Today, that metallic soup is shipped to China, where individual rare earths are separated before being refined into metals and forged into magnets. But MP Materials, the company that took ownership of the 70-year-old Mountain Pass mine in 2017, hopes to change that. This quarter, MP Materials plans to begin separating rare earths at Mountain Pass — the first time this key processing step will have occurred in the United States since 2015.MP Materials says that the new U.S.
Julie Klinger, a geographer at the University of Delaware who studies the global rare-earth industry, said MP Materials’ new processing capabilities have the potential to be a “best-case scenario in terms of diversifying the global supply chain and also doing so in a comparably robust regulatory environment.” However, Klinger cautioned that from a sustainability perspective, it’s important to minimize new mining overall.
Demand for rare-earth magnets is growing quickly. By 2030, under an aggressive decarbonization scenario, the U.S. EV sector’s rare-earth magnet demand could rise nearly sixfold compared with 2020 levels, according to aby the U.S. Department of Energy, or DOE. Over the same time frame, rare-earth magnet demand for the nascent offshore wind industry could rise from zero to 10,000 tons.