The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Finding Rare Earths in Japanese Mud || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: February 24, 2026

Japan has identified a large rare earth deposit of its own, but it's not going to change global supply dynamics. Here's the situation...Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/46MOb8z

Peter Zine here coming from Colorado. Several people have written on the Patreon page asking about the new rare earth project that the Japanese are poking into offshore. It's called the, it'si. Minamito Oroshima, Minomito Oroshima, I think, way too many syllables. Anyway, the idea is that it has significantly higher concentrations of rare earth than some of the production sites around the world today. And is this something that's going to change the math of rare earth production? Probably not. Let's start with how we do it now. Rare earths are not something we use in large volumes.

Like your car probably has less than a tenth of a grand of the stuff in it. But that doesn't mean it's not critical. It changes the electrical properties of a lot of things. And so we've got, I think, 13 different rare earths that we use in different concentrations and different things, just in microscopic amounts typically. Well, what that means is there really, until recently, hasn't been anything called a rare earth. mine. What you do is you produce something else, iron or copper, silver, for example, and then you take the tailings and you process the tailings that might have a higher concentration

of these things, which sends it through several hundred vats of acid over several months. And from somewhere from a half a ton to several tons, after that amount of time and that amount of acid, you get one ounce of this stuff. So it's really available in very small volumes. Now, the mud that they have drudged up from Mito, Minamito Oroshima, has a reasonably high concentration, somewhere in the range of 6 to 8,000 parts per million, which compared to a lot of the mines out there, is pretty low. But if you compare it to the handful of mines that have popped up in recent years as part of this kind of geopolitical scramble for the stuff,

some in China, mountain past the United States, for example, it doesn't compare all that great. The richest rare earth mine, if you want to use that term, is in South Africa. And it's about 10 times the concentration of what the Japanese are dredging off the sea floor. Mountain Pass is probably about four or five times the concentration. It is richer than some of the clays that the Chinese are mining. But you've got to remember, when you're talking about South Africa or Mountain Pass or China, you can basically drive a truck to it and put a shovel on the ground and start doing it.

The Minamito Orishima deposit, while huge, absolutely huge, is at the bottom of the seafloor on the abyssal plain under 8 kilometers of water. So you have to bring it up and then dry it and then start the processing. So you're already talking about costs that are on average, an order of magnitude higher than anything, anywhere else. But the only thing about Minamito Orishima that is really interesting is the concentration variation. There's two different kind of buckets for rare earth, lights versus heavy, and most of the deposits in the world are for the light ones, and the heavy ones are the really rare ones. Whereas the Japanese on this abyssal plane have found one where it's about a 50-50 split.

But in order for it to be economically viable, you would have to see the price of these things, not go up by a factor of two or three or five or ten, but probably 50 or 100 in order to justify economically the infrastructure. And at the moment, there's no sign that that's going to happen. Because, again, rare earths are a byproduct of other, mining and the limiting factor is not, not, not, not the actual access to the ore. The limiting factor is the processing capacity, which the Chinese basically have a lock on at the moment. We are

seeing that changing. Places like Mountain Pass are building it out, and there are a number of countries out there, Australia and Malaysia come to mind, that have some of these facilities dormant. But for them to be economically viable, the price of the stuff has to go up. So the Chinese will continue to have the leverage until such time as countries decide to kind of marry national security to their economic decision-making on these things. And if that happens, this will all kind of work itself out in a year or two. And even in that scenario, I really don't see the Japanese stuff coming to the forefront. Just keep in mind that the Japanese, among the major powers, are the least resource-rich country in the world. And so they will be always trying out new

technologies and new places to see what they can make work. And most of them will never pan out. but they have to try. And every once in while, it generates big advances in things like efficiency, which is one of the reasons why Japan is the most energy efficient of the major countries in the world because it's been forced to by its geography. Kind of think of what's going on with rare roots in that category.