Oil is on its way out.

Like so many age-old, repeatedly incorrect narratives, this statement is finally starting to come true. Electric cars and the general lithium-ionification of the world are poised to cut out a huge portion of the gas market, while chemical and materials science are attacking the need for large amounts of petroleum in industry. It will still take several decades to happen in full, but the strategic usefulness of oil reserves is dwindling quickly — take it from someone who lives in Canada, which must exploit its oil sands within the next decade or risk missing their profitability entirely.

Nuclear tech continues to roll out in spite of the Fukushima disaster, mostly to cut carbon emissions. More and more homeowners and even communities are becoming energy-independent through solar technology, and an enormous number reside in places that now could be, with just a little investment. The US has made incredible investments in natural gas extraction (fracking) which could soon give it the freedom to reject foreign oil entirely. Countries like Spain are looking seriously at geothermal to power whole cities, and Lockheed even thickened the plot by coyly claiming that fusion power is just around the corner.

The fact is that oil no longer powers the most disruptive and defining technologies of our age — smartphones and smart cars and other devices beginning with “smart” now increasingly hinge on a different keystone resource: rare earth elements (REEs). This group of 17 chemically similar substances is necessary for the medical, industrial, and communications, and personal computing industries. Every Toyota Prius carries about 10 pounds of lanthanum in its advanced batteries, while everything from hard drives to headphones require a small amount of neodymium. Europium goes into many LEDs and touchscreen displays, while erbium is used in fiber-optic cables to help maintain signal strength. We even use the rare earth metal cerium to lower auto emissions.

Like oil, and despite the name, rare earth elements are actually dispersed quite widely around the globe. The problem is that they don’t tend to be concentrated in small areas of high purity, like gold or crude oil itself, but spread over a large area like natural gas. The elements have a lot of chemical similarities and thus they’re difficult to separate out of composite minerals and ores like monazite and bastn�site. Malaysia recently built itself into an REE processing center, and huge amounts of raw rare earth-containing ores regularly traverse the globe so they can be separated into pure, usable substances.

Since they only occur in composites, securing a supply of one REE tends to secure a supply of others as well. As we saw with oil, another multi-product resource, this can stymie innovation by driving companies to hard-sell a product they probably wouldn’t bother to collect all on its own; we would almost certainly have a wider array of non petroleum-based plastics today if petroleum hadn’t always been available in such freakishly large quantities. Worse, once used to build a device, REEs are notoriously difficult to recycle, adding to costs, waste, and pollution.

Amazingly, production of rare earth elements is even more centralized than production of oil; up until the late 2000s, China provided more than 97% of the world’s rare earths, at which point it limited supply and, allegedly in retaliation for its actions in the South China Sea, actually banned Japan from purchasing REEs altogether. This forced the US to re-invest in rare earth mining, and today China only accounts for about 70% of global supply. This has been hailed by some as a sign that rare earth elements are of little strategic importance — but don’t believe it.

First of all, to control 70% of the supply of anything as central to the global economy as REEs is to have an enormous amount of power. More to the point, the vast majority of the gain against China’s production came from reopening a single Californian mine called Mountain Pass, which does not produce yttrium or any heavy rare earths in large quantities. This mine actually existed before the Chinese strong-arming began, but it was previously shut down because it couldn’t compete with the Eastern behemoth in terms of total production or pricing — but the US had no choice but to re-open it. You can’t re-re-open a mine, and the next time we need a major infusion of REEs, it won’t be nearly so easily or quickly available.