Rare Earths 101 Part 2 : The Path To Rare Earth Independence

Brownfield beats Greenfield. Old Fashioned Chemistry beats Every “Novel”  Flowsheet. And the West is much Closer to Rare-Earth Independence than the Doom-Loop narrative Suggests 

Amanda Van Dyke 

 

 

In Part I, I walked through what rare earths actually are, where they sit on the periodic table, why they matter, and the complex physical chain that turns ugly grey rock into the permanent magnets inside every EV motor, wind turbine, F-35, cruise missile, MRI machine, and iPhone speaker on the planet. The core argument was that mining is the easy bit. The strategic chokepoint is midstream — cracking, leaching, separation, oxide, metal, alloy, magnet — and inside that chokepoint the real chokepoint is separation, because rare-earth ions are so chemically similar to one another that pulling them apart is closer to distilling whisky a thousand times over than it is to anything a normal metallurgist does in a smelter.

Part II is about who figured out how to do that, who lost it, who stole it, who weaponised it, and — the part almost nobody in the mainstream press wants to write — who is quietly rebuilding it. Because the honest read of where we are in mid-2026 is not that the West is decades behind. It is that America and Japan already know how to do this, are already doing it, have already funded the businesses that will do more of it, and are three to five years — not thirty — away from meaningful rare-earth independence.

Brownfield beats greenfield. That is the whole argument. Let me show you why.

A Two-Hundred-Year Puzzle: The Science Was Always Ours

Rare earths are a European discovery and an American industry. Both facts have been quietly wiped from the story China now tells about itself.

In 1787, a Swedish army lieutenant called Carl Axel Arrhenius picked up an unusually heavy black rock in a quarry at Ytterby, a village outside Stockholm. He thought it might contain tungsten. He was wrong. The sample went to a Finnish chemist called Johan Gadolin, who in 1792 worked out that roughly 38 percent of its mass was a completely unknown “earth” — an oxide — which was eventually named yttria. Four of the seventeen rare earths — yttrium, ytterbium, terbium, and erbium — take their name from that one village. Gadolinite the mineral itself, and gadolinium, were named for the chemist.

That is where the story begins, and it also foreshadows the problem that would define the industry for the next two centuries. The rare earths sit in a single row at the bottom of the periodic table, they nearly all carry a +3 charge, and their ionic radii differ only very slightly from one neighbour to the next. Which means they behave almost identically in solution. Almost. And the entire commercial rare-earth industry — every single tonne of separated oxide humanity produces — lives inside that “almost.”

Nineteenth-century chemists relied on fractional crystallisation to tease the elements apart. The technique worked, technically, but it was so brutal that one classical separation reportedly required as many as 40,000 discrete operations. It took Americans, working in American national labs on American government contracts, to solve the problem at industrial scale.

At Ames Laboratory in Iowa in the 1940s and 1950s, Frank Spedding — a Manhattan Project veteran — developed ion-exchange displacement chromatography that reached pilot scale by 1953. At Oak Ridge and Argonne through the 1950s, Donald Peppard and Boyd Weaver went further and developed liquid-liquid solvent extraction — a continuous, scalable, exquisitely precise method that runs an aqueous stream and an organic stream in opposite directions through dozens or hundreds of mixer-settler stages, exploiting tiny differences in how each rare earth partitions between the two phases. Every commercial rare-earth separation plant on Earth today, whether it is in Baotou or Mountain Pass, is built on that American mid-century chemistry. This is what Quinton Hennigh meant in our interview when he said the technology is not a mystery, it is not lost, and it is not Chinese: the blueprints are in grandpa’s drawer.

America then did what America used to do with strategic industries. It built the plant. From the early 1950s through the mid-1980s, Mountain Pass in California — operated by Molycorp under Union Oil — was the single most important rare-earth mine in the world, and for much of that period supplied roughly 60 percent of global output. The killer app was europium, the red phosphor that made colour television possible. Former Molycorp CEO Mark Smith put it plainly in an interview: “Every single colour television that was made in the world had europium from the Mountain Pass deposit.” That is the industry America built and then let slip. Not through bad luck. Through choice.

China’s Great Move: Buy the Technology, Then Perfect It at Home

China did not out-innovate the West on rare earths. It out-strategised us. It recognized how important rare earths were to electronic motors and that electronics were at the heart of almost all modern technological innovation. The saw the choke point and how owning it was a strategic advantage. They used patient, state-directed accumulation of tacit capability behind a screen of infant-industry protection, funded by whatever Western partners were naive enough to hand over the keys. Rare earths condense the entire story into a single sector.

