The US Can’t Just Engineer Its Way Out of the Rare-Earth Problem

Energy independence was for decades a fantasy in the US, until the advent of a new kind of oil production technology in the early aughts changed the rules of the game. Thanks to fracking and horizontal drilling, the US overtook petroleum heavyweights such as Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the world’s top oil producer, no longer at the mercy of mercurial trading partners.

Today, President Donald Trump’s White House is chasing a similar dream—this time with rare earth elements, the hard-to-pronounce metals that underpin much of modern technology. But unlike with shale oil and gas, it’s extremely unlikely ...