| ISSUE 021 · MATERIALS, CAPACITY, CONVERSION | |
| The ammunition ledger counts shell bodies, TNT and propellant charges, each with a tonnage and a target date. Nobody keeps a line for the material that starts the sequence. That material is black powder, and a US patent on substitute igniters gives its generally accepted optimum as 75 percent potassium nitrate, 15 percent charcoal and 10 percent sulfur. | |
| Voyager Technologies, which owns the only American plant, listed its military jobs on 8 September 2026: the delay element in fuzes, the ignition charge in artillery and mortar rounds, grenades, signals, blank charges and primers. The Pentagon's release of 10 August 2022 called it a propellant for artillery, firearms, rocketry and pyrotechnics, with commercial uses in model rockets, muzzleloaders and fireworks. | |
| That plant, GOEX Industries at Camp Minden, Louisiana, stopped producing after an explosion on 18 June 2021, and its then owner, Hodgdon, announced its closure on 28 September 2021. On 10 August 2022 the Department of Defense committed $3.5 million under DPA Title III to reopen it, against a project cost of $5.3 million and a stated restart within two years. "There is no other domestic source and no substitute material," Voyager president Matt Kuta said in the September statement. | |
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| PLATE · WASTEWATER EVAPORATION PONDS, IVANPAH DRY LAKE, CALIFORNIA, 1990S |
| Mountain Pass, in the California Mojave, was the only rare earth mining and processing site in the United States. Its wastewater pipeline to Ivanpah Dry Lake produced at least 60 separate spills between 1984 and 1998, Science News reported. The separation plant shut in 1998, and mining was suspended in 2002 when the tailings pond reached capacity, according to The Northern Miner. |
| Molycorp bought the site from Chevron in 2008 and rebuilt it while China tightened its rare earth export quotas, the measures the United States, the European Union and Japan took to the WTO on 13 March 2012. On 25 June 2015 Molycorp filed for Chapter 11. Its quarterly report cited soft prices, depressed demand and "the delayed ramp-up of operations at Mountain Pass." |
| Minden has the same structure. A sole domestic producer stops after its own incidents, and a restart is financed once the dependency is noticed. The result then turns on how long the ramp takes and who buys the output while it does. |
| PLATE · BLACK POWDER CORNING MILL, CAMP MINDEN, LOUISIANA | |||
| DuPont built the Belin Works at Moosic, Pennsylvania, in 1908. By the 1960s it was the only black powder plant in the United States, and in 1972 DuPont sold it to Gearhart-Owen and left the business, according to the Hagley Museum and Library. GOEX moved production to Camp Minden, the former Louisiana Army Ammunition Plant, in 1997. | |||
| Estes Energetics bought the assets from Hodgdon in early 2022; Voyager announced its purchase of Estes on 20 November 2025. The Army's modernization contract of August 2024 came to $8,617,813, with one bid received. After an explosion on 30 October 2024, the Louisiana National Guard said no one was injured. | |||
| On 8 September 2026 Voyager said the plant was producing again. Among the inputs it says federal investment will bring under domestic sourcing is charcoal, a primary component of the powder itself. | |||
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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. |
