Ever since the early 1990s, when China’s leader, Deng Xiaoping, declared the metals to be his country’s equivalent to Saudi oil, they’ve been a kind of buzzword for trans-Pacific geopolitical anxieties. Never mind that rare earths are nothing like oil—the total market is worth about the same as the US egg market, and the elements can theoretically be mined, processed, and turned into magnets all over the world. But China is the only place that does all of it.

China’s near-monopoly is partly due to economics—in the 1990s, cheap Chinese rare earths flooded the market, hastening the shutdown of mines and processing in places like the US—and partly due to environmental concerns. Mining and refining rare earths is a notoriously toxic business, in part because the most valuable elements, like that magnet-boosting neodymium, come tightly bound with other rare earths, as well as radioactive elements like uranium and thorium. Today, China produces nearly two-thirds of rare earths mined worldwide and processes more than 90 percent of the world’s magnets.

“You have a $10 billion industry, which enables products that are worth between $2 trillion and 3 trillion a year. It’s enormous leverage,” says Thomas Kruemmer, a minerals analyst and author of the popular Rare Earth Observer blog. //

Currently, 12 percent of rare earths go into EVs, according to Adamas Intelligence, a market that’s just now taking off. At the same time, rare earth prices have recently whiplashed due to internal Chinese markets and political interventions that outside companies cannot always predict.

All in all, if you’re in a business where you can make an alternative work, it probably makes sense to do so, says Jim Chelikowsky, a physicist who studies magnetic materials at the University of Texas, Austin. But there are all kinds of reasons, he says, to look for better alternatives to rare earth magnets than ferrite. The challenge is finding materials with three essential qualities: They need to be magnetic, to hold that magnetism in the presence of other magnetic fields, and to tolerate high temperatures. Hot magnets cease to be magnets.