Start with the geology, because it matters. China sits on two genuinely world-class rare-earth resource types. Bayan Obo, in Inner Mongolia, was identified as an iron deposit in 1927; its rare-earth content was recognised in 1936. It is now the largest known REE deposit on Earth. Then, in the southern provinces — Jiangxi, Guangdong — China has the ionic-clay deposits the premium source for the heavy rare earths — dysprosium, terbium, europium — that are precisely the ones the West is now scrambling for.

Deng Xiaoping understood exactly what he was sitting on. During his 1992 Southern Tour, he reportedly delivered the line that has since been chiselled onto every rare-earth pitch deck on Earth: “The Middle East has its oil, China has rare earths.” The historian Julie Klinger has rightly cautioned against reading the quote as evidence of a fifty-year masterplan drawn up on a napkin in Yingtan station. But Deng did not need to hand-draft a masterplan. He needed to point at a resource, tell the system it mattered, and let the state machinery he inherited from Mao do the rest. Which is exactly what happened.

The real coup was Magnequench. In 1986, General Motors opened a plant in Anderson, Indiana producing neodymium-iron-boron magnets — the strongest permanent magnets ever invented, co-discovered in 1982 by John Croat at GM and Masato Sagawa at Sumitomo Special Metals in Japan. In 1995, in one of the most staggering acts of strategic self-harm in modern American industrial history, GM sold Magnequench for $70 million to a consortium that included the China National Non-Ferrous Metals Import & Export Corporation and San Huan New Material. Within a few years the Indiana operations had been physically dismantled and shipped to China. Not just the intellectual property. The entire plant. The bonded-magnet know-how. The equipment. The alloy recipes. All of it. Bill Clinton’s administration waved it through under a Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States review that has aged about as well as anything else from that era.

That is the pattern. American technology, American plants, American operators — sold, transferred, replicated, undercut. By the mid-2000s, China was making the magnets. By the late 2000s, it controlled almost all the separated oxides that fed them. By 2010, it was ready to use that position as a weapon.

The 2010 Warning Shot Nobody Heeded

In September 2010, a Chinese fishing trawler rammed a Japanese Coast Guard vessel near the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. Japan detained the very drunk captain. China turned it into an international incident and stopped shipping rare earths to Japanese customers. Officially there was no embargo — China has always denied it — but industry could not get 1kg of rare earth metals in any form, prices spiked hard across the entire REE complex, and Japan received an object lesson in what it means to depend on a strategic adversary for the inputs to your entire industrial base.

To Japan’s enormous credit, they did not go back to sleep. They set up JOGMEC as the state vehicle for securing overseas mineral supply. They co-founded Japan Australia Rare Earths with Sojitz, put an initial $259 million into Lynas in Australia, and locked in a supply agreement covering up to 65 percent of Lynas’s heavy rare-earth output. They funded urban mining, recycling, substitution research, and — critically — they kept operating their small legacy separation plants at places like Nippon Yttrium in Kyushu. Japan did not forget how to do this. They stayed in the game at low volume and preserved the operator memory.

The United States, the EU, and Japan also filed a joint WTO complaint. Case DS431 was lodged in March 2012, the panel ruled against China in March 2014, the Appellate Body upheld it in August 2014, and China formally removed the offending export quotas in May 2015. The West won the case and lost the industry. By the time the ink was dry on the ruling, Molycorp — which had IPO’d in 2010 riding the price spike — had gone bankrupt. Prices collapsed on cue. Everyone went back to sleep. Hennigh described this cycle to me almost verbatim: China squeezes, prices spike, Western capital rushes in, China floods the market, prices crater, Western capital dies, and the cycle resets. It has happened twice already. April 2025’s export controls on samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium — imposed in retaliation for Trump’s tariff hike — are the third act. This time we cannot afford to fall for it again.

The Argument the Doom-Loop Narrative Keeps Missing: Brownfield Beats Greenfield

Here is where I want to break from the standard commentary, because the standard commentary is wrong. Every op-ed you read about rare earths ends with some variant of “the West is fifteen to twenty years behind and cannot catch up.” That is nonsense. It rests on the assumption that the West is starting from a standing start, and we are not.

America and Japan are not building this industry from scratch. They are turning it back on.

