Turkey is reportedly poised to send a delegation to China for advanced talks on teaming up with Chinese experts to process a discovered deposit of rare earth elements (REEs)—but when word of the discovery broke two years ago, it encountered a lot of scepticism as to its extent and value, and no more information on those parameters appears to have been released since.

If it turned out that the deposit in Beylikova near Eskisehir in central Anatolia has the potential to deliver lucrative outcomes, it might help attract Chinese electric vehicle (EV) makers to Turkey, given their need for REEs.

When Turkey described the deposit, breathless local news stories referred to officials estimating that the deposit could meet global REE needs for a thousand years. But various publications then looked at whether the claims might be bunk.

"If they're claiming such a big deposit, they would [have] done a lot of drilling and would know what the grade was," Christopher Ecclestone, a principal and mining strategist at the UK research house Hallgarten & Company, was quoted as saying by DW in July 2022, adding: "So where's the detail?"

David Merriman, research director for rare earths at global consultancy firm Wood Mackenzie, told the German public-service media outlet that the Turkish deposit likely contained the rare earth elements lanthanum and serum, which were "currently in a significant oversupply". It likely did not contain the "rarest type in demand for use in high-performance magnets", he added.

When refined to separate them from other metals and processed, rare earths can be used to make vital parts of products such as EVs, wind turbines and solar panels. So they are essential to the energy transition. Moreover, the defence industry regards reliable supplies of rare earths as crucial to producing top-grade military hardware.

As things stand, the world is hugely reliant on China for rare earths supplies.