TAIPEI: Taiwan plans to \u200csend officials to assess US rare earths deposits with a goal to have such minerals refined on the island, \u200bEconomy Minister Kung Ming-hsin said on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump\u2019s administration has stepped up efforts to secure US supplies of critical minerals after China rattled senior officials and global markets last year by withholding rare earths required by American automakers and other industrial manufacturers.<\/p>\n
Trump last week launched a US \u200cstrategic stockpile of critical \u200cminerals, called Project Vault, \u200bbacked \u200cby $10 \u2060billion in \u200bseed funding \u2060from the US Export-Import Bank and $2 billion in private funding.<\/p>\n
While semiconductor powerhouse Taiwan is not formally part of that scheme, it has previously held talks with the United States on how it can help, given Taipei\u2019s concerns about over-reliance on a China-centric \u2060supply chain.<\/p>\n
China views Taiwan as its \u200cown territory and \u200chas stepped up its military threats.<\/p>\n
Speaking \u200bto reporters in Taipei, \u200cKung said the ministry\u2019s Geological Survey and Mining \u200cManagement Agency would go to the United States to assess rare earths deposits there.<\/p>\n
\u201cSpecifically, what rare-earth elements they contain and whether they are suitable. In other words, \u200cwhether those are the rare earths we actually need. So we still need \u2060to investigate,\u201d he \u2060said.<\/p>\n
Given Taiwan does not mine such elements itself, it can instead play a role in refining the materials from other countries, Kung added.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe technology is not an issue; the next step is scaling up,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Taiwan consumes 1,500 metric tons of rare earth annually, a figure projected to rise to 2,000 metric tons given economic growth, Kung added.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur goal is to expand production \u200bcapacity to meet \u200bhalf of our demand by then, strengthening the supply chain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
TAIPEI: Taiwan plans to \u200csend officials to assess US rare earths deposits with a goal to have such minerals refined on the island, \u200bEconomy Minister Kung Ming-hsin said on Wednesday. President Donald Trump\u2019s administration has stepped up efforts to secure US supplies of critical minerals after China rattled senior officials and global markets last year …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":93611,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93592"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93612,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93592\/revisions\/93612"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}