The science is ours. Spedding, Peppard, Weaver — American national laboratories, American publications, American blueprints. The plant chemistry is not proprietary Chinese magic; it is 1950s-and-60s American solvent extraction that has been continuously running at Nippon Yttrium in Japan, at Silmet in Estonia (which Neo Performance Materials inherited from the Molycorp wreckage), and at Mountain Pass itself for decades. The magnet technology is Sumitomo’s and GM’s — Hitachi Metals, now rebranded Proterial, still holds more than 600 NdFeB patents and litigates them aggressively. The deposits are on our side too: Mountain Pass is a producing. Brazil sits on what Hennigh called “the mother of all ionic clay deposits” at Poços de Caldas — probably bigger than anything in China, with cleaner chemistry.

What we lost was not the knowledge. It was the will. And the will is coming back at a speed that would have been unthinkable in 2020.

Look at what has actually happened in the last eighteen months:

· The US Department of Defense took a roughly 15 percent equity stake in MP Materials in July 2025, guaranteed a $110/kg NdPr price floor for a decade, and committed to buy 100 percent of the output from a new 7,000-tonne-per-year magnet plant for its first ten years. $400 million in preferred equity plus a $150 million loan. Apple followed with $500 million prepaid against recycled-magnet supply. JPMorgan and Goldman put in roughly a billion more in commercial financing.

· USA Rare Earth acquired the British metals-and-alloys company Less Common Metals for around $220 million in a deal that closed in November 2025. LCM, based in Ellesmere Port, is described by its own management as the only ex-China producer of scaled samarium, samarium-cobalt, and NdPr metal and alloy — precisely the layer of the value chain that everyone else is still trying to build. USAR now runs mine (Round Top, Texas), metal and alloy (Ellesmere Port), and is commissioning a magnet plant in Stillwater, Oklahoma targeting 10,000 tonnes a year.

· Lynas signed a binding $137 million offtake with the DoD at a $110/kg price floor in March 2026, and now has upwards of $258 million in DoD support for its Texas heavy-rare-earth facility, on top of the mature Mount Weld — Kalgoorlie — Malaysia chain that already produces most of the non-Chinese light rare earths on Earth.

· Arafura took its Nolans project to FID in May 2026 with roughly $1.2 to $1.6 billion of stapled financing from Australian, Korean, German, Canadian, and US government sources plus offtakes with Hyundai/Kia and Siemens Gamesa.

· Iluka is deep into construction on Eneabba, backed by an A$1.65 billion non-recourse loan from the Australian Government.

· Neo Performance Materials inaugurated Europe’s largest rare-earth magnet plant at Narva, Estonia in September 2025 — 1,000 tonnes ramping to 5,000, roughly 10 percent of European demand, on the site of the old Silmet separation plant that traces its lineage straight back to Molycorp.

That is not a “starting from scratch” list. That is production, expansion, and offtake. It is exactly what Hennigh said we needed to do — stop chasing novel flowsheets, take the old blueprints out of grandpa’s drawer, back the deposits that actually work, and build. And it is happening.

Hennigh’s own timeline for full ex-China supply from a standing start was five years — two to build the plant, three to run the separation circuit end-to-end. But we are not standing still. MP Materials is already producing separated oxide. Lynas is already producing separated oxide. Energy Fuels is producing roughly 1,049 tonnes a year of NdPr from White Mesa in Utah. Neo Performance is producing magnets in Estonia. USAR has metals and alloys in the UK. Meteoric commissioned its pilot in December 2025 and is targeting FID in late 2026. This is not a five-year build from zero. It is a three-to-five-year integration and scale-up on assets that already exist, backed by government offtakes that solve the price-crash problem that killed Molycorp.

That is the whole argument. Second-mover advantages — access to the means of production, trusted partnerships, deep capital markets, existing miners and refineries — and apply it specifically to rare earths, and the case is even stronger. We just have to stop losing on purpose.

The Companies Worth Watching

A quick lay of the land. This is not a stock tip sheet. It is a list of the operators who have been doing this seriously for at least a decade — or who have just made moves significant enough to earn a seat at the table.

North American Mining and Processing

MP Materials (NYSE: MP) — Mountain Pass, California. The only US mine currently producing separated rare-earth oxide at commercial scale. Building the country’s first fully integrated mine-to-magnet chain with the “Independence” magnet facility in Fort Worth. DoD is a preferred-equity holder with a $110/kg NdPr floor for ten years. Apple has prepaid $500 million against recycled-magnet supply. This is the anchor asset of the entire American rare-earth strategy.

