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Peculiar Materials
Insights · Supply chain

The heavy rare earth bottleneck

Everybody counts tons of rare earth. The number that actually binds is dysprosium, and almost nobody publishes it.

Short versionDysprosium is roughly one percent of what comes out of the world's rare earth mines. Terbium is less. Neither is optional: without them a neodymium magnet loses its coercivity as it warms up, and a traction motor is a hot place. Run the arithmetic and the average neodymium magnet can carry about 1.5 percent dysprosium and still be in balance with what the ore ratios deliver — while the grades that go into motors were, before grain boundary diffusion, asking for four to eleven percent. That gap is the bottleneck. Everything else on this page is what the gap does: why China's heavy quota has not moved since 2018 while its light quota grew 149 percent, why April 2025's export controls were drawn exactly along the heavy/light line, why the first commercial dysprosium separated outside China happened in May 2025 and not before, and why so many of the projects meant to close the gap are stuck behind a thorium problem rather than a chemistry problem.

Peculiar Materials LLC · 22 September 2026. Figures are dated where they come from, because several of the most-quoted numbers in this field are older than they look. Two of the charts rest on arithmetic I did myself from published inputs, and the note under each one says which inputs and where the arithmetic is weakest.

Disclosure: much of the fundamentals here comes from Steve Constantinides' freely published work, and I have co-authored papers with him.1 Read that as a reason to check my summary against his originals rather than as a reason to discount it — he publishes his sources, which is more than most of this field manages.

What this page skips, so nobody mistakes it for complete: samarium-cobalt, which needs no dysprosium at all and is the honest answer to some high-temperature problems; the separation chemistry itself, which deserves its own page; recycling, which has one already; yttrium and scandium, which are on the same control lists for different reasons; and any number that would identify a supplier's position, because those are not mine to publish.
1
The one percent
The arithmetic that defines the problem
2
Why Dy and Tb
Anisotropy bought with remanence
3
What GBD fixed
And what it did not
4
The flat quota
19,150 tons, eight years running
5
Outside China
Scale, and the best available dates
6
The thorium tax
Why the heavies come with a license
7
The speculative end
Coal, ash, and what price it needs
8
What I'd watch
Five things, and one date
Scroll to build the figures

Short versionDysprosium is about one percent of mined rare earths. Everything on this page follows from that ratio.

1 · The one percentStart with what comes out of the ground

Constantinides gives a rough production-share estimate for the four rare earths magnets actually care about, blended across bastnasite ore and ionic clays: neodymium about 15 percent of everything mined, praseodymium 5, samarium 3, dysprosium 1.2 Call it 15:5:3:1. Elsewhere he puts dysprosium nearer 1.5 percent,3 so take the range rather than the point.

You cannot mine dysprosium. You mine an orebody and you get the whole lanthanide series in whatever proportion that rock happens to hold.

1 · The one percentThe balance line

Now the bridge. A sintered neodymium magnet is about 31 weight percent rare earth in total.2 If dysprosium is 1 percent of the rare earth coming out of the ground, and rare earth is 31 percent of the magnet, then the average magnet can contain roughly 1.5 weight percent dysprosium and be, in his phrase, "in balance with existing supplies."

Above that line, the industry is drawing on a dysprosium stream the ore ratios do not support, and something has to give: price, grade, or somebody's delivery date.

1 · The one percentWhat the grades were asking for

Set that line against the grade ladder. This is his 2015 table, before grain boundary diffusion had finished doing its work.3 A magnet with no suffix is comfortably inside the budget. An SH-grade motor magnet wanted nearly three times its share. An EH grade wanted six or seven.

That is the bottleneck in one picture. Not a shortage of rare earths, which there isn't — a mismatch between the ratio the earth supplies and the ratio the application wants.

Worth saying plainly: the balance figure and the grade loadings come from two different documents eleven years apart, which were not written to be read against each other. The comparison is mine, not his.

1 · The one percentWhy it doesn't resolve itself

Co-production. Wanting more dysprosium means wanting more of everything else that sits beside it, whether or not there is a buyer. Constantinides watched the same mechanism one element-pair earlier: Mountain Pass in the 1980s was run for europium (color television) and cerium (glass polishing), and the magnet rare earths came out of the residue. By the mid-1990s neodymium demand had outrun its natural ratio, and the operator was stockpiling cerium and lanthanum it could not sell.4

In practiceThe place this shows up is not a commodity desk, it's a design review. Somebody specs an EH grade because the thermal model has an uncomfortable margin and EH makes the margin go away, and the part is now carrying six or seven times its proportional claim on the scarcest thing in the magnet. Most of the time nobody at that table knows it, because the grade is a line on a drawing and the dysprosium is three tiers up the supply chain. The cheapest heavy rare earth in any program is the one a better thermal design meant you never needed.

Short versionDy and Tb have much larger anisotropy fields than neodymium. That is what buys coercivity.

2 · Why Dy and TbWhat you are buying

The anisotropy field is roughly the field the crystal itself resists being turned by. More of it means the magnetization is harder to reverse — which is coercivity, which is what keeps a magnet from quietly giving up some of its output the first time the motor gets hot and the inverter asks for a large negative d-axis current.

Substituting dysprosium for neodymium roughly doubles it. Terbium roughly triples it.5

2 · Why Dy and TbWhat you pay with

The same substitution drops saturation polarization by more than half, and saturation polarization is what remanence — the useful flux — is made of. That is the whole trade in two bars: you buy coercivity with remanence, and the older the grade, the more literally that is true.

