Heavy rare earths will replace oil and gas, becoming the future economic pillar of the country

Since its establishment in 1974, Petronas has been a stabilizing force for the national economy. Its success lies in its ability to go beyond simple resource extraction and integrate the entire industrial chain. It not only earned huge foreign exchange for the country, but also cultivated generations of world-class engineers through technology transfer and localization strategies, and supported the Malaysian oil and gas industry to enter the international market.

With the acceleration of global energy transition and the natural depletion of resource reserves, our country can no longer continue to overly rely on the export of a single petrochemical energy. To break through this bottleneck, our country urgently needs a new type of industrial system with high economic complexity to accommodate future high-paying jobs and the return of talents, and developing the rare earth extraction industry is one of the options.

Based on the current market situation, the economic value of heavy rare earths is much higher than that of light rare earths. The three most abundant heavy rare earth metals in China's rare earth mines are gadolinium (Gd), europium (Eu), and samarium (Sm). Although the content of heavy rare earths in China is far less than that in other countries, the key point is that they have extremely low radiation levels and possess economic mining value.