| ISSUE 008 · MATERIALS, CAPACITY, CONVERSION | |
| Everyone is counting engines. Build rates, hot section spares, order books, the backlog on military powerplants. Now tell me how much rhenium the world mined last year. Eighty-one tonnes. That is the planet. | |
| Rhenium goes into the single crystal nickel superalloys that hold their shape in the hot section of a turbine, and into the platinum-rhenium catalysts refineries use to make the high-octane components of lead-free gasoline. The US Geological Survey put superalloys at 80 percent of American end use in 2025 and petroleum-reforming catalysts at 15 percent. Its substitutes list names candidates for the catalyst, for thermocouples, for electrical contacts and for X-ray targets, and none for the superalloy above 1,000 degrees Celsius. | |
| Primary rhenium is recovered from the roasting of molybdenum concentrates out of porphyry copper deposits, so its output is set by copper and molybdenum decisions. World mine production in 2025 was an estimated 81,000 kilograms, American primary production 9,800 kilograms of that, on a net import reliance of 75 percent, all from the USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries published in February 2026. The same page records the federal rhenium stockpile in a single word: None. Rhenium joined the US critical minerals list on 7 November 2025, at 90 FR 50494. | |
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| PLATE · STRATEGIC STOCKPILE MATERIALS IN STORAGE, UNITED STATES, 1950 – 1953 |
| The Defense Production Act became law on 8 September 1950, Public Law 81-774, ten weeks into the fighting in Korea. Title III let the government pay for new productive capacity. Standing that capacity up took years. |
| A US Army War College account of the Korean mobilisation records shortages of copper, nickel, steel and aluminium slowing production, and a tungsten shortage for armour-piercing ammunition covered by drawing on the strategic stockpile. That stockpile ran under the Strategic and Critical Materials Stock Piling Act, Public Law 79-520, approved 23 July 1946, which amended an act of 7 June 1939. On 22 January 1951 Truman established the President’s Materials Policy Commission under William Paley to determine the country’s overall position on the raw materials needed for national defence. |
| The commission’s first volume appeared on 23 June 1952, seventeen months later, according to the State Department’s Office of the Historian, with four more volumes released that year. The tungsten drawn down in the meantime sat in a stockpile operating under a law passed six years before the war started. Naming a material and holding it are separate activities on separate calendars. |
| PLATE · MOLYBDENUM ROASTER AND RHENIUM RECOVERY CIRCUIT, SIERRITA, ARIZONA | |||
| American primary rhenium comes off two molybdenum roasters at Sierrita, an open pit copper and molybdenum complex 20 miles southwest of Tucson, Arizona, wholly owned by Freeport-McMoRan. On its own operations page the company notes that in addition to copper and molybdenum the mine produces rhenium, “a rare and highly valued metal”. The roasters process concentrate from Sierrita, from Freeport’s other mines, and from third parties. | |||
| Rhenium volatilises during roasting and is recovered from the flue dust and stack gases. The USGS does not measure what comes out of the circuit. Its footnote states that domestic production is based on 80 percent recovery of the rhenium estimated to be contained in the molybdenum disulfide concentrates. | |||
| The Sierrita concentrator takes 100,000 metric tons of ore a day. First claims on the ground were recorded in 1895. Underground mining began in 1907, and open pit development began in 1957. | |||
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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. |