Note that terbium buys about 1.5 times the anisotropy of dysprosium for essentially the same penalty. It is the better element and the scarcer one, which is why dysprosium was the default for decades — until a process arrived that could spend a little terbium in exactly the right place.5

2 · Why Dy and TbTwo limits, constantly conflated

Curie temperature is a hard limit of physics, the point at which the material stops being ferromagnetic at all. Nobody designs anywhere near it. Maximum working temperature is a rule of thumb about how much irreversible loss you will accept in a particular magnetic circuit, and it is the number that binds. The grade suffixes are about the second one.

Constantinides puts the onset of the dysprosium requirement at roughly 80 °C.2 Since a traction motor rotor has no interest in staying below 80 °C, that is the sentence connecting the arithmetic above to the automotive industry.

Short versionReversal starts at the grain boundary, so put the heavy rare earth at the grain boundary. It roughly halved the loading.

3 · What GBD fixedDope the skin, not the block

A sintered magnet is millions of grains. Demagnetization nucleates at defects right at the grain boundaries and sweeps inward. Alloying dysprosium through the entire grain to fix a boundary problem works, but most of it ends up in the grain core, where it does nothing for coercivity and a great deal against remanence.

Grain boundary diffusion applies a heavy rare earth compound to the surface of an already-sintered magnet and heats it just enough to migrate inward along the boundaries. The grade chart page works through what that does to Br and Hci, with a live cost model.

3 · What GBD fixedHalving a number that was six times too big

The saving is real and large: SH grades from over 4 percent dysprosium down to about 2, and the 8–11 percent grades down to 4–5.3 Go back to the grade ladder and halve the right-hand column. SH lands near 2 percent, within shouting distance of the balance line. EH and AH land at 4 to 5, which is still three times over.

Grain boundary diffusion bought the industry a decade. It did not repeal the arithmetic.

3 · What GBD fixedAnd what it cannot reach

Diffusion reaches as far as diffusion reaches: practically 3 to 4 millimeters from the surface, falling off exponentially with depth, which puts the maximum thinnest dimension of a fully treated magnet at around 6.5 millimeters.5 Thin rings, arcs and plates — most of what goes into a motor — are fine. A large block is not, and large blocks still get their coercivity out of the bulk alloy.

So the heavy rare earth demand that grain boundary diffusion does NOT address is concentrated in exactly the parts that are biggest and most expensive to get wrong.

In practiceWhen somebody tells you a program has "designed out" its dysprosium exposure, the useful follow-up is about geometry, not chemistry. What is the smallest dimension of the largest magnet in the assembly? If it is comfortably under six millimeters, the diffusion story probably holds. If somebody is buying a thick block and quoting a diffused grade's heavy rare earth content, one of those two things is wrong, and it is usually not the block.

Short versionChina's mining quota is split in two. The light half grew 149 percent from 2018 to 2024. The heavy half did not move at all.

4 · The flat quotaTwo halves, two histories

China issues annual mining quotas split into rock-type — the light rare earths out of Bayan Obo, going overwhelmingly to China Northern Rare Earth — and ion-adsorption type, which is the southern clays, which is the heavy material, and which goes to China Rare Earth Group.67

Light went from 100,850 tons to 250,850. Ion-adsorption was 19,150 tons in 2018 and 19,150 tons in 2024, and in all six years in between. Not slow growth. No growth.

4 · The flat quotaTwo readings, both true

The heavy share of China's own mining quota fell from 16 percent to 7.1 percent while the total more than doubled. There are two ways to read a number that constant.

Resource constraint: the southern clays are a finite and environmentally brutal resource, and in 2012 their remaining life was being estimated at 15 to 25 years at then-current rates,8 which on its own terms runs out somewhere between next year and 2037. Policy: a quota held deliberately flat is a supply curve that does not respond to price, which is a useful thing to own if you are the only one who owns it.

I do not think you have to choose. Both are true, and they point the same direction.

4 · The flat quotaThe quota is not the throughput

Here is what makes the quota misleading if you stop there. China's heavy rare earth FEEDSTOCK is much larger than its heavy quota, because much of it is not Chinese. Global Witness, working from Chinese customs data, put imports of heavy rare earth oxide from Myanmar at 41,700 tons in 2023 — more than double China's entire domestic heavy mining quota, in a trade worth $1.4 billion.9 It is ionic clay mined in Kachin State and trucked across the border for separation.

So the world's supply of the elements that decide whether an electric vehicle motor survives a hot lap runs through an active civil war. In October 2024 the Kachin Independence Army took Chipwi and Pangwa; China closed border gates; imports collapsed to 311 tons in February 2025, down 89 percent year on year.10 USGS now estimates Myanmar's output at 22,000 tons for 2025, and flags that the figure is itself derived from Chinese import data.11

One detail cuts against the obvious story. Between late September 2024 and March 2025, terbium oxide rose 21.9 percent in China while dysprosium oxide FELL 3.2 percent.10 The seizure moved terbium and did not move dysprosium. Anyone telling you the Kachin fighting spiked the heavy rare earths is half right, and it is worth knowing which half.

4 · The flat quotaThe control line was drawn on this boundary

In April 2025 China put seven elements under export license: samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium and yttrium, along with their oxides, compounds, alloys, sputtering targets, and neodymium magnets containing terbium or dysprosium.12 Neodymium and praseodymium were not on the list, and have not been since.

