Strategic Gateway: How Ucore is disrupting China's 'stranglehold' on rare earth elements.

• Author: Simonelli, Isaac Stone
• Position: MINING

Ucore Rare Metals would like to break ground on its Strategic Metals Complex (SMC) sometime this year. In about two years, the facility could be cranking out rare earth oxides, materials prized for their special properties of magnetism, luminescence, and strength.

Currently, about 80 percent of rare earths imported to the United States come from China, according to the US Geological Survey. Therefore, the Biden administration zeroed in on a domestic supply chain as part of its climate and technology policy. Ucore's business plan is in lockstep with that national strategy.

"Ucore has a very definitive vision and plan for an independent and comprehensive North American rare earth element supply chain," Ucore Chairman and CEO Pat Ryan says. "To accomplish this, the fundamental component is the ability to have--first and foremost-operating commercial-scale rare earth separation plants. The ability to separate rare earth elements into oxides does not exist in North America today and is. therefore, the central objective of Ucore."

Rare earth elements (REE) are not rare. Some of the seventeen metals in that stretch of the periodic table are more abundant in the Earth's crust than nickel or tin, which have been used to craft human technology for thousands of years.

The "rarity" arises from two attributes, one physical and one economic. First, the properties of the elements prevent them from clumping in commercial quantities, and they are difficult to chemically separate from ore. Second, the overwhelming bulk of rare earth oxides are produced by China.

"That production of individual oxides, that's where the margin is... that's where all the money is," Ryan says. "You've got to have that centerpiece, that midmarket, in order to take on the challenge of beating the stranglehold that China has and the upper hand they have over North America. So that's why we're focused on that."

Ryan says that a failure to secure the supply chain for REE necessary for the electrification of the automobile sector could mean that jobs tied to North America's combustion engine plants would eventually migrate to China. The same goes for wind turbines, defense systems, smartphones, and other 21st century technology, he adds.

"If you don't have that on home soil, you lose the jobs," Ryan says.

Like Nowhere on Earth

Ucore has three main goals in its battle plan: commercialize its proprietary separation method, identify US-allied feedstocks, and develop downstream customers. Those three lines of attack converge in Ketchikan, where Ucore intends to build its SMC to process rare earth concentrates into marketable oxides. Ucore signed a memorandum of agreement with Southeast Conference to develop a natural resource development campus, and the anchor tenant would...