Substitutes can’t meet short term demand --- no guarantees and could take 5+ years
Woods & Hirsch, 22 (November 3, 2022 7:05 PM ET, Darian Woods & Paddy Hirsch – Hosts on NPR’s The Indicator From Planet Money, “An end to China's rare earth monopoly?” https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1134110697, JMP) ***Note - Jonathan Hykawy is the president of Storm Crow Capital Ltd, investor who tracks technologies that use rare earths, Laura Henderson Lewis is a professor of mechanical engineering and chemical engineering at Northeastern University in Boston, Mass
HIRSCH: Which makes the lab production of tetrataenite look kind of like a gift of magical alien technology from outer space, which it sort of is - just without the aliens. But Laura Lewis at Northeastern says it's no quick fix.
LEWIS: Having this is not the same as having a magnet. I often use the analogy - you may have a material to make a brick, but you have to put the bricks together to make a wall. And then that wall makes the Taj Mahal.
WOODS: She says there's no guarantee that the lab tetrataenite will work as well as the tiny bits of metal mined from the meteorites. Even if it does, nothing will happen overnight.
HIRSCH: Yeah. Best case, she says, it could be five to eight years before tetrataenite could make a meaningful difference to the magnet-production business or to the rare earth markets. Until then, the race is on to compete with China and to secure new sources of rare earths - far in the Australian desert, deep under the seabed in Japan, maybe in outer space.
WOODS: I mean, once you've run out of land, that's my guess as where you have to go.
HIRSCH: It is the final frontier.