Japan\u2019s government is taking on the challenge of mining critical minerals, including rare earths, from the seabed around Minamitorishima, a remote Japanese island in the Pacific, with an eye to realizing domestic rare earth production in the future.<\/p>\n
Securing such minerals is a matter of vital importance for Japan, which is poor in natural resources. In February of this year, the country succeeded in a test collection of rare earth-bearing mud at a depth of 6,000 meters below sea level near the island, which is in the Tokyo village of Ogasawara.<\/p>\n
While commercialization is being targeted for 2028 at the earliest, the government faces the challenge of striking a balance between the importance of the mining for economic security and its economic viability.<\/p>\n
Rich mineral resources are believed to lie in the ocean floor around Minamitorishima. Cobalt-rich crusts and manganese nodules have been found there. Cobalt and manganese are used for electric vehicle batteries.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, the presence of mud containing scarce and expensive heavy rare earth elements, such as neodymium and dysprosium, has also been confirmed, and development is being promoted under government leadership. Neodymium and dysprosium are needed for high-performance motors used in EVs and wind power generators.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have promoted technical development over the years to make the world\u2019s first attempt\u201d at deep-sea rare earth mining, said Shoichi Ishii, an official at the Cabinet Office who is leading the rare earth-rich mud development project.<\/p>\n
In the ongoing initiative, the Cabinet Office and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) adopted a method in which some 600 pipes, each around 10 meters long, were connected from the Chikyu deep-sea drilling vessel while a mining device at the tip enclosed the mud, mixed it with seawater and pumped it up.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were nervous until the mining device reached the seabed,\u201d Ishii said. \u201cWe are relieved that the test succeeded.\u201d<\/p>\n
The government and JAMSTEC conducted a pipe connection test off the coast of Ibaraki Prefecture in 2022, and improvements have been made since then.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The government plans to assess the economic feasibility of rare earth recovery by mining 350 tons of mud per day in 2027, after securing a related budget of \u00a516.4 billion for fiscal 2025.<\/p>\n
The industry ministry expects that the profitability threshold for the ocean floor mining will be 3,500 tons of mud per day. To realize mining on that scale, it will be necessary to upgrade both vessels and dewatering facilities. \u201cIt will cost a tremendous amount,\u201d a senior official of an economy-related government agency said.<\/p>\n
China holds an overwhelming share in the global rare earth market and has repeatedly weaponized it, including by tightening export controls whenever Tokyo\u2019s relationship with Beijing…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Japan\u2019s government is taking on the challenge of mining critical minerals, including rare earths, from the seabed around…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":41305,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[12,462,1739,191,189,188,190,3676,1956,14755,6109,1955],"class_list":["post-41304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-china","tag-china-japan-relations","tag-economic-security","tag-economy","tag-economy-of-japan","tag-japans-economy","tag-japanese-economy","tag-minamitorishima","tag-minerals","tag-mining","tag-oceans","tag-rare-earths"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41304\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}