Highlights

• Türkiye's rare metals strategy emphasizes downstream integration and leverages its boron dominance.
• The strategy underestimates the decades of capital, environmental tolerance, and technical mastery China invested to control global supply chains.
• The hardest bottleneck remains processing and refining capacity.
• Without competitive facilities, Türkiye risks exporting raw materials while remaining dependent on external processors, despite domestic resource discovery.
• This situation signals a broader geopolitical shift: middle powers are studying China's rare earth playbook.
• Execution will depend on capital discipline, technological partnerships, and realistic timelines for materials mastery.

---

An opinion piece (opens in a new tab) by Mahmut Özer argues that rare metals sit at the heart of Türkiye’s future—binding defense, energy transition, and technological sovereignty into a single strategic project. The framing is ambitious and timely. The global race for critical minerals has indeed moved beyond geology into geopolitics, industrial policy, and supply-chain control. Importantly, owning resources is not the same as controlling value. Where the opinion piece falls short is in underplaying the scale, cost, and time required to replicate the very supply-chain dominance it cites as a model.

Where the Argument Is Solid

The piece accurately situates rare metals—especially rare earth elements (REEs)—as foundational inputs for defense systems, energy technologies, and advanced electronics. This aligns with known facts: magnets, superalloys, sensors, and guidance systems rely on small quantities of highly specialized materials with outsized strategic value.

The emphasis on downstream integration is also correct. China’s advantage did not come from mining alone, but from decades of investment in refining, separation, alloying, magnet manufacturing, patents, and process know-how. Türkiye’s recognition that exporting raw materials without building industrial depth above ground is a losing strategy is a necessary starting point.

The article is also right to highlight boron as Türkiye’s strongest hand. Türkiye dominates global boron reserves, and boron compounds are critical in armor, composites, propellants, and nuclear applications. Here, Türkiye already possesses leverage—if it chooses to extend it into advanced materials rather than commodity exports.

Where Optimism Outruns Reality

The comparison to China is instructive—but incomplete. China’s rare earth dominance was not achieved through policy coordination alone. It required massive environmental tolerance, capital intensity, and decades of scale-up, particularly in separation chemistry and magnet manufacturing.  Note to mention downstream demand in key verticals. These are not modular capabilities that can be rapidly “stood up” by strategy documents.

The article also glosses over the hardest bottleneck: processing and refining. Many “rare metals” appear only as by-products, making supply dependent on broader mining economics. Without competitive refining capacity, Türkiye risks remaining dependent on external processors—even if it identifies domestic resources.

Environmental framing, while acknowledged, remains aspirational. Rare metals processing is among the most environmentally challenging industrial activities. Managing water, waste, and tailings is not a policy footnote—it is often the binding constraint.

What’s Notable for the Rare Earth Supply Chain

What makes this commentary notable is not what it claims, but what it reveals: middle powers are now openly studying China’s playbook. The global rare earth supply chain is no longer just about diversification away from China—it is about who can realistically build processing, materials science, and manufacturing ecosystems under modern environmental and social constraints.

For investors and policymakers, the signal is clear. Türkiye’s rare metals projection is credible as a strategic vision, but execution will hinge on capital discipline, technological partnerships, and brutal realism about timelines. Mining ambition is easy. Materials mastery is not.

© 2025 Rare Earth Exchanges™ – Accelerating Transparency, Accuracy, and Insight Across the Rare Earth & Critical Minerals Supply Chain