That is not an oversight. Restricting neodymium would hurt Chinese magnet exporters and could be mined around within a decade. Restricting dysprosium and terbium costs China's own producers comparatively little and cannot be mined around quickly, for every reason on this page. The October 2025 escalation, which added an extraterritorial rule covering foreign goods with more than 0.1 percent Chinese-origin rare earth content, was suspended in November until 27 November 2026. The April measures were not suspended.13

The underlying position is a gradient: the IEA puts China at 60 percent of mined magnet-rare-earth production in 2024, 91 percent of refined output, and 94 percent of sintered magnets.14 Concentration rises as you move downstream, and the heavies sit at the far end of it — Benchmark puts China at 85 percent of all rare earth oxide and 99 percent of dysprosium and terbium oxide.15

In practiceWhen somebody quotes you a Chinese quota, the first question is which half, and the second is what year — because from the 2025 first batch onward the split has not been published. It was issued quietly in June 2025, with recipients reportedly told not to share the numbers.16 A peer-reviewed treatment calls this the start of a "nondisclosure era."17 The practical consequence is that the most load-bearing input in any heavy rare earth supply model just became unobservable, and any model still showing a confident 2026 heavy quota is showing you an assumption wearing a number's clothes.

Short versionBefore May 2025 the answer was zero. Today it is essentially one plant in Malaysia.

5 · Outside ChinaStart with the date

The first commercial-scale dysprosium oxide separated outside China was produced by Lynas at Kuantan, Malaysia, in May 2025, with terbium following in June.18

Not the first significant volume. Not the first cost-competitive volume. The first. Forty years into the neodymium magnet industry, the count outside China was zero until last year.

5 · Outside ChinaWhere the axis of this chart comes from

Before anything else on this figure, the basis, because it is thin and it is holding up everything drawn on top of it.

There is no authoritative public figure for world dysprosium or terbium production. USGS publishes a chapter dedicated to heavy rare earths and puts no world production table in it.19 Lynas has never published a dysprosium or terbium tonnage in any quarterly or annual report. Every headline number in this industry is a total-rare-earth-oxide number, and the heavies are a sliver inside it that nobody is obliged to disclose.

So the roughly 4,000 t/yr this chart is scaled to comes from one sentence in one press release: Carester says Caremag's 600 t/yr of combined dysprosium and terbium will be "around 15% of the global production."20 Divide and you get 4,000. Fifteen percent is exactly the kind of round number a press release produces, and I have no way to check it. If that one number is off by a third, every proportion on this chart moves by a third.

I am showing it anyway, because the alternative is to show nothing and let the reader keep an unexamined sense of scale that is almost certainly worse. But it is an estimate built on marketing copy, and it should be read the way you would read one.

5 · Outside ChinaWhat everything announced adds up to

Add the quantified announcements and you get about 2,140 t/yr of ex-China dysprosium plus terbium separation targeted by 2030 — of which roughly 1,572 tons is financed or under construction, and about 568 tons is aspirational.21 Against an estimated world total near 4,000, the financed portion is around 40 percent of today's output and the full announced portion a little over half.

That is not nothing. It is also, if every single project lands on its announced date at its announced capacity, still less than China and Myanmar make now.

Six further facilities — Lynas's expansion, Ucore Louisiana, the Saskatchewan Research Council, Solvay La Rochelle, Neo's Estonian line and Serra Verde phase 2 — publish no dysprosium or terbium number at all, so the real 2030 figure is higher than the one drawn and nobody can say by how much.

5 · Outside ChinaTwo numbers that don't reconcile

I would rather show the seam than hide it. Benchmark's 99 percent Chinese share of dysprosium and terbium implies about 40 tons a year outside China. Trade-press readings of Lynas's own reporting imply something nearer 250 to 300 tons of dysprosium oxide and 40 to 60 of terbium — which would be 7 to 9 percent. Both are 2025–26 figures.22

Treat the ex-China number as somewhere between negligible and under a tenth, and be suspicious of anyone who states it more precisely than that.

5 · Outside ChinaThe projects, graded

  • Lynas, Malaysia. Operating. The only one. Mt Weld is instructive: it is not a heavy deposit. Lynas states 12,790 tons of contained dysprosium oxide, which against its reported reserve or resource is roughly 0.3 to 0.6 percent of total rare earth oxide.23 A very large LIGHT deposit with just enough dysprosium to justify a circuit — a different business from a heavy deposit, and the one that got there first.
  • Iluka Eneabba. 725 t/yr, targeted 2027, financed by a A$1.65 billion Australian government loan, construction more than half done. The largest credible thing on the board.
  • Caremag, Lacq. 600 t/yr, targeted late 2026, €216 million closed with Japanese and French state money. Nearest term of the large ones.
  • MP Materials. More than 200 t/yr planned, called imminent for mid-2026, no production announcement I can find as of today. Mountain Pass bastnasite is heavy-poor: MP's SEG+ product, which is ALREADY the heavy-enriched fraction, is about 4 percent dysprosium and terbium on a total-oxide basis.24 Full build-out puts its Dy+Tb to NdPr ratio around 1 to 30. The Defense Department price floor covers NdPr, not the heavies.
  • Energy Fuels. 47 t/yr in phase 1B, targeted 2027 and already slipped from late 2026; a further 368 t/yr in an unfinanced phase 2. Section 6 is about why a uranium company is on this list.
  • Serra Verde, Brazil. Producing ionic-clay material since 2024 and frequently listed as a heavy rare earth producer. It makes a mixed rare earth carbonate and does not separate. That is feed, not supply, and the distinction is the entire subject of this page.

