Turkey, China sign MOU to team up for rare earth mining

Turkey and China have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to advance the nations’ cooperation in all areas of mining, with a particular focus on critical minerals such as rare earth elements.

China currently dominates the world’s supply of rare earths, accounting for approximately 70% of the global mine production and as much as 90% of the refined output.

The announcement was made this week at an international mining conference held in Tianjin, China, where Alparslan Bayraktar, Turkey’s minister of energy and natural resources, met with his Chinese counterpart Wang Guanghua to complete the MOU signing.

“Critical minerals, which are indispensable for high-tech products, have become important raw materials that shape the policies of countries. Investing in critical minerals and rare earth elements plays an important role in our energy transformation vision,” Bayraktar said during the conference, according to his ministry’s website. 

“In this context, we aim to establish an industrial facility that will purify 570,000 tonnes of rare earth elements annually in order to bring the world’s second largest rare earth element reserve, which we discovered in Eskişehir, to our economy,” he added.

The agreement follows an earlier MOU focused on cooperation in energy transformation signed during a visit by Bayraktar in May. The Turkish government had hoped that the rare earth mining agreement could encourage Chinese companies including BYD, the world’s biggest maker of electric cars, to consider producing batteries following a recent deal to make EVs in the country, Bloomberg sources said last month.

During his latest visit, Bayraktar also met with the vice president of CNOS, one of China’s leading nuclear companies, to discuss possible opportunities regarding modular reactors, and the chairman of SPIC, among China’s largest energy companies, regarding potential renewable energy partnerships.

“In today’s world, where the global mining industry is going through a critical period, joint projects to be developed between China and Türkiye in the field of mining have great potential,” Bayraktar said in a follow-up statement on his official X account.