News: LYC Australia's Lynas races to keep up with global rare earths demand, page-31

Lynas IP. Lynas has great skills in running the plant. Partially because of mismanagement by NC it took them 10 years to develop this and they still are improving. Remember the plant is just a modernizations (new control Systems ) of a design that was taken out of China by the original designer of the Chinese plants, Rhodes It took AL to put focus on plant and solve production problems. This is why Lynas does not have a single patent in any country on plant design. The IP is in peoples heads and hopefully notebooks, of how to optimize the plant for variances in the concentrate.

I am sure a plant being built to day would use AI in the control system to figure out what is going on, learn and make changes faster than people. I know the petroleum industry has been using AI for multiple years with large improvements in Efficiency and capacity. With only small changes in plant design.

Also there are many new ways to separate and purify REE that MAY be better than Lynas's 30 year old process. Here are a few there are many more.

https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2016/06/clean-way-extract-rare-earth-metals
https://www.mining.com/a-new-magnetic-way-to-separate-rare-earths/#:~:text=Researchers%20at%20Pennsylvania%20University%20found%20a%20way%20to,causes%20metal%20ions%20to%20crystallize%20at%20different%20rates.

Here is a history of REE separation from 1906 as you can see this is not a static fields. Like everything it is always being improved.
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/earthelements.html