In practiceThe diligence question that sorts this list fastest is not about the resource, the flowsheet or the offtake. It is: what is the first date on which this facility will separate a kilogram of dysprosium from anything, and what has that date been for the last three years? A project whose first-heavies date has moved right twice is telling you something the technical report is not. And a capacity figure quoted as total rare earth oxide, in a conversation about dysprosium, is nearly always doing the work of hiding the number you asked for.

Short versionThorium and uranium follow the rare earths into the same minerals. Monazite is about 120 times over the US regulatory threshold.

6 · The thorium taxA different legal category

Thorium and uranium substitute readily into the crystal sites the rare earths occupy, so the minerals that concentrate rare earths concentrate actinides too.2526

In the United States, "source material" is defined at one-twentieth of one percent — 0.05 percent, or 500 parts per million — of uranium or thorium by weight, and above it you need a license under 10 CFR Part 40.27 Monazite at 6 percent thorium oxide is roughly 120 times that threshold. Not a marginal call, not an exemption, not a matter of good practice. The same legal category as uranium ore.

One correction worth carrying: xenotime — the phosphate that actually hosts the heavy rare earths — is a uranium problem more than a thorium one. About seven times less thorium than monazite, about three times more uranium. Both still around sixteen times over. If you repeat the common line that the heavy mineral is the thorium-rich one, you will have the mechanism backward.

6 · The thorium taxWhich is why China's heavies come from clay

Ion-adsorption clays are the exception. Their rare earths sit as loosely bound ions on clay surfaces rather than locked in a thorium-bearing crystal lattice, so they are simultaneously heavy-enriched and low-radioactivity.3

Put that together with section 4 and a lot of things line up at once. The world's heavy rare earth supply comes from ionic clay, in southern China and Kachin State, because ionic clay is the one heavy-enriched resource that does not come with an actinide problem attached. It is not only that China got there first. It is that the deposit type China and Myanmar have is the one that skips the hardest regulatory step, and almost everybody else's heavy resource is monazite or xenotime.

6 · The thorium taxWhy a uranium company is now a rare earth company

Energy Fuels' White Mesa Mill in Utah is a conventional uranium mill with a Utah Agreement State radioactive materials license — not, despite constant trade-press repetition, an NRC license — and an on-site 11e.(2) byproduct disposal cell. It has processed monazite since 2021, made its first kilogram of 99.9 percent dysprosium oxide in August 2025, and announced roughly 30 kilograms of dysprosium and 1 kilogram of terbium in March 2026.28 The company is refreshingly direct: "Uranium and thorium are problems for most REE companies — but we want them!"

The regulator has now said the quiet part in writing. In a September 2025 letter to Utah's environmental regulator, the NRC advised that where ore is processed for both its source material AND other constituents such as rare earths, the wastes are generally 11e.(2) byproduct material — and that rare-earth-only processing does not qualify.29 That is the moat in one sentence: the company also recovering uranium gets a disposal pathway the company recovering only rare earths does not.

Two things keep me from overselling it. It binds on CRACKING monazite, not on separating rare earths — an operation like Ucore's, taking already-cracked mixed oxide, never touches source material. And "nowhere in the US to dispose of thorium" is too strong; licensed disposal exists at Clive, Utah and Andrews, Texas. The advantage is an on-site cell versus case-by-case third-party acceptance plus transport of licensed material. Large, and not absolute.

6 · The thorium taxLost decades, and the honest counterpoint

Elsewhere the constraint shows up as lost decades rather than lost margin. Lynas spent fourteen years fighting over the residue from ore assaying 750 ppm thorium oxide before receiving a ten-year Malaysian license in March 2026, conditional on ceasing water-leach-purification residue generation by 2031.30 India holds something like 13.15 million tons of monazite and cannot commercially exploit it, because monazite sits with the Department of Atomic Energy rather than with miners.31 The largest untouched heavy-rare-earth-bearing resource in the friendly world is locked up by its thorium, and has been for sixty years.

In fairness — and this is a real objection, not a rhetorical one — thorium is a weak alpha emitter with a half-life measured in billions of years, and there is a respectable industry argument that the burden is disproportionate to the hazard. I looked for a citable authority making that case and did not find one. The Bayan Obo tailings measure around 276–321 mg/kg thorium-232 — BELOW the US threshold — with a maximum dose rate of about 1.15 mSv/yr against natural background nearer 2.4.32 The problem there is volume and containment, not concentration. Take that as a caution against both the "it's basically uranium" framing and the "it's basically nothing" one.

In practiceIn diligence on any rare earth project, the question that separates a real plan from a deck is: where does the thorium go, whose license permits it to go there, and for how many years is that arrangement secured? Answers involving future legislation, a facility that does not exist yet, or the word "minimal" are the same answer. I have seen flowsheets that are genuinely elegant right up to the point where a stream leaves the page and the arrow has no destination.

Short versionThe price argument for the coal route is fine. The grade argument is not, and grade does not respond to price.

7 · The speculative endFirst, the fair part

Dysprosium has repeatedly reached prices at which marginal resources genuinely pencil. It went from $91/kg in January 2009 to $2,377/kg in August 2011, a 26-fold rise in 31 months.33 And the relevant price today is not the Chinese one: export licensing has split a single world price in two. In September 2026, dysprosium oxide was assessed around $212–218/kg inside China and around $3,250/kg in reported North American transactions; terbium about $990 against $7,500.34 A US producer sells into the second market.

