Gina Rinehart-backed Lynas to buy rare earths miner Meteoric - Free Malaysia Today

Lynas Rare Earths, backed by billionaire Gina Rinehart, has agreed to acquire Meteoric Resources, a rare earths explorer. The deal aims to expand Lynas's supply of rare earth elements used in permanent magnets for wind turbines and electric vehicle motors.

Where this fits

This acquisition is a sovereignty play, not a cost story. Rare earths are the chokepoint mineral for the renewables transition. China controls roughly 70 per cent of global rare earth processing, and Australia has long-term exposure: we mine the ore but depend on China to refine it into usable form. Lynas's move to secure domestic supply and build processing capacity in Western Australia is a direct response to that vulnerability. It is also the kind of heavy lifting, capital, time, regulatory approval, that Australia's energy transition requires but has not yet priced into the whole-system cost of a renewables-only grid.

What it means

Australia is slowly building back rare earth sovereignty, but the timeline is measured in years, not months. Wind and battery deployment will not slow to wait for it. In the near term, Australia remains exposed to disruption of Chinese processing; in the long term, the energy transition is adding a new strategic dependency on mineral supply chains that cannot be built without government backing and long-term offtake certainty. A nuclear-fired grid would demand far less rare earth material, no permanent magnets needed for reactor cooling or power conversion, and would replace that input with uranium, for which Australia is a low-cost, politically stable producer. The renewables path is not wrong on sovereignty grounds, but it is harder than it looks, and it is being built without a domestic firm-power option that would flatten that materials risk.