https://noveon.co/noveon-jumpstart

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After two years of what its CEO called "bringing to a life a very big, full-sized manufacturing facility," the United States' only rare-earth magnet company is ready to ramp up manufacturing — and shift to the U.S. part of an industry that is primarily located in China.San Marcos-based Noveon Magnetics Inc., which rebranded last year from Urban Mining Company, was thrust into the spotlight earlier this month, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott held his State of the State address at its 150,000-square-foot facility at 1550 Clovis R. Barker Road.Noveon, which has received more than $35 million in investment from the U.S. Department of Defense, recycles discarded rare earth magnetic material — a category of rare metals that includes promethium and holmium — to produce magnets that are used to power everything from electric vehicle motors to wind turbines and other sustainable applications.The facility is built to manufacture 2,000 metric tons of magnetic material annually — and aims to eat into projected shortages in magnet supply, while shifting their production away from China, which according to some estimates accounts for about 93% of the industry."China has essentially created such a position of dominance, and it's pretty much covered the entire value chain. From the mining side, all day long. From a lot of the in-between stages that create metals and alloys and commodity tradable-type products, all the way into these finished products ... China just completely dominates that," CEO Scott Dunn told the Austin Business Journal in early December. "When chip shortages and Covid came rolling around, anything that was maybe hypothesis, including at the customer level, we kind of looked like fortune tellers or geniuses. It was just kind of right place, right time I suppose."Abbott's State of the State address kicked off should be a big year for Noveon. The event was not open to the public or the press, cell phones were banned and some attendees were forced to sign non-disclosure agreements, according to the Texas Monthly. During the speech, Abbott pointed to Noveon as an example of the importance of bringing industry back to the United States amid supply chain disruptions and potential national security issues spurred by always-fluctuating global tensions."Most rare earth materials now come from China," Abbott said, according to prepared remarks. "If that supply is ever disrupted, many of the things we do every day would come to a halt. The future of Texas and the United States should not depend on China. We must embrace innovation like Noveon to make Texas more self-reliant to create our own products and to secure the Texas of tomorrow."