So the usual criticism of Ramaco's Brook Mine in Wyoming — that its price deck is fantasy — does not hold up. The PEA assumes $850/kg dysprosium oxide against a USGS 2025 estimate of $239, and 3.6 times the published price looks aggressive until you notice Benchmark had dysprosium trading at 4.4 times the China price ex-China in 2025, forecast to reach 8.3 times by 2027.1535 That is about $1,052/kg — ABOVE their assumption. On price, the deck is conservative.

7 · The speculative endThe grade, which is not close

Ramaco publishes a total rare earth oxide grade of about 500 ppm and a distribution in which dysprosium is 2.1 percent of the basket and terbium 0.4; it does not publish a per-element table, citing proprietary information.35 Multiply it out and you get roughly 10.5 ppm dysprosium oxide in run-of-mine material. That checks against their own numbers: 2.62 million tons a year of feed at 10.5 ppm is 27.5 tons contained, and the PEA projects 25 short tons, implying about 83 percent recovery.

Now compare it. Published Powder River Basin fly ash runs 5 to 15 ppm dysprosium.36 Browns Range xenotime runs around 840 ppm — eighty times more. The fly ash paper's own benchmark for a good rare earth ore is 1 to 2 percent total rare earths, which is 10,000 to 20,000 ppm.

Brook Mine's dysprosium grade is indistinguishable from ordinary Powder River Basin fly ash. That is the finding, and it comes from two independent published sources rather than from an opinion.

7 · The speculative endAnd the heavies aren't the business anyway

22.7 tons a year of dysprosium oxide is about 0.6 percent of estimated world output, for $533 to $580 million of capital and 2.62 million tons a year of mining. In Ramaco's own model, dysprosium and terbium together generate about $33 million a year of revenue against roughly $143 million of steady-state EBITDA. The heavies are not what makes this project work even on its own numbers. Scandium, gallium and germanium are — which is awkward, since Wolfpack Research put world scandium oxide demand at about $25 million a year, and Ramaco's own Defense Logistics Agency offtake is 6.4 tons of scandium, roughly the entire world market in one contract.37 A shareholder suit was filed in April 2026; the company's position is that its critics are short sellers.

None of which makes the underlying idea worthless. Coal ash, phosphogypsum and acid mine drainage are real rare-earth-bearing streams that somebody has already mined, ground and moved, and recovering something from a waste you are already managing is a legitimately different proposition from opening a mine. But the ratio between ten parts per million and a thousand does not respond to price, permitting, policy or enthusiasm. It is a hard limit of the resource, not a technological challenge.

In practiceThe diligence question is not "does the chemistry work." It usually does. It is: what price does this need, and what happens at the price we had in 2016 — which for dysprosium was about $180 a kilogram. If the answer is that the project closes, what is on the table is a dysprosium price forecast with some engineering attached, and nobody can underwrite a dysprosium price forecast. If I could, I would not be writing web pages about it.

Short versionEvery date on that chart is a date somebody announced. Not one of these companies has a record of hitting one.

8 · What I'd watchTake two years off everything

Go back to the scale chart and look at what it assumes. Every bar sits on its operator's own announced first-production year, which is the most generous convention available, and I used it because there is no other.

Here is the thing that convention hides. No major rare earth project outside China has an established record of starting on time. Not one. Lynas took the better part of a decade from Mt Weld to a working Malaysian plant, and then fourteen more years of license fights. Molycorp restarted Mountain Pass into a bankruptcy. MP Materials called heavy separation imminent for mid-2026 and the mid-2026 announcement has not appeared. Energy Fuels' phase 1B already moved from late 2026 to 2027. Seadrift was going to be Lynas's American plant and now may not proceed at all. Iluka's Eneabba has been financed and re-financed and re-scheduled since 2022.

The shaded step on the figure is the same 2,140 tons with a flat two-year slip applied. It is not a forecast — it is what the identical set of announcements looks like if this industry behaves the way it has behaved every other time. I would treat that as the base case and the unshaded one as the promotional case.

8 · What I'd watchFive things, and one date

  • 27 November 2026. When the suspension of the October 2025 extraterritorial controls expires. The April 2025 regime continues either way, so this is about the 0.1 percent content rule coming back, not about the heavies becoming controlled — they already are.
  • Whether Caremag and Eneabba hit 2026 and 2027. Those two are 1,325 of the roughly 1,572 financed tons. If they land, the ex-China heavy position genuinely changes. If they slip two years — which the paragraph above says is the normal outcome — nothing on the chart matters until 2029.
  • Whether Lynas or anyone else ever publishes a dysprosium tonnage. The single most useful disclosure nobody is making. Until then, every market model in this field, including the chart on this page, is built on a derivation.
  • Kachin. Not for the headlines but for the customs data. Chinese imports of heavy rare earth oxide from Myanmar are the best available proxy for how much heavy material is actually moving, and they are published monthly by somebody, which is more than can be said for the quota.
  • Whether any Western price floor extends to the heavies. The Defense Department arrangement with MP Materials sets a floor under NdPr, which is not where the scarcity is. A floor under dysprosium and terbium would change the financing conversation for half the projects in section 5. Its absence, so far, is worth noticing — and absence, as ever, is the finding.

