The road to China-free supply chains for rare earths is long

Building China-free supply chains is tough. Sometimes it means dealing with lizards that don’t have legs and sands that are radioactive.

- Jon Emont

That is the case with making rare-earth magnets—a powerful piece of tech that is as crucial to jet fighters and wind turbines as it is to smartphones and electric cars.

For decades, China has dominated every step in the process of making rare-earth magnets. It is the only nation capable of producing the magnets from start to finish at scale.

Now, with demand growing for China-free magnets in the U.S. and Europe, a diverse group of companies are stitching together globe-spanning supply chains and encountering all kinds of obstacles as they attempt to break China’s grip on the market.

An Australian company has spent years relocating protected pink-tailed reptiles from its rare-earths mine site to unlock a new source of the minerals outside China. Meanwhile, the company is trying to find other sources of rare earths, from countries such as Vietnam and the U.S., for its processing plant in South Korea.

On the other side of the world, the hunt for rare earths has led a Canadian company to use ones that have been extracted from the mineral-rich sands in the U.S. state of Georgia. The rare earths there had to be brought to Utah to be stripped of radioactive uranium, and then shipped to Estonia to be ready for magnets.

Two-thirds of the world’s rare-earth mining occurs in China. It processes around 85% of the ore, and it builds more than 90% of the magnets.

The new ventures can’t deliver prices as low as China’s. But the companies say some Western automakers and defense manufacturers are willing to pay more for magnets largely untouched by China.

“There’s a massive gap that needs to be filled in," said Rahim Suleman, chief executive of Neo Performance Materials, the Canadian company seeking to make a magnet supply chain outside China.