| ISSUE 009 · MATERIALS, CAPACITY, CONVERSION | |
| Everyone is counting rare earths. The Interior Department led with them when it published the final 2025 List of Critical Minerals on 7 November 2025. Fluorspar sits on the same list, sixteenth alphabetically, between europium and gadolinium. It is calcium fluoride, and it is where industrial fluorine chemistry begins. | |
| Metallurgical grade goes into steel furnaces as a flux. Acid grade, above 97 percent calcium fluoride, is reacted with sulfuric acid to make hydrogen fluoride, which the US Geological Survey in February 2026 called the primary feedstock for virtually all fluorine-bearing chemicals: refrigerants, fluoropolymers, aluminium and uranium processing, and the cleaning and etching steps in semiconductor manufacture. The USGS records domestic hydrogen fluoride production from fluorspar in Louisiana and Texas. The Geismar, Louisiana plant has been operated since 30 October 2025 by Solstice Advanced Materials, spun out of Honeywell. | |
| Significant American fluorspar mine production has not been reported since 1995, and the United States was 100 percent net import reliant in 2025, on USGS figures published in February 2026. Imports between 2021 and 2024 came 64 percent from Mexico and 10 percent from China. The same two pages estimate American fluorspar mine employment at fifteen people, and record the government stockpile as none. | |
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| PLATE · COAL TAR DISTILLATION AND TNT SUPPLY, BRITAIN, 1915 TO 1917 |
| Britain in 1915 could press shell bodies faster than it could fill them. The filling was high explosive, and high explosive meant TNT, which is nitrated toluene. British toluene came from coal tar, recovered as a byproduct of coke ovens and gas works. The Chemical Engineer, in its account of the Explosives Supply Department, records that even with yields pushed to the maximum and the dye industry denied coal tar entirely, the total toluene available fell short of what the army required. |
| Lord Moulton, Director-General of Explosives Supply, proposed cutting TNT with ammonium nitrate and carried Kitchener over military objection. The Royal Arsenal at Woolwich worked up the binary mixtures, amatol, to stretch the TNT that existed, as a 2024 paper in Royal Society Open Science sets out. The Ministry of Munitions itself was constituted by the Munitions of War Act of 2 July 1915. The Commons was told on 28 June 1917 that British high explosive capacity in March 1917 stood at twenty-eight times the March 1915 figure. |
| The episode is remembered as a shortage of shells. The binding constraint sat two layers upstream, in the coal tar. Substitution at the chemistry layer arrived first, and new supply took years. American hydrogen fluoride has its own substitution route already running: the USGS estimated 45,000 tons of fluorosilicic acid recovered from three phosphoric acid plants in 2025, equivalent to about 73,000 tons of fluorspar grading 100 percent calcium fluoride. |
| PLATE · FLUORSPAR LUMPS AND FLOTATION PLANTS, DELTA, UTAH | |||
| The Defense Logistics Agency awarded contract SP8000-26-D-0002 on 29 December 2025 to Ares Strategic Mining, for acid-grade fluorspar for the National Defense Stockpile. It was posted on SAM.gov on 13 January 2026 and announced by the company on 20 January 2026 at a proposed value of $168,938,267.30 against a five-year ceiling of $250 million. The guaranteed purchase under it is $2 million. | |||
| The ore comes from the Lost Sheep Mine in the Spor Mountain district of Juab County, Utah, trucked to a processing site at Delta. The company said on 18 August 2026 that mined ore had begun entering the Metallurgical Lumps Plant there, which makes metspar for steel furnaces. Acid grade is made in the adjacent flotation plant. | |||
| Ares told securities regulators that as at 30 June 2026 construction and installation of both the lumps plant and the flotation plant remained in progress, and that commissioning had not commenced. The flotation plant arrived at Delta on 12 December 2024, shipped from Asia and routed through the port of Long Beach. | |||
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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. |