8 · What I'd watchThe habit worth breaking

Every wave of ex-China rare earth projects since 2011 has been financed at the top of a price spike and buried at the bottom of the trough that followed. The current wave is being financed at a fifteen-fold Western premium that exists because of an export license regime. If that regime is relaxed — for any reason, including a good one — the premium goes with it, and a fair number of the tons on this page go with the premium.

That is not an argument against building them. It is an argument for knowing which price each of them needs, and asking before the money moves rather than after.

Dysprosium in the rock
The ratio

Dysprosium is about 1 percent of mined rare earth. At 31 percent rare earth in a magnet, that supports about 1.5 wt% Dy on average. The grades that matter wanted two to seven times it.

What helped

Grain boundary diffusion roughly halved the loading, and cannot treat a part thicker than about 6.5 mm. Halving six times too big leaves three times too big.

Where it comes from

Ion-adsorption clay, in southern China and Kachin State — the one heavy-enriched resource without an actinide problem. China's quota for it has not moved since 2018.

What replaces it

One plant in Malaysia today. About 2,140 t/yr announced by 2030, 1,572 of it financed, every date set by the company that wants the money.

References

The materials physics on this page needs no citation. Everything that is a claim about a company, a quantity, a price or a law gets one. Footnote 20 undercuts the page's own scale chart and should be read before the chart is used for anything; footnote 21 says which of its dates have already moved; footnote 22 records two sourced figures that do not reconcile and does not pick between them; footnotes 2 and 8 flag figures that are much older than the documents carrying them; and footnotes 5, 23, 26 and 35 name the places where I have done arithmetic that the source did not.

