Rare earths

Rare earth production (17 chemically similar elements, including neodymium and dysprosium), in thousand tonnes of rare-earth-oxide equivalent (REO) — annual, 1998-2024.

USGS, Mineral Commodity Summaries / Minerals Yearbook (1998-2019), supplemented by Our World in Data/Energy Institute for 2020-2024, as USGS hasn't republished a full edition since. China dominates across the entire covered period — unlike an OWID-only source, which covered it only from 2020 and gave a false impression of historic US dominance.

Time slider.

China (270 kt REO) produces about six times as much as the United States (45 kt), the second producer — despite their name, rare earths aren't geologically rare, but their extraction and especially their refining are extremely polluting, which pushed most Western countries to offshore that step to China starting in the 1990s, a strategic dependency now widely debated.