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.