  1. S. Constantinides, D. Maybury, U. Wyss, G. Martinek, "Extending the limits of the Sm2Co17 System," WMM'16, Rome, June 2016; and G. Martinek, U. Wyss, D. Maybury, S. Constantinides, "Optimizing Magnetic Effects through Shaped Field Magnets," REPM 2014. magmatllc.com/publications.html
  2. S. Constantinides, "Demand for Rare Earth Materials in Permanent Magnets," 51st Annual Conference of Metallurgists, Niagara Falls, October 2012; revised 18 November 2023. The 15:5:3:1 estimate, the 31 wt% rare earth content of a neo magnet, the ~1.5 wt% balance figure and the 80 °C onset are all at pp.12–13. The revision note states that "the data remains fundamentally as presented in 2012" — so these are 2012 figures with a 2023 date on the cover, and should be read that way. magmatllc.com
  3. S. Constantinides, "Important Role of Dysprosium in Modern Permanent Magnets," 6 September 2015. Table 1 (Dy wt% by grade suffix) at p.2; the ~50% grain boundary diffusion reduction at p.2; Dy as ~1.5% of mined rare earths at p.5; thorium and uranium in HREE-rich ores, and the ion-adsorption clay exception, at p.3. arnoldmagnetics.com
  4. S. Constantinides, "The Elements of Magnetics," MRS Proceedings 1492 (2013), p.1 — Mountain Pass operated for europium and cerium, magnet rare earths sold from residuals, and cerium and lanthanum stockpiling by the mid-1990s. magmatllc.com
  5. S. Constantinides, "Grain Boundary Diffusion," white paper v.2, 29 October 2023. Table 2 (anisotropy field and saturation polarization) and the terbium-versus-dysprosium comparison at p.10; diffusion depth of 3–4 mm at p.4 and the ~6.5 mm thinnest-dimension limit at p.9. The ratios drawn in the figure are arithmetic on his figures, not his. His own unit conversion at p.9 gives 6.5 mm as 0.165 in, which is wrong — 6.5 mm is 0.256 in. Given 3–4 mm of reach from each face, 6.5 mm total is the self-consistent reading, so the millimeter figure is the one used here. magmatllc.com
  6. Shanghai Metals Market, third batch of 2023 rare earth quotas: light 235,850 t and medium-heavy 19,150 t, with the medium-heavy figure stated as unchanged for six years, and the light-quota year-on-year growth series used to derive 2018–2022. 2018 through 2022 are derived, not read off a document: the growth rates run backward from the 2023 light figure and subtracted from the independently published annual totals. The derivation reconciles exactly to every published total, which is good evidence and is not the same as evidence. Anyone using those rows for anything that matters should pull the MIIT annexes and check the ion-adsorption column by eye. news.smm.cn
  7. China Tungsten Industry Association, 2024 allocation by company: China Northern light 188,650 t, China Rare Earth Group light 62,200 t and ion-adsorption 19,150 t, totaling 270,000 t. 2024 totals also confirmed by Global Times, 21 August 2024. ctia.com.cn, globaltimes.cn
  8. S. Constantinides, COM 2012 slide deck, slide 42 — southern China ion-adsorption clays estimated at a 15 to 25 year life at then-current rates. As of 2012, so on its own terms that window closes between 2027 and 2037. A fourteen-year-old reserve-life estimate is a weak number and is used here only to show the shape of the constraint. arnoldmagnetics.com
  9. Global Witness, "Fuelling the future, poisoning the present: Myanmar's rare earth boom," 23 May 2024, analyzing Chinese customs data: 41,700 t of heavy rare earth oxide imported from Myanmar in 2023, worth $1.4bn, against 19,500 t in 2021. globalwitness.org
  10. Reuters, Chinese customs data, March 2025: February 2025 imports of 311 t, down 89% year on year, after the Kachin Independence Army took Chipwi and Pangwa in October 2024; and Chinese domestic prices between late September 2024 and 24 March 2025, terbium oxide +21.9% to ¥6,550/kg and dysprosium oxide −3.2% to ¥1,665/kg. investing.com
  11. US Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026, Rare Earths: Burma 27,000 t (2024) and 22,000 t (2025), "estimated based on reported import data for China"; world total 390,000 t; China 270,000 t. pubs.usgs.gov
  12. Ministry of Commerce and General Administration of Customs, Announcement No. 18 of 2025, 4 April 2025 — export licensing on samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium and yttrium and related items. Neodymium and praseodymium are explicitly absent from the list. iea.org policy database, hklaw.com
  13. MOFCOM Announcement No. 61 of 2025 (9 October 2025), including the 0.1 percent de minimis extraterritorial rule — full English translation at cset.georgetown.edu. Suspension by Announcement No. 70 of 7 November 2025, running to 27 November 2026, with Announcement 18 unmodified: clarkhill.com. Independently confirmed by USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026.
  14. International Energy Agency, Rare Earth Elements (2026), executive summary: China at 60% of mined magnet rare earth production, 91% of refined output and 94% of sintered magnet production, 2024. iea.org
  15. Benchmark Mineral Intelligence: China at 99% of global dysprosium and terbium oxide production against 85% of all rare earth oxide; and dysprosium oxide CIF North America at 4.4× the EXW China price in 2025, forecast at 8.3× by 2027. source.benchmarkminerals.com
  16. Reuters via MINING.COM, "China quietly issues 2025 rare earth quotas," July 2025 — first batch issued in June 2025 with no public announcement, recipients reportedly told not to share the figures. Reuters' sources did not give the volumes. mining.com
  17. "The Power of Withholding: Rare Earth Quotas and Informational Statecraft in China," Journal of Chinese Political Science (2025). link.springer.com
  18. MINING.COM, 16 May 2025 — Lynas becomes the first producer of separated heavy rare earths outside China; terbium followed in June 2025, confirmed in the company's FY26 results as first produced in FY25 (the year to 30 June 2025). Several secondary sources date this to 2026. They are a year out. mining.com
  19. US Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026, Heavy Rare Earths — the first edition to split light and heavy into separate chapters. Prices (FOB, Argus and Asian Metal): dysprosium oxide 99.5% at $410, 382, 330, 257 and $239/kg for 2021 through 2025; terbium oxide 99.99% at $1,340, 2,050, 1,300, 812 and $1,010/kg. US net import reliance 100% every year 2021–2025; China supplied 100% of US terbium, holmium and lutetium compound imports 2021–2024. The chapter contains no world production table for dysprosium or terbium. That absence is why the scale figure has to derive one. pubs.usgs.gov
  20. The scale figure's axis, and how thin it is. Carester, Caremag launch — 600 t/yr of combined dysprosium and terbium oxide at Lacq, described by the company as "around 15% of the global production," with €216m of financing closed. carester.fr Dividing gives a world total near 4,000 t/yr, and China and Myanmar's share of it is then taken as Benchmark's 99 percent for Dy/Tb oxide. Both inputs are single sources, one of them a press release, and "around 15%" is a round number in marketing copy rather than an assessment. No USGS, IEA or DOE figure exists to check it against. If the 15 percent is really 10 or 20, the world total is 6,000 or 3,000 and every proportion drawn on that chart moves with it. It is the weakest number on this page and it is holding up the page's central comparison.
  21. Project capacities and dates are each operator's own announced figures, which is the most generous convention available and the only one there is: Iluka Eneabba (iluka.com), Energy Fuels phases 1B and 2 (investors.energyfuels.com), Aclara Dynamo and the EXIM letter of interest (mining.com). Two have already moved: Energy Fuels phase 1B from late 2026 to 2027, and MP Materials from a mid-2026 commissioning target that passed without a production announcement. The two-year slip drawn on the figure in section 8 is an illustration of that pattern, not a forecast of any particular project.
