Reporter and writer. I cover energy, climate change and geopolitics. Contact me via my website www.alexanderckaufman.com and subscribe to kaufman.substack.com.

If you’re open to it, can you share what you meant in the first tweet about oil metaphor being wrong? Not the whole argument but maybe an example? Also ok if not haha, but figured I’d ask so I wouldn’t speculate

The main thing you're going for with oil is the crude itself. Of course, that gets refined. But the main prize is the actual deposit. With rare earths, they're not actually rare, they're just hard to refine and China dominates the world's refining capacity. The oil analogy falls flat because the power is in the downstream industrial capacity, not the upstream extraction. 

I sense that there's this instinctive comparison between hydrocarbons and minerals as if we just need to secure resources to mine, as if the mining is the main thing. In reality, we need the capacity to turn ore into oxides and oxides into magnets and battery components. 

It's a totally different game.

Damn that’s awesome insight, thank you for sharing