Rare Earths in Ukraine? No, Only Scorched Earth.

What Ukraine has is scorched earth; what it doesn’t have is rare earths. Surprisingly, many people — not least, US President Donald Trump — seem convinced the country has a rich mineral endowment. It’s a folly.

It’s not the first time that Washington has gotten its geology wrong in a war zone. Back in 2010, the US announced it had discovered $1 trillion of untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, including some crucial for electric-car batteries, like lithium. The Pentagon went as far as describing Afghanistan as “the Saudi Arabia of lithium.”

All very important stuff, the kind of geo-economic shock that redraws the global political map. But it was, as many said then, and as everyone knows now, a complete fantasy. The same applies to Ukraine’s alleged riches.

If the focus in Afghanistan was largely copper and lithium, key to the electrification of everything, the spotlight in Ukraine is on rare earths, a collection of 17 elements that high school chemistry students would remember for their tongue-twisting names. The list includes the likes of praseodymium, dysprosium and promethium.

For Trump, the importance of rare-earth reserves comes from the fact that China dominates global supply. In tiny amounts, the elements are used in exotic alloys. Though often presented as essential to high-tech applications and weapons production, their uses are far more prosaic. Dyson Ltd., a popular British maker of home appliances, boasts that it uses the element neodymium in the magnets of its vacuum cleaners, for example, so they “spin up to five times faster than a Formula One engine.”

The hype about the Ukrainian rare earths began with Ukrainians themselves. Desperate to find a way to engage Trump, they miscalculated presenting the then-incoming president a “victory plan” in November that talked up — way, way up — the potential of the country’s mineral resources. Soon, they lost control of the narrative.

On Feb. 3, Trump emphatically said the Ukrainians had “very valuable rare earths.” Always keen to be perceived as a dealmaker, he added: “We’re looking to do a deal with Ukraine where they’re going to secure what we’re giving them with their rare earths and other things.” He doubled down a few days later, telling Fox News on Feb. 11 about his talks with Ukrainian officials: “I told them that I want the equivalent like $500 billion worth of rare earth.”

I was puzzled. To the best of my knowledge, Ukraine has no significant rare-earth deposits other than small scandium mines. The US Geological Survey, an authority on the matter, doesn’t list the country as holding any reserves. Neither does any other database commonly used in the mining business.

Simply put, “follow the money” doesn’t work here. At best, the value of all the world’s rare-earth production rounds to $15 billion a year — emphasis on “a year.” That’s equal to the value of just two days of global oil output. Even if Ukraine had gigantic deposits, they wouldn’t be that valuable in geo-economic terms.

Say that Ukraine was able, as if by magic, to produce 20% of the world’s rare earths. That would equal to about $3 billion annually. To reach the $500 billion mooted by Trump, the US would need to secure 150-plus years of Ukrainian output. Pure nonsense.

Javier Blas is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy and commodities. He is coauthor of “The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources.”