  22. The two ex-China figures, and why they do not reconcile. Benchmark's 99 percent Chinese share of dysprosium and terbium oxide15 implies roughly 40 t/yr everywhere else. The 7 to 9 percent figure is my arithmetic on trade-press estimates of Lynas's output — roughly 240 t of dysprosium and 50 t of terbium — which are themselves a reading of an annual report that gives no dysprosium or terbium tonnage at all. The most likely explanation is timing: Lynas separated its first dysprosium in May 2025, so a share computed over 2025 and a share computed over 2026 are describing different worlds. But "most likely" is doing real work in that sentence, and the other live possibility is simply that the trade-press estimate of Lynas's output is too high. I could not find a way to settle it, and neither figure can be audited, because the only company that could publish the number has chosen not to.
  23. Lynas Rare Earths, Mt Weld resource statement, 2024: 12,790 t of contained dysprosium oxide; resource 106.6 Mt at 4.12% TREO, reserve 32.0 Mt at 6.4% TREO. Lynas does not state whether the 12,790 t sits against the resource or the reserve, which is why the derived Dy2O3 share is given as a range of 0.29% to 0.62% rather than a figure — that range is my division, not the company's. No terbium figure is published for Mt Weld at all. lynasrareearths.com
  24. MP Materials, SEG+ product page — the heavy-enriched concentrate is "approximately 4% dysprosium (Dy) and terbium (Tb) on a total rare earth oxide (TREO) basis." SEG+ is already the enriched fraction, produced after cerium, lanthanum and NdPr removal; the whole-ore figure is lower and is not published. The 1-to-30 ratio is mine, from that figure against published NdPr output. mpmaterials.com
  25. V. Pillai, NORM in rare earth mineral processing, ENA-NORM conference paper: monazite 4.5–9.5% ThO2 and 0.2–0.4% U3O8; Malaysian xenotime 0.83% ThO2 and 0.81% U3O8; bastnasite 0.1–0.2% ThO2; Mt Weld ore 750 ppm ThO2. ena-norm.eu
  26. World Nuclear Association, mineral sands NORM appendix and thorium information paper: monazite thorium "5–12%, typically about 7%." The ion-adsorption clay row on the mineral figure is deliberately qualitative. Constantinides states that these clays "exhibit very low thorium and uranium content" and the literature is consistent, but I could not find a citable percentage or activity figure for Chinese, Myanmar or Brazilian clays. The blank is not a zero, and it should not be filled in from a secondary source. world-nuclear.org
  27. 10 CFR 40.4, definition of source material — "ores which contain by weight one-twentieth of one percent (0.05%) or more" of uranium, thorium or any combination — and 10 CFR 40.13(a), the unimportant quantities exemption at the same figure. ecfr.gov
  28. Energy Fuels: first kilogram of 99.9% dysprosium oxide at White Mesa, 21 August 2025 (investors.energyfuels.com); roughly 30 kg of dysprosium and 1 kg of terbium from US monazite announced 25 March 2026 (investors.energyfuels.com). White Mesa operates under a Utah Agreement State radioactive materials license, originally NRC SUA-1358, reissued by Utah in February 2005 — not, as is often reported, a current NRC license.
  29. US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, technical assistance letter ML25248A089, 26 September 2025, to the Uranium Recovery Section Manager, Utah Department of Environmental Quality: where ore is processed for both its source material and other constituents including rare earths, the resulting wastes are generally 11e.(2) byproduct material; rare-earth-only processing does not qualify. nrc.gov
  30. Lynas granted a ten-year Malaysian operating license on 3 March 2026, conditional on ceasing water leach purification residue generation by 2031, treating existing residue to below 1 Bq/g, and constructing no new permanent disposal facility. malaymail.com, thestar.com.my
  31. India's monazite resource of about 13.15 Mt, held under the atomic energy framework rather than open to private rare earth extraction. csep.org The "prescribed substance" characterization rests on secondary reporting and an Indian government ministerial statement rather than on the text of the Atomic Energy Act, 1962, which I did not read.
  32. "In-situ gamma-ray survey of rare-earth tailings dams — a case study in Baotou and Bayan Obo districts, China," Journal of Environmental Radioactivity: 276–321 mg/kg thorium-232 in the tailings, maximum dose rate about 1.15 mSv/yr. The widely repeated figure of 70,000 metric tons of thorium waste at Bayan Obo could not be traced to a primary source and is not used here. sciencedirect.com
  33. Adamas Intelligence monthly FOB China data via MINING.COM: dysprosium oxide $91/kg in January 2009, $2,377/kg in August 2011, $748/kg by December 2012, and a floor near $180/kg in 2016. Higher 2011 peaks in circulation — $3,400/kg is the common one — could not be verified against a source and are probably metal rather than oxide, or transaction outliers. mining.com
  34. Rare Earth Exchanges, 21 September 2026, citing Chinese assessments and S&P Global for North American transactions: dysprosium oxide ¥1,410–1,450/kg ($212–218) in China against about $3,250/kg in North America; terbium about $990 against $7,500. The source itself cautions that ex-China trades are thin, bilateral and usually confidential, so these are indications rather than executable prices. rareearthexchanges.com
  35. Ramaco Resources, Brook Mine preliminary economic assessment, July 2025 (ramacoresources.com) and SEC exhibit 99.1 (sec.gov): TREO plus gallium and germanium oxides at 500 ppm; dysprosium 2.1% and terbium 0.4% of the basket; 25 short tons/yr Dy2O3 and 5 short tons/yr Tb4O7; price assumptions of $850/kg dysprosium oxide and $3,000/kg terbium oxide; capex $533.1m. The per-element parts-per-million figures used on this page are mine, derived from the grade and the published distribution, because the PEA withholds the mineralogical breakdown as proprietary.
  36. "Rare earth elements of fly ash from Wyoming's Powder River Basin coal": 42 samples, total rare earths plus yttrium 156.0–590.3 ppm with a mean of 399.5; dysprosium 5–15 ppm and terbium 1–4 ppm; and the paper's own benchmark that ores containing 1–2 percent rare earths are considered good. osti.gov
  37. Wolfpack Research's October 2025 report on Brook Mine, and the responses to it, as reported by Cowboy State Daily, 16 November 2025 — including the estimate of world scandium oxide demand at about $25m a year and Ramaco's Defense Logistics Agency offtake of 6.4 t of scandium. Shareholder suit filed April 2026. Wolfpack is a short seller and says so; the figures here are reported claims, not findings, and Ramaco disputes them. cowboystatedaily.com, deseret.com

Elsewhere in Insights: How China came to own rare earths is the forty-year history this page picks up from, and the place the price chart lives. The NdFeB grade chart works through what dysprosium and terbium actually do to Br and Hci, with a live cost model of the trade. How magnets get recycled covers the one heavy rare earth source that needs no mining permit. Two ways to split rare earths shows how dysprosium and terbium are separated from everything else, and why the industry usually separates them from each other too. Grain boundary diffusion, from the public record is the whole history of the fix this page credits, from the first patents to the grades it made, footnoted to public documents only. And the weekly Digest follows the export controls as they move.

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