Rare earths boom turns a pile of ‘worthless’ sand into $1.3b
Three decades ago, somebody decided to hoard a worthless pile of sand. Now it’s a billion-dollar stockpile that will help wean Australia off Chinese rare earths.
Every day for the past 29 years, Geoff Dyer has watched beige to black “monazite” sands being poured into a big hole at Eneabba in Western Australia.
A price crash in the early 1990s had cruelled a lucrative trade in selling the mineral to French customers, who had previously extracted the rare earth elements in monazite to make fluorescent lights, magnets and glass.
Peter KerResources reporterPeter Ker covers resource companies for The Australian Financial Review, based in Melbourne. Connect with Peter on Twitter. Email Peter at pker@afr.com
