October 1942. Eastern Tennessee.

Families across a quiet valley came home to find eviction notices on their doors. The Army had bought 60,000 acres of their farmland — churches, schoolhouses, and all. They had weeks to get out. No explanation. No appeal.

Within months, a secret city rose behind military fences. Factories the size of football fields. A power grid that drew more power than all of New York City. Seventy-five thousand workers poured in. Most of them had no idea what they were building.

They were refining uranium. The metal was too important — and too dangerous — to leave in civilian hands. So the Army put it behind its own gates. They called the place Oak Ridge.

Last Thursday, the Pentagon did something it hasn't done since that era.

The U.S. Army signed deals with four companies to build critical minerals plants on military bases across the country. REalloys will build a heavy rare earth separation facility at the Tooele Army Depot in Utah. Titan Mining gets graphite at Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas. ioneer will handle boron and Energy X will handle lithium at other bases. It's the first time the U.S. military has ever put commercial mineral refining inside its own fence line.

But the rare earths coming out of Tooele won't hit the open market. They'll be stockpiled on-site for military use. The Army acts as landlord, and REalloys pays rent — some of it as upgrades to the base. No taxpayer subsidies. The deal moved by direct executive order, cutting through the years of review that have stalled other rare earth projects cold.

Tooele won't refine neodymium or praseodymium — the light rare earths that get the attention. It will separate the heavies — dysprosium and terbium. Those are the metals inside the magnets in every precision-guided missile and jet engine. China controls more than 90% of their global supply, and the heavies are the ones the Pentagon cannot afford to lose.

Which is why the calendar matters. China's MOFCOM suspension — the one-year pause on its harshest export controls — expires November 10. That's 134 days away. If the pause ends, any product made outside China with Chinese rare earths could need an export license from Beijing. Every SmCo magnet in a guided missile. Every NdFeB motor in a military drone. All of it controlled by one government.

The Army isn't waiting. It's building the backup behind its own walls. Oak Ridge went from bare farmland to a working city in under three years. REalloys says development at Tooele could start in 2027, with initial operations targeted by 2028. The question is whether that's fast enough — because November comes first.

G7 leaders agreed at Evian to cap their dependence on any single supplier of rare earths and permanent magnets at 60% by 2030. Right now, China accounts for over 90% of global rare earth refining. Getting to 60 means building enough refining outside China — in four years — to replace a third of what the West now buys. After 2030, the target drops to 50%. France held the G7 chair this year and made this its top issue, bringing in the IEA to run a new tracking platform. It's the hardest number the G7 has ever put on this problem.

Chile's Biobío region gave full approval to the environmental study for Aclara Resources' Penco Module on June 9. It's a rare earth deposit in ionic clay — the same geology China uses for its heavy rare earth mines in the south. Aclara is building the project with Grupo CAP, Chile's largest steelmaker, and uses a method designed to cut water use and recycle chemicals on-site. Chile has never produced rare earths before. If Penco reaches production, it becomes one of the few heavy rare earth sources in the Western Hemisphere — and the only one in South America outside Brazil.

A new EU-funded study found that Europe throws away enough critical minerals every year to cover more than half its own demand by 2050. The catch is it has to actually collect and recycle the material. Old phones, spent batteries, scrapped wind turbines, even demolished buildings all contain rare earths, lithium, and cobalt that now get shipped to China or sent to landfill. The FutuRaM project mapped this "urban mine" across 31 countries and found that by 2050, recovery systems could enable Europe to recover up to 5.7 million tonnes of critical raw materials annually. The EU is already moving to ban exports of rare earth magnet scrap to keep those materials at home.

Ivan Murphy, Executive Chairman of Harena Rare Earths
June 2026

SAMARIUM

Samarium-cobalt magnets go into guided missiles, fighter jets, and satellites — anywhere a magnet has to work at extreme heat. They were first made at a U.S. Air Force research lab in the 1960s, years before neodymium magnets existed. SmCo handles temperatures up to 300°C — nearly four times what standard NdFeB can take — and resists corrosion. That makes it the go-to magnet for weapons and aerospace systems where failure is not an option. Neodymium trades at $245 per kilogram and gets most of the attention. But the real cost of SmCo comes from the cobalt and the plants needed to shape the finished magnet. Most of those plants are still in China. The Army's new Tooele plant is built to change that.

Terbium oxide hit $4,028 per kilogram, doubling since January. It's now the most expensive rare earth on the board — more than sixteen times the price of neodymium. Demand from EV and defense buyers who need terbium to keep magnets stable at high temperatures keeps pushing the price higher. Since Jan 2020, terbium is up over 500%.

— Strategic Metals Invest

MP Materials filed suit in a Texas court accusing USA Rare Earth of stealing "grain boundary diffusion" formulas through a former employee. MP says the employee shared proprietary magnet-making data that USAR then passed to a third-party tech company. Both stocks fell 3% on the news. USAR has not responded to questions about the suit.

— Mining.com

Ramaco Resources and REalloys signed a non-binding offtake deal for rare earth carbonate from Ramaco's Brook Mine in Wyoming. The rare earths come from coal mining byproducts — a waste stream that the DOE and several startups are now targeting as a domestic supply source. REalloys could take up to 20% of future Brook Mine output.

— Mining.com

China suspended its October 2025 rare earth export controls for one year as part of the Xi-Trump trade deal. That pause runs out November 10. If it lapses without renewal, products made with Chinese rare earths anywhere in the world will need an export license from Beijing — even if they're assembled in Japan, Germany, or the U.S.

— Rare Earth Exchanges