December 1942. Tooele, Utah.

The Army needed a place to store ammunition. Not a small place. A place the size of a small city, far from the coast, safe from enemy attack.

They found it thirty-five miles southwest of Salt Lake City. The government bought 25,000 acres of dry desert land, poured concrete, and built row after row of bunkers. Tooele Ordnance Depot opened that winter. For the next eighty years, it held bombs, shells, and war reserves. It was a warehouse. A vault for the last century's weapons.

Last week, the Army gave Tooele a new job. Not storage. Refining. The depot will now host one of America's first heavy rare earth plants — the kind that turns raw ore into the dysprosium and terbium inside every guided missile, every fighter jet motor, every submarine sensor.

And Tooele is not alone. On June 25, the Army awarded long-term leases at four military installations to four companies. REalloys got Tooele for heavy rare earths. Empire State Mines, a unit of Titan Mining, got Anniston Army Depot in Alabama and Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas for graphite. Ioneer got Tooele for boron, while REalloys also got Tooele for heavy rare earths. EnergyX landed Red River Army Depot in Texas for lithium.

This has never happened before. The Army has never put commercial mineral plants on active military bases. The deals use something called an Enhanced Use Lease, a legal tool that lets the Army hand over unused land to private companies without spending a dollar of taxpayer money. The companies pay for everything — design, construction, operations. The Army gets a domestic source of metals it cannot live without.

The timing matters. A federal rule takes effect January 1, 2027, that bars the Pentagon from buying anything with Chinese rare earth content. REalloys CEO Lipi Sternheim put it plainly: the deadline is less than seven months away, and the company wants to start qualifying North American dysprosium and terbium for defense magnets now. The Tooele plant targets initial production by 2028, using feedstock from allied Canadian sources.

Why military bases? Speed. Building a chemical plant in a civilian town means years of permits, local hearings, and environmental reviews. A military installation already has cleared land, security, and a built-in customer. David Fitzgerald, the Army's Deputy Under Secretary, said this model would have been unthinkable eighteen months ago.

The depot that spent eighty years storing the last century's weapons will now refine the metals that go inside this century's. That tells you where the Army thinks the next war gets won — not in the bunker, but in the supply chain.

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The Department of Energy awarded $75 million to five projects that will try to pull rare earths and other critical minerals out of coal and coal byproducts. The grants go to the University of North Dakota, Valor Metals, CONSOL Innovations, American Resources Corporation, and Peabody Energy. Each one will build pilot-scale plants that turn coal waste into market-ready materials, including rare earth elements, germanium, gallium, and aluminum. It is part of a $275 million program announced last November. The pitch is simple: America has mountains of coal waste sitting in piles. Those piles contain metals the country currently buys from China.

GreenMet, a Washington-based firm that connects private capital to critical minerals projects, announced a $150 million processing hub in Rupert, West Virginia. The partners — Flash Metals USA, AmForge Corporation, and Greenbrier Smokeless Coal Company — will recover rare earths from coal tailings across the state. The facility is expected to create 250 jobs in Greenbrier County. GreenMet says the project is backed entirely by private money, with no state subsidies or taxpayer dollars involved. The company also says it has mineral deals to process material from Greenland, Canada, and Cameroon.

Eurostat released new trade data last week showing that EU rare earth imports climbed 17.1% in 2025 to 15,100 tonnes. The value of those imports rose even faster — up 23.2% to €124.9 million — which means prices stayed firm even as volumes grew. That is the opposite of what happened in 2024, when trade fell sharply. The rebound tracks with rising demand from EV factories, wind turbine makers, and defense firms across the continent. But the source mix barely moved. China supplied 46.8% of the EU's rare earth imports by weight, or about 7,100 tonnes. Russia came second at 25.9%. Between those two countries, nearly three-quarters of Europe's rare earths still come from places the EU considers strategic risks. Buying more does not solve the problem if you keep buying from the same place.

Dr. Jeff Waksman, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army
June 25, 2026

You hear about neodymium all the time. But most NdFeB magnets — the strongest kind on Earth — contain praseodymium, often mixed in as a cost-effective substitute for some of the neodymium. The two metals are refined together as a blend called NdPr. That blend is in your EV motor, your wind turbine, your earbuds. Praseodymium also gives welding goggles their green tint and strengthens aircraft engine alloys. The price has hit $144 per kilogram, up 50% this year. It tracks neodymium almost exactly because the two are inseparable in the ore — mine one and you always get the other. China refines most of the world's NdPr. Which is why the Army just opened Tooele.

Greenland rejected a licence renewal for Energy Transition Minerals' Kuannersuit deposit — one of the largest rare earth and uranium deposits on the planet. The government cited its ban on uranium mining, since uranium occurs naturally alongside the rare earths in the ore body. ETM shares fell 17%. The deposit was designed as an end-to-end operation that could have bypassed Chinese refining entirely. It now sits frozen with no clear path forward.

— Rare Earth Exchanges

The China Rare Earth Industry Association reported its price index at 266.0 on July 1, using 2010 as the base year of 100. The pressure is not spread evenly. Magnet metals — NdPr, dysprosium, terbium, and samarium — are doing the heavy lifting. Outside China, some buyers say they cannot source heavy rare earths at any price.

— Rare Earth Exchanges

CEO Mark Tory told InvestorNews that Wicheeda's deposit near Prince George, British Columbia, can produce a flotation concentrate grading 50% total rare earth oxides — one of the highest figures for any North American project. The company signed an MOU with South Korea's Hanwha Corporation and is running pilot studies with the Saskatchewan Research Council.

— InvestorNews / Jack Lifton

Ucore Rare Metals produced 99.5% pure NdPr oxide at its RapidSX demonstration plant in Kingston, Ontario, and shipped qualification samples to major magnet makers in North America and Europe. The tests will confirm whether the material meets the purity and consistency standards needed for commercial NdFeB magnet production.

— Metal Tech News