| ISSUE 011 · MATERIALS, CAPACITY, CONVERSION | |
| Every trade desk can quote the aluminium tariff: 50 percent, in force from 4 June 2025 under Section 232. Ask who in the United States smelts the magnesium that goes into the alloys. Nobody has since 2022. | |
| In 2025, by US Geological Survey estimate, 69 percent of American primary magnesium consumption went into castings, mostly automotive, 15 percent into aluminium alloys for packaging and transport, and 9 percent into desulfurising iron and steel. Announcing a Defense Production Act award in February 2024, the Pentagon described magnesium as a precursor for metals essential to defence systems. Chemical & Engineering News noted at the time that flares and fuses often contain it. | |
| Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026, published by USGS in February, estimates world primary magnesium production in 2025 at 1.1 million tonnes, 950,000 of them in China. The only US smelter, drawing brine from the Great Salt Lake, stopped in 2022; its operator filed for Chapter 11 in September 2025. USGS still lists 64,000 tonnes of American smelter capacity against zero output, and net import reliance above 75 percent. | |
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| PLATE · MOUNT WELD OPEN PIT, WESTERN AUSTRALIA, 2011 |
| The New York Times reported on 23 September 2010 that Chinese customs had stopped rare earth shipments to Japan, during the dispute over a trawler captain Japan had detained that month. China’s commerce ministry denied any ban the same day. By the figures of Japan’s state metals agency, JOGMEC, Japan was then taking about 90 percent of its rare earths from China. |
| JOGMEC and the trading house Sojitz put $250 million in loans and equity into Lynas in 2011, a producer that mines at Mount Weld in Western Australia and refines in Kuantan, Malaysia. JOGMEC data cited by the Times in December 2025 show China’s share of Japanese supply down to 60 to 70 percent. The Center for Strategic and International Studies reads the record less generously: China still supplied 63 percent of Japan’s rare earth metal imports in 2024. |
| Held cargoes and a denial were enough to make the dependence visible. Unwinding it took a state lender, one producer outside China and a decade and a half, and the Chinese share remains above 60 percent. Where one country holds the smelters, the first money goes to a single outside producer and the share moves by the decade. |
| PLATE · SMACKOVER BRINE TO ELECTROLYTIC MAGNESIUM, LAFAYETTE COUNTY, ARKANSAS | |||
| On 16 June 2026 Magrathea and TETRA Technologies, through their Arkansas Magnesium joint venture, announced primary magnesium metal above 99.9 percent purity, meeting the ASTM B92 specification, made by electrolysis from Smackover brine drawn from TETRA acreage in Lafayette County, Arkansas. The two companies finalised the joint venture’s operating agreement in March 2026. | |||
| Defense Production Act Title III money came first: $19.6 million from the Pentagon to Magrathea, announced in February 2024, with milestones tied to purity at each stage of scale-up. The department tested a pilot sample in July 2025 and confirmed it met the project’s purity target. Engineering is under way on a Commercial Phase 1 plant. | |||
| Its site is TETRA’s Evergreen Project near Stamps, a bromine plant under construction. TETRA holds more than 40,000 acres of brine leases in Arkansas. | |||
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| Every supply figure carries a date and a source in the text. Not a footnote. In the sentence. | |||
| FREE. NO STOCK PICKS. NO PREDICTIONS. | |||
| Nothing here is investment advice. No company is named as an investment. |