USA Rare Earth (NASDAQ: USAR) — Round Top, Texas (heavy REE deposit) plus Stillwater, Oklahoma magnet plant, plus Less Common Metals in Ellesmere Port, UK (metals and alloys). The November 2025 LCM acquisition is arguably the single most strategically important move of the cycle — it plugs the samarium and NdPr metal/alloy gap that nobody else has closed. If they execute Stillwater commissioning through 2026, USAR becomes the first fully vertically integrated non-Chinese heavy-REE mine-to-magnet operator.

Lynas Rare Earths (ASX: LYC) — Mount Weld, WA / Kalgoorlie / Malaysia / Seadrift, Texas. The most mature non-Chinese integrated producer on Earth. Ten-plus years of operating experience. JOGMEC-backed on the Japan side, DoD-backed on the US side. Building heavy-REE separation in Texas with $258 million of DoD support and a $137 million binding offtake at a $110/kg floor. The single most important company in this story.

Energy Fuels (NYSE: UUUU) — White Mesa Mill, Utah. Repurposed a legacy uranium mill into an operating rare-earth separation facility processing monazite. Currently producing over a thousand tonnes a year of NdPr oxide with heavy-REE expansion planned for 2027. A live example of brownfield beating greenfield.

Ucore Rare Metals (TSX-V: UCU) — Louisiana Strategic Metals Complex. Commercialising its RapidSX technology with $22.4 million of DoD support. First “early production” targeted for late 2026. Worth watching if only to see whether the “novel flowsheet” argument Hennigh warns against can beat conventional solvent extraction on cost — I remain sceptical, but the DoD money speaks.

Rare Element Resources (OTCQB: REEMF) — Bear Lodge, Wyoming, plus Upton demonstration plant. Majority-owned by General Atomics’ Synchron affiliate. DOE-funded demonstration plant operational in early 2026, $553 million EXIM Letter of Interest for commercial-scale build-out.

NioCorp (NASDAQ: NB) — Elk Creek, Nebraska. Not a pure REE play — the primary economics are niobium and scandium — but a strategic-metals project with Pentagon Title III backing and a scandium-aluminium alloy partnership with Lockheed’s Skunk Works for fighter airframes.

HyProMag / Mkango Resources (AIM/TSX-V: MKA) — Birmingham, UK / Pforzheim, Germany / Dallas–Fort Worth, USA. The purest brownfield play in the industry. Uses the Hydrogen Processing of Magnet Scrap (HPMS) technology developed at the University of Birmingham to strip rare-earth magnet powder out of end-of-life hard drives, EV motors, wind turbines, and MRI machines. The Tyseley Energy Park plant opened in January 2026 as the first commercial rare-earth magnet production in Britain in 25 years, running at 100 tpa and scaling to ~300 tpa. A German sister plant is commissioned, a Texas facility is targeting H2 2027, and Siemens has already integrated recycled magnets into a SIMOTICS servomotor. No mine, no separation plant, no ionic-clay geology — just recovering material that already exists. Exactly the model Apple’s MP Materials deal is validating at scale.

Critical Metals Corp / Tanbreez

Critical Metals Corp (NASDAQ: CRML) — Tanbreez, southern Greenland. One of the largest rare-earth deposits on Earth by tonnage, and — critically — a eudialyte-hosted deposit with roughly 27–28% heavy rare earths in the basket and low uranium/thorium levels that sit below Greenland’s 100 ppm regulatory threshold, avoiding the legal wall that has stalled the neighbouring Kvanefjeld project. Critical Metals secured a non-binding $120 million Letter of Interest from the US Export-Import Bank in early 2025 and has moved into resource expansion and permitting, with first production targeted by 2026–2027. Strategically positioned inside the Trump administration’s Greenland-focused critical-minerals push, and one of the few Western deposits with genuinely heavy-REE-rich, radiogenically-clean chemistry outside the Brazilian ionic-clay complex.

Brownfield Ionic Clay: Brazil

Meteoric Resources (ASX: MEI) — Caldeira Project. The Brazilian ionic-clay deposit with 1.6 billion tonnes of resource. DFS complete mid-2026, pilot plant running since December 2025, non-binding offtakes with POSCO International, Neo Performance Materials, and Ucore. If governments are serious, this is the deposit they should be building offtake around.

Viridis Mining and Minerals (ASX: VMM) — Colossus, adjacent to Meteoric’s Caldeira. Processing facility launched May 2026, explicit strategy of selling only to Western buyers. $360-400 million project targeting steady production by end of 2028.

