| ISSUE 026 · MATERIALS, CAPACITY, CONVERSION | |
| Structural beams, automotive sheet, armor plate and naval hull steel share one input that rarely appears in capacity debates. The USGS 2023 Minerals Yearbook, released in January 2026, attributes more than 90 percent of global manganese consumption to steelmaking. A 2017 USGS professional paper puts the requirement at 6 to 9 kilograms per ton of steel, and the 2026 Mineral Commodity Summaries find no satisfactory substitute for manganese in its major applications. | |
| The USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries for 2026 report that the United States has not produced manganese ore containing 20 percent or more manganese since 1970. The same summary puts net import reliance, measured on a manganese-content basis, at 100 percent in each year from 2021 through 2025, with ore imports from 2021 to 2024 coming from Gabon at 64 percent, South Africa at 24 percent and Mexico at 12 percent. Manganese remained on the final 2025 List of Critical Minerals, which USGS published in the Federal Register on November 7, 2025. | |
| The National Defense Stockpile’s fiscal 2025 Annual Materials Plan listed potential acquisition of 5,000 tonnes of electrolytic manganese metal, the high-purity refined form, and no fiscal 2026 plan had been released by February 2026, according to the USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries for 2026. The Congressional Research Service reported that as of March 2023 the stockpile held $1.3 billion in total assets and, as of April 2023, mitigated less than half of estimated shortfalls for military requirements. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, appropriated $2 billion to the National Defense Stockpile Transaction Fund under Section 20004. | |
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| PLATE · Manganese ore awaiting shipment, South Africa, 1951 |
| When the Korean War began in June 1950, the Controlled Materials Plan from the Second World War had lapsed and the government had no information on available critical materials, according to a US Army War College case study on readiness for the Korean conflict. Congress enacted the Defense Production Act on September 8, 1950, authorizing loans and purchase commitments for strategic mineral development. A 2008 National Research Council report records that Congress also appropriated $2.9 billion for stockpiling over a six-month period following the invasion. |
| A 1951 State Department document placed manganese ore in Class VIII: “Materials are being used to meet military, AEC and essential defense supporting production almost exclusively, thus only slight additions to the stockpile are possible.” In November 1951 the Secretary of State warned the embassy in South Africa that South African manganese ore shipments to the United States that year would fall below the 1950 volume, with a backlog of unshipped ore still in South Africa. The year closed at about 317,000 tonnes, against about 435,000 tonnes in 1950, according to a State Department editorial note in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954. Seventy-four years later, the same stockpile’s fiscal 2025 plan carried authority to dispose of 292,000 tonnes of metallurgical-grade manganese ore and 18,000 tonnes of high-carbon ferromanganese, according to the USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries for 2026. Disposal authority sets a ceiling; it does not record sales. |
| PLATE · Eramet Marietta, Marietta, Ohio | |||
| Eramet Marietta Inc. in Marietta, Ohio, is the only producer of refined ferromanganese in the United States, according to the company. The company reports that the plant had about 170 employees and produced 110,000 tonnes of manganese alloys in 2021, serving about 60 North American steel customers. Its nominal capacity is 120,000 tonnes of manganese alloys a year, according to an Eramet recruitment listing. | |||
| Eramet Marietta says the plant processes ore from several sources, including a Gabon mine operated by Comilog, an Eramet sister company. The ore is barged to the Ohio River site and smelted into ferromanganese and silicomanganese in electric arc furnaces and an oxygen refining unit. Union Carbide built the facility in 1952 and sold it to Elkem Metals in 1981, and Eramet bought it in 1999, the company says. | |||
| Eramet announced in 2000 that it would close the plant’s manganese metal facilities by year end, citing excess global capacity and falling prices, according to the USGS Mineral Industry Surveys for July 2000. The same report named Kerr-McGee Chemical’s plant in Hamilton, Mississippi, as the only other domestic producer of manganese metal at the time. Felman Production in Letart, West Virginia, which WCHS-TV describes as one of two US silicomanganese producers, notified WorkForce West Virginia on July 13, 2026, that it would halt production for at least six months, shut down its furnaces toward the end of August and lay off 98 employees, according to the company’s WARN notice. | |||
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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. |
