Türkiye aims to boost its production of rare earth elements (REE) and rank among the top five producers in the world, along with becoming an important supplier for other countries, Energy and Natural Resources Minister Alparslan Bayraktar said Tuesday.

Bayraktar’s remarks came during a visit to a rare earth element management facility in the country’s central Eskişehir province.

Türkiye discovered the world’s second-largest rare earth element reserve in Eskişehir’s Beylikova district in 2022.

Bayraktar confirmed a find of around 690 million tons of ore at the site, where the first stage of a pilot plant was established.

Based on the preliminary results from the facility, Bayraktar said an industrial facility would be built to initially process 1,200 tons of ore and later to process 570,000 tons of ore and 10,000 tons of rare earth oxide annually.

If successful with this production rate, Bayraktar maintained that the country would become "one of the top five producing countries in the world."

"This will bring us to a very important point in our industry, especially for our electric vehicles, as well as in renewable energy technologies, and we will become an important supplier for many countries in the world to access these raw materials and rare earth elements," he said.

Rare earth elements, also known as "industrial gold," are a group of 17 chemical elements and are one of the indispensable elements of new technologies.

China supplies over 61% of the world’s rare earth elements and holds roughly two-thirds of scarce metals and minerals globally, according to Statista, a German online data gathering and visualization platform.