Saskatchewan’s “Rare Earth Revolution”, or the Oddest Non-Event
How the Saskatchewan Research Council has allegedly snatched the rare earth minerals crown from China with AI and duct tape
First of all: thank you, thank you, thank you.
I’m overwhelmed, grateful and recommitted to using my platform to protect free speech and freedom of public information on government activity, as the rest of the world declares war on those two concepts.
Holding myself to a higher standard while I do it.
I’m slammed dealing with all that, but this critical minerals thing is blowing my mind. I just had to get this to you. Thank you again to everyone who donated. There’s no paywall on this post, courtesy your support.
And because everyone in Saskatchewan needs to read this.
Today the New York Times sounded the alarm that the United States is running out of a rare (or “critical”, take your pick) mineral crucial to its military operations. Only China* is dirty enough to produce it, and that door has slammed.
Read the whole piece if you can, but I’m going to screenshot and paste some salient points here.
China controls the world’s refined rare earth mineral supply, but the NYT story focuses on one called samarium, used in war machines.
“China produces the entire world’s supply of samarium...” - NYT, June 9, 2025
Straightforward.
Two days after Donald Trump’s tariff “Liberation Day”, China cut off the export of seven refined rare earth minerals, including samarium.
Samarium is used to kill people.
Or, stop them from killing you - whatever helps you sleep at night.
A lot of killing going on at the moment, so the world is running out of samarium.
Fifty years ago samarium was refined in France, but it stopped because it was an environmental disaster.
Naturally, China had no qualms.
After a false start in 2014, in 2022 a US mining company invested $100-million to buy equipment to refine rare earth minerals, including samarium.
Then Joe Biden screwed it up.
Almost like rare earth minerals are complicated or something.
Today, China grips the whole cheap, toxic rare earth minerals bag, leaving American military manufacturers scrambling to create weapons of mass destruction during high season.
*But wait!
Excitedly I rushed to my laptop, eager to let the New York Times journalist know that he’d overlooked a major stakeholder in the samarium story: Saskatchewan!
“The Saskatchewan Research Council has become the first organization in North America to produce rare earth metals at a commercial scale.” - CKOM, Sept 18, 2024
Is that… duct tape?
Anyway, how did the NYT miss such a huge development on an important issue of national security, and during a global trade crisis?
According to that State Radio story, published last fall:
“…fighter jets and missile technology…significant defense importance…” oh my!
Again I ask: how does the New York freaking Times not know that a US military supply chain problem has already been solved by Mike Crabtree and the Gang at the Saskatchewan Research Council?
Who by the way, unlike the Chinese, actually care about the environment.
“…one of the goals was to be a lot cleaner and safer than plants currently operating in China.”
Yeah I would hope so, ffs.
Kind of the least we could do.
This is one of - some the say the only (China’s not big on transparency) - other “commercial scale” rare earth minerals processing facility in the world, located outside the Chinese city of Baotou:
Apparently the other one is now located just off 51st in Saskatoon, behind Lee Valley and next to Taco Time.
“The work can be dangerous, and in places like China it takes a lot of people to run”, says Sask Research Council CEO Mike Crabtree.
Indeed. Here’s just one wing of that Chinese facility:
For scale, that’s a staircase zigzagging down the bottom.
“In Saskatchewan, however,
the process has been made mostly autonomous through AI, which will help make things safer.”
…said literally no one, ever.
Also,
This last bit literally (well not literally) left me dead:
Absolutely unbelievable.
Here’s what an “imbalance between water and the liquids being used” looks like in China, behind that only other commercial scale rare earth mineral processing facility in the world:
It’s radioactive, AND seeping into the groundwater!
Or, as the BBC put it:
For the final time: how is it that Saskatchewan is home to NATO’s first commercial scale, AI-trained, world’s most environmentally sustainable rare earth processing facility of significant defense importance the US on the planet, and the New York Times doesn’t know about it eight months later?
Like it doesn’t even exist.
The claims the SRC is making do not make sense.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in private investment is moving in Canada right now, predicated on this bullshit with the SRC’s rare earth mineral processing facility.
Hundreds of millions of your public dollars, Saskatchewan, have gone into this buillshit. This does not make sense and absolutely nobody is questioning it.
The idea that Saskatchewan has just ripped the rare earth mineral market out from underneath China is fucking insane. You’d literally have to believe your audience was beyond stupid to sell them this with a straight face.
Where are the patents? Who owns the Intellectual Property? We used AI, but nobody else, no other country, thought of that? What the fuck?
Who is buying rare earth elements from the Saskatchewan Research Council? Who’s doing the contracts, with whom, why, for what, and where is that revenue?
Yet today instead of researching it further, I’m hauling ass to get money I don’t have to a rich white dude to defend me from another rich white dude.
Funny how that works.
Thank you again, by the way.
Wake up Saskatchewan. If we do not get some grownups behind the wheel in the next six months to try to protect what’s left of our resources, across the board, this is going to end so badly.
Talk soon.
