’s actions led to me going deeper. I’ve also spent a fair amount of time talking to and following Lyle Trytten, the Nickel Nerd, whose career of engineering extraction and processing of minerals spans the globe.
What China did wasn’t a ban, at least not in name. They called it export licensing. Sounds like something a trade lawyer might actually be excited about. But make no mistake: this was a surgical strike. They didn’t need to say no. They just needed to say “maybe later” to the right set of paperwork. These licenses give Beijing control over not just where these materials go, but how fast they go, in what quantity, and to which politically convenient customers.
The U.S.? Let’s just say Washington should get comfortable waiting behind the rope line. The licenses have to be applied for and the end use including country of final destination must be clearly spelled out. Licenses for end uses in the U.S. are unlikely to be approved. What’s astonishing is how predictable this all was. China has spent decades building its dominance over these supply chains, while the U.S. was busy outsourcing, divesting, and cheerfully ignoring every report that said, “Hey, maybe 90% dependence on a single country we keep starting trade wars with and rattling sabers at is a bad idea.”
The materials China just restricted aren’t random. They’re chosen with the precision of someone who’s read U.S. product spec sheets and defense procurement orders. Start with dysprosium. If your electric motor needs to function at high temperatures—and they all do—then mostly it is using neodymium magnets doped with dysprosium. No dysprosium, no thermal stability. No thermal stability, no functioning motor in your F-35 or your Mustang Mach-E. China controls essentially the entire supply of dysprosium, and no, there is no magical mine in Wyoming or Quebec waiting in the wings. If dysprosium doesn’t come out of China, it doesn’t come out at all. It’s the spinal cord of electrification, and right now China’s holding the vertebrae.
Then there’s tungsten. The metal that makes bullets bulletproof. Literally. Tungsten is what you use when you need to cut, drill, punch, or penetrate anything harder than stale marshmallow. The U.S. hasn’t produced meaningful amounts of it since the Obama administration, and China sits on 80% of global production. Oh, sure, you can try Vietnam or Portugal, but good luck getting those volumes at scale without waiting years and paying triple. Tungsten isn’t just in ammunition. It’s in the tiny vertical connections between layers of circuitry in semiconductor chip, CNC machine tools, and high-performance alloys that go into everything from jet engines to deep-drilling rigs. When China put tungsten behind a licensing wall, it wasn’t targeting one sector—it was targeting the industrial base of a specific big country that’s trying to re-grow precision manufacturing at scale.
Terbium, dysprosium’s equally awkward but equally vital cousin, got scooped up too. You want high-efficiency motors in your EVs and offshore wind turbines? You want night-vision goggles, sonar systems, or magnetostrictive actuators? You’re going to need terbium. Like dysprosium, terbium comes almost exclusively from Chinese soil, processed in Chinese facilities, and licensed by Chinese bureaucrats with a nuanced appreciation for geopolitical leverage. There’s no viable substitute that doesn’t involve performance compromises, re-engineering, or violating the laws of thermodynamics.
Indium is a quieter casualty but no less critical. It’s the transparent conductor that makes your screens light up, your fiber optics communicate, and your laser diodes actually lase. Without indium, touchscreens become paperweights, and 5G base stations start to look like 3G nostalgia boxes. The U.S. has zero domestic production, and while Canada, South Korea, and Japan produce some, the global market still revolves around Chinese supply. Try ramping up your semiconductor fab or solar plant when your indium source just dried up. It’s a fun exercise in learning which of your suppliers used to be dependent on Beijing but never mentioned it in the quarterly call.
And then there’s yttrium. The element so obscure it sounds like a typo, but without which high-temperature jet engine coatings don’t work, high-frequency radar systems don’t tune, and precision lasers don’t align. Yttrium is what makes YAG lasers possible, and it’s also what allows thermal barrier coatings on turbine blades to keep your aircraft engines from melting mid-flight. No YAG lasers, no laser target designators, LASIK, engraving, or spectroscopy. If your military likes flying, it likes yttrium. If you like affordable flights, you like yttrium too. And guess who has a near-monopoly on refining it? Hint: it’s not Australia, and it’s not Estonia. It’s China. Again.
The impacts ripple far beyond a few exotic gadgets or weapon systems. The defense sector is first in line, with guided munitions that rely on terbium-enhanced actuators, infrared imaging that needs tellurium, and stealth aircraft that won’t stay in the air without yttria-stabilized turbine blades. It’s not just about whether you can build the next missile. It’s whether your next missile flies straight, hits what it’s supposed to, and doesn’t fall apart from heat stress. Precision without materials is just expensive scrap metal. Those thick U.S. military budgets for the technology it depends on for overwhelming offensive superiority are going to be sitting around unspent.
Then there are semiconductors. Everyone loves to talk about the CHIPS Act, fab incentives, and America’s glorious return to silicon dominance. But no one mentions that your advanced chip process needs tungsten for interconnects and indium for high-speed optoelectronic interfaces. No one’s building 5G infrastructure without compound semiconductors, and no one’s building those chips without the post-transition metals China just turned into strategic bargaining chips. Oh, and U.S. advanced military systems? They need the chips too. U.S. smart munitions just lost 20 IQ points.
Clean technology is next, and it’s going to hit U.S. dreams of actually manufacturing EVs, solar panels, and wind turbines for its domestic market hard. Without dysprosium and terbium, your EV motor gets downgraded to a clunky, less efficient design that eats more power and delivers less range. Without tellurium, First Solar’s cadmium-telluride panels—the pride of U.S. solar manufacturing—become unbuildable. Without yttrium, the turbine blades in offshore wind projects suffer from higher fatigue and shorter life spans, so shards of GE Vernova’s blades would be washing up on more beaches if Trump hadn’t blown up those projects with an executive order. The states and cities trying to decarbonize around the gasoline-huffing federal government that’s currently in power are facing more challenges.
The economic implications aren’t subtle. Prices for these materials have already surged, and downstream costs are beginning to appear in everything from automotive supply chains to defense budgets. Expect cost overruns, delayed product launches, and nervous procurement officers asking if anyone, anywhere, has dysprosium in their garage. Six months ago staunch allies like Canada and Australia would have loved to help, although they couldn’t replace China overnight. But the same tariffs that led to China’s new licenses for critical minerals are hitting the former allies Trump is treating like enemies.
This didn’t need to happen. The warnings were there. The dependency ratios were published. The stockpile gaps were documented. But instead of building resilient supply chains, the U.S. chose to chase lowest-cost sourcing and pretend that critical materials would always be available like app updates or breakfast cereal. Now the reckoning is here, and it’s being administered by a country that understands resource leverage the way a tiger understands a sheep.
There’s still time to course correct, although it’s unlikely. That would require Trump to roll back his U.S.-economy destroying, recession-causing, enemy-making tariffs first, and return to the trade agreements and patterns that the U.S. was so integral to building. Then it would require have a careful bipartisan strategy for rebuilding critical minerals extracting, processing, and refining domestically and in allied states over the next 20 years (because that’s how long it’s going to take). It means supporting recycling at scale and developing substitutes that don’t require a PhD in regret. And it means being honest about the cost, and finding a way to square that with Wall Street bros who only care about the next quarterly earnings call.
So here we are. China has responded to Trump’s tariffs by cutting off U.S. supply of some of the most essential ingredients of the modern world. The U.S., meanwhile, is standing in the cold, holding a clipboard and wondering where the magnets went.
China knows how to hit Trump, Musk and the US where it hurts.
