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> Is it just uneconomic to extract it in other countries?

Yes mostly. The West outsourced this market due to heavy environmental and financial costs of extracting it. It’s sort of the same story as for a lot of the rare earth elements.

by skew-aberration9 hours ago|

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If it was marginally economic for a time while the price was 1/10th of the current price, it must be economic now. This appears to be yet another case of China undercutting, creating a monopoly, and then jacking the prices up.

by trklausss23 minutes ago|

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Unless there are regulations put in place since then about environmental pollutants. It is a hypocrisy from western nations to "outsource" it though: it ends up in the same seas, so the damage is just the same, just NIMBY.

by solyin7 hours ago|

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The environment concerns are the issue. If stories about China are to be believed, getting it out of the ground and onto a train isn't the hard part, it's that doing so destroys the environment and China is unique positioned to not give a shit about the environment itself or with people that live near the mine protesting and suing the government for causing cancer and going all Erin Brockovich on them.

by skew-aberration7 hours ago|

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A quick search suggests that modern gallium extraction is not particularly toxic, and is no worse than the Bayer process itself. China uses ion exchange technology that has never been successfully commercialized in the west. i.e they invested in making clean methods competitive, about 20 years ago. In fact, they have monopolized much of the ion exchange supply chain.

https://payneinstitute.mines.edu/strategic-intervention-to-r...

> China produces approximately 98% of the global gallium supply and 88% of the global germanium supply; dominance has been fueled by government intervention. Beijing mandated its rapidly expanding aluminum producers to install the capacity to extract gallium. Between 2005 and 2015, China’s production of low-purity gallium surged from 22 metric tons to 444 metric tons, a nearly 2000 percent increase. This move flooded the market and forced producers in the United Kingdom, Germany, Hungary, and Kazakhstan to shutter their operations.