this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
1764 points (98.8% liked)
Microblog Memes
9918 readers
3413 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The issue is that nobody has found a way to refine it in a way that isn't extremely polluting without the cost being extremely excessive and making it entirely pointless.
We could mine as much as we want, but the only country OK with refining this stuff is China. Unless we solve the issue of refining this in a relatively clean way at a somewhat competitive price, no refining will ever be set up in Europe.
Only sith deal in absolutes.
Caremag/Caresters plant in France is scheduled to open in 2026 and Solvay that is already running in France is trying to hit 30% of EU's demand by 2030.
If we would start building the mines right now it would take close to 10 years to have the mines running. By that time the refining process in France should be pretty well tested and if there would be more minerals produced than they can process, building new facility with the know how they have accumulated and any progress in tech, is not that big of an leap anymore.
By the way this would be pretty close how Norway originally got their economy running with hydropower and later with oil. They waited until there was enough know how to make effective plants. Then they made deals with outside companies where the state would own part of the facilities, but the companies would make enough money to make a profit. After the deals would expire the state would get the now profitable facilities for them self, but the original companies had made enough money for the deal to be good for them.