Aclara Resources (TSX: ARA) — Penco Module in Chile plus Carina in Brazil. Environmental approval cleared June 2026. Combined potential of roughly 12 percent of China’s official 2024 heavy-REE output.

Rainbow Rare Earths (LSE: RBW) — Uberaba, Brazil. An elegant unconventional feedstock: phosphogypsum stacks left over from fertiliser production, in JV with Mosaic. PEA complete February 2026, DFS targeted late 2026, potential 1,900 tonnes of NdPr plus 600 tonnes of a samarium-europium-gadolinium product per year from tailings.

The Australian Contingent

Iluka Resources (ASX: ILU) — Eneabba refinery, WA. A monazite-fed refinery under construction with an A$1.65 billion non-recourse Australian government loan — the largest single sovereign commitment to a Western rare-earth project. Traditional mineral-sands producer pivoting into REE separation.

Arafura Rare Earths (ASX: ARU) — Nolans, Northern Territory. Reached FID in May 2026 with roughly $1.2-1.6 billion of financing stapled from Australian, Korean, German, Canadian, and US government sources. Binding offtakes with Hyundai/Kia and Siemens Gamesa. One of the most broadly financed non-Chinese REE projects ever.

Northern Minerals (ASX: NTU) — Browns Range, WA. Xenotime with some of the highest dysprosium and terbium grades outside China. FFS completed September 2025, roughly 8 percent of global Dy/Tb demand at full production. Included in the US EXIM Bank’s $2.2 billion Australian critical-minerals package.

The Japanese Refiners and Downstream

JOGMEC — Japan’s state critical-minerals vehicle. Co-founder of Japan Australia Rare Earths, primary backer of Lynas, funder of overseas ionic-clay exploration for over a decade. The template for how a Western government should behave.

Santoku Corporation — Now part of Hitachi Metals / Proterial. Pioneered molten-salt electrolysis of rare earths and patented the Strip Casting process that is now the world standard for NdFeB alloy. Also developed a solvent-extraction route for europium in the 1960s. Decades of continuous operating experience.

Hitachi Metals / Proterial — Holds 600-plus NdFeB magnet patents worldwide including Sumitomo Special Metals’ original 1982 co-invention. Enforces them. Licenses TDK. The IP backbone of the non-Chinese magnet industry.

Nippon Yttrium — The Kyushu separation plant. Small, quiet, still running. Exactly the kind of operator memory we need to redeploy at scale.

Europe

Neo Performance Materials (TSX: NEO) — Silmet separation plant in Estonia plus the newly inaugurated Narva magnet plant, Europe’s largest. Direct corporate lineage back through Molycorp to the original Magnequench technology. €187 million of EU funding, customer commitments from Schaeffler and Bosch.

Less Common Metals — Ellesmere Port, UK, now owned by USA Rare Earths. Covered above.

Stop Managing the Decline. Start Rebuilding the Industry.

The industry our father’s generation built is being rebuilt by ours, in real time, and it is happening much faster than the doom-loop press wants to admit. Not because anyone had a sudden ideological conversion. Because China overplayed its hand in April 2025 and finally made the strategic argument un-ignorable, and because a critical mass of capital — sovereign, defence, and commercial — decided at the same time to stop losing on purpose.

The playbook is not complicated. Back the deposits that actually work — Mountain Pass, Poços de Caldas ionic clays, Mount Weld, Eneabba, Nolans. Restart the old American solvent-extraction chemistry at scale rather. Buy or bolt on the metals-and-alloys layer aggressively, as USAR just did with LCM. Preserve and expand Japan’s operator memory. Guarantee offtake and price floors so the next Chinese flood does not kill the industry the way it killed Molycorp in 2015. Recycle magnets — Apple’s MP and Hypromag are the template. And stop, for the love of God, selling any more American strategic plants and technology to the Chinese.

Three to five years is not decades. It is the length of a normal capex cycle. It is less than the time between iPhone hardware refreshes. It is entirely doable, because it does not require inventing anything new. It requires remembering what we already knew, developing the assets we already own, and executing with the commercial discipline I argued in China’s Vision of Victory and the West’s Industrial Revival.

China in 75 years into a well 100 year plan to be the dominant global superpower, and they realized that controlling the inputs of production was the key to that plan. The West has the technology the inputs and the industrial ecosystems, we just forgot they were important. The West does not need a 100 years. We need three to five, at least for rare earths, and we are already two years in. Then we need to do what we are doing with rare earths for every critical mineral on the Periodic Table.