The rare earth production chain (RE)

challenges and opportunities for Brazil

Abstract

This article aims to describe and analyze the Rare Earth Production Chain - “RE”, highlighting the challenges and opportunities for its development in Brazil. RE are a set of 17 chemical elements, classified as strategic minerals of importance for the (ongoing) process of energy transition, technological sophistication and for the defense industry (national security). The methodology adopted will be a bibliographic review about RE in Brazil, anchored in the (neo) Schumpeterian sectoral perspective within the scope of Industrial Economics. In this sense, this article is structured as follows: section 1 introduces the theme. Section 2 describes the concept of RE, its fields of application, its location in Brazil, as well as draws a “parallel” with two other industries: steel and silicon. Section 3 reflects, within the (neo) Schumpeterian framework, the relationship between Pavitt's Sectoral Taxonomy (1984; 1989) and the RE Taxonomy. Section 4 describes the RE production chain, highlighting the Brazilian case for its development. Finally, section 5 corroborates the final considerations on the subject. In short, the importance of developing the RE production chain for the productive densification of the Brazilian industry is highlighted. However, despite Brazil's advantages/potential as a holder of this natural resource, it has challenges to be overcome for the “full development”/“verticalization” of this chain in the long term, the biggest of which is the production/separation of individualized RE oxides in the upstream stage of the aforementioned chain.