| ISSUE 016 · MATERIALS, CAPACITY, CONVERSION | |
| The magnets are being counted. Mountain Pass produced 2,599 tonnes of neodymium-praseodymium oxide in 2025, its operator reported on 26 February 2026, and magnet lines are going up in Texas and Oklahoma. Between the oxide and the magnet sits a furnace step: the oxide is reduced to metal, and the metal is melted with iron and boron into alloy. | |
| That alloy becomes the sintered neodymium magnet in electric vehicle motors and wind turbines. The Defense Department’s own 2019 list of rare earth uses runs to precision guided munitions, radar, sonar and jet engines. When the White House signed five Defense Production Act determinations on rare earths on 22 July 2019, one of them, No. 2019-18, covered metals and alloys alone. | |
| China produced 94 percent of the world’s sintered permanent magnets in 2024 and 91 percent of refined magnet rare earths, the International Energy Agency reported in 2025. From 1 January 2027, the DFARS provision “Restriction on the Acquisition of Certain Magnets, Tantalum, and Tungsten” bars delivery to the Pentagon of any neodymium or samarium-cobalt magnet containing material mined, refined, separated, melted or produced in China, Russia, North Korea or Iran. Executive Order 14415, signed 20 July 2026, conditions most waivers after that date on a contractor mitigation plan. | |
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| PLATE · CONTINUOUS SLAB CASTER, JAPANESE INTEGRATED STEELWORKS, 1980S |
| In 1984 Japan could continuously cast 89 percent of its steelmaking capacity. The European Community could cast 65 percent and the United States 40, according to an International Monetary Fund study published in 1987. |
| Continuous casting is the step between the furnace and the rolling mill: molten steel solidifies directly into a slab instead of being poured into ingots, reheated and rolled down. In the thirteen years to 1984, Japan added roughly 90 million net tons of continuous casting capacity and the European Community about 80 million. The United States added 30 million, half of it between 1980 and 1984. |
| American mills melted steel in quantity throughout. The conversion step directly after the melt set the cost and yield of everything rolled from it, and that step had been built out elsewhere first. Rare earth metal making holds the same position in the magnet chain, between the separated oxide and the pressing line. |
| PLATE · RARE EARTH METAL AND ALLOY PLANT, ELLESMERE PORT, CHESHIRE | |||
| Less Common Metals, founded in 1992, makes rare earth metals and alloys in a 67,000 square foot plant at Ellesmere Port, Cheshire. The plant has 2,500 tonnes a year of total alloy capacity, Fastmarkets reported in May 2025. USA Rare Earth completed its purchase of the company on 18 November 2025. | |||
| The September 2025 acquisition filing lists samarium, samarium-cobalt, neodymium-praseodymium, dysprosium, terbium, yttrium and gadolinium among its metals and alloys, along with neodymium-iron-boron strip cast alloy. The Defense Logistics Agency has awarded it a grant to expand samarium metal capacity at the Cheshire site. A 3,750 tonne a year metal and alloy plant is planned at Lacq, France, beside Carester’s 1,600 tonne a year Caremag oxide plant. | |||
| Its customers are in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan and Taiwan. | |||
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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. |
