In La Tribune 03/02/2025
It’s a small event in the world of critical metals. A US company in Colorado has refined for the first time earth ore from a Texas deposit.
USA Rare Earths group is vertically integrated from mining to permanent magnets. The Round Top lanthanide mine in Texas is rich in heavy rare earths, dysprosium, terbium, etc., and will probably be producing within 12 and 18 months. At the same time, the company has invested in a processing plant in Colorado. This has just refined a test batch of Texas ore into rare earth oxides, and its Oklahoma metallurgical plant has produced permanent magnets for the first time.
China used to dominate rare-earth production, but now it controls only 60%, and there’s no doubt that this new US breakthrough will help to further rebalance the market.
Meanwhile, mining exploration is regularly discovering or confirming major rare earth deposits. Round Top in Texas will be a major mine not only for heavy rare earths, but also for gallium, beryllium and lithium. While less than 20% of the deposit has been explored, the size of the resources at Halleck Creek in Wyoming puts this site in 4th place worldwide outside China, on a par with Fen in Norway, while Per Geijer in Sweden is smaller. Several other very large-scale projects have been confirmed in Canada. Australia’s Lynas, the world’s leading producer outside China, continues to repatriate its refining line from Malaysia to Kalgoorie-Boulder, close to its fast-expanding Mt Weld mine, and to build another refining plant in the USA. Vietnam and Brazil have yet to show the full extent of their mineral resources, and Chile is investing in the extraction of rare earths from its mine tailings. Greenland has the world’s largest deposits outside China; alas, Denmark made nothing of them, but that’s not why Donald Trump wants to « buy » this country.
Given the increase in supply and the anticipation of new production, the benchmark price for rare earths is divided by three compared with 2022.
All in all, this is further confirmation that « rare metals », which do not exist, were a fake news, and that rare earths are not rare… except in Europe.
Unlike the rest of the world, intoxicated by the « rare metals » hoax, European metallurgical reindustrialization is slow. Scandinavia’s major rare-earth mining discoveries are still pending, while resources and occurrences in Germany, Spain, France, Greece, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, the Czech Republic and the Balkans remain little explored. Although France used to be the world leader in rare earths thanks to the Rhodia plant in La Rochelle, founded in 1948, the latter has definitively lost its grandeur as a result of the country’s deindustrialization policy. Europe’s desire to produce permanent magnets for the Green Deal is real, but how can we achieve palpable sovereignty without our own minerals?
The question is no longer where tomorrow’s rare earths will come from – they’re everywhere – but how many rare earths will we really need in the future. As was the case for nickel and cobalt before the advent of nickel- and cobalt-free electric vehicle batteries, current consumption prospects appear to be overestimated. Sovereignty is not to be sought in hoaxes, but in production, substitution and technical progress.