While Europe is trying to turn away from Russian energy resources, Turkey may have solved another major problem: the continent's near-complete dependence on China for rare-earth elements to make the transition to clean energy.

This month, Ankara announced the discovery of a huge deposit of rare-earth elements that, once processed, could be used to make electric cars, wind turbines and solar panels.

Turkish geologists estimated that the area near the northwestern city of Eskisehir contains about 694 million tons of rare earth metals, second only to China's 800 million tons.

While Turkey believes its new deposit is enough to meet the world's needs for 1,000 years, the lack of clarity about the grade or quality of the metallic elements has many analysts scratching their necks.

"If they're claiming such a big deposit, they would done a lot of drilling and would know what the grade was," Christopher Ecclestone, a principal and mining strategist at the UK research house Hallgarten & Company, told DW.

David Merriman, director of rare-earth element research at the global consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, said the Turkish deposit probably contains rare-earth elements, lanthanum and whey, which are "currently in significant abundance," rather than "the rarest type in demand."

British geologist Kathryn Goodenough recently told Wired magazine that Turkish deposits probably contain about 14 million tons of rare-earth element oxides, less than a third of China's estimated resources.

China currently supplies about four-fifths of the world's rare-earth materials and is responsible for about 98 percent of the European Union's rare-earth magnet imports - about 16,000 tons per year.

The largest operators in China's supply chain are state-owned and/or heavily subsidized, which keeps the cost of Asian-made magnets about a third lower than their European counterparts.

China's monopoly has raised concerns in Brussels, Berlin and Washington that rare earth elements could be used by Beijing as leverage in trade and geopolitical disputes.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said this week that Washington is seeking to reduce its overreliance on Chinese rare earth elements, accusing Beijing of using "coercion to pressure a number of countries whose behavior they have disapproved of."

Two years ago, the EU created the European Raw Materials Alliance to encourage member states to diversify sources of primary raw materials, including rare earth metals, from third countries.

If the deposit is as valuable as Ankara claims, it will give Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan additional leverage over his NATO allies and help prop up Turkey's ailing economy, which has limped from one currency crisis to another since 2018.

But this is not the first time Erdogan's statements have provoked skepticism. Two years ago, Ankara announced the discovery of a huge natural gas field in the Black Sea, which the Turkish leader said would reduce the country's huge energy import bill.

Analysts doubt that the roughly 320 billion cubic meters (11.3 trillion cubic feet) of gas reserves will be as large as originally predicted and that the gas field will be operational by 2023 as promised.

The strategic importance to West is such that many other potential rare earth projects have exaggerated their potential in recent years in an attempt to boost investor interest.

Ecclestone said that during the last rare earth elements boom a decade ago, "many of the big deposits discovered were too low grade, too isolated or the metallurgy was wrong and that's why they stayed in the ground". Merriman said Wood Mackenzie now tracks about 150 rare earth element projects around the world that are in the mining phase. Of those, 100 are at the processing stage.

Currently, there is only one rare earth element processing plant in Europe in Estonia and a very limited number of magnet manufacturers, the largest of which is Germany's Vacuumschmelze.

But the market is changing rapidly, and in a decade China may no longer have the same dead grip, Ecclestone predicts.

"China has already lost the advantage in heavy rare earths [which make up nearly half of the 17 rare earth metals], it now has to import those," he said.

Merriman said that despite efforts by the U.S., Britain and Australia to support their investments in rare earths, China's dominance is likely to continue.