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President Donald Trump has designs on potential rare earth resources in Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Greenland. But one company says it has developed a smarter way to access critical minerals needed for military drones, wind turbines and electric vehicles.
At a plant on Belfast Harbour in Northern Ireland, Ionic Technologies, a unit of Australian stock exchange-listed Ionic Rare Earths, has patented a method for extracting the four highest-value and most in-demand rare earth oxides from industrial magnets.
China dominates both rare earths mining and processing, and the market is valuable: Adamas Intelligence, a consultancy focused on supply chains for critical materials, predicts that the global value of rare earth oxides used to make magnets will grow more than fivefold to $44.1bn by 2040.
As a result, western efforts to obtain rare earths through recycling have intensified.
Companies such as Solvay in France, REEcycleinc in the US, Norway’s REEtec, HyProMag in the UK, Sweden’s LKAB and Germany’s Heraeus Remloy are seeking to extract rare earths from magnets, batteries, mining and other products, but Ionic says its process and ability to separate them set it apart in a “very niche” market.
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Ionic Rare Earths managing director Tim Harrison Tim Harrison, managing director of Ionic Rare Earths, said Ionic Technologies was in ‘advanced talks’ to expand across the Atlantic © Charles McQuillen/FT The company, spun out from Queen’s University Belfast as Seren Technologies before being taken over by Ionic Rare Earths in 2022, is in talks to expand into the US, where Trump has made clear his aim to boost supplies of the minerals needed for advanced manufacturing and defence.
Ionic says that by relying on end-of-life magnets that are widely available, its approach reduces dependence on supplies from China and enables high-purity production of the individual rare earth elements praseodymium, neodymium, terbium and dysprosium at commercial scale.
“Our USP [unique selling proposition] is that we’re the only company doing the separation . . . outside China,” said Tim Harrison, managing director of Ionic Rare Earths.
The Belfast plant expects to produce 400 tonnes per year of separated rare earth oxides with net revenue of $2.12bn over its 20-year lifespan, according to its feasibility study.
That was enough for approximately 2 gigawatts of wind turbines or about 200,000 EV motors, Harrison said.
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