Ucore Rare Metals — Louisiana Strategic Metals Complex

A rare earth separation plant under construction in an 80,800 square foot brownfield building in the England Airpark at Alexandria, Louisiana. It is designed to take mixed rare earth carbonate and mixed rare earth oxide from third parties and separate them into individual oxides, including neodymium-praseodymium, dysprosium, terbium, samarium and gadolinium. It is not a mine and it has no captive feedstock.

At a glance

Founded: 2006 — Ucore Rare Metals Inc. was founded in 2006 and was formerly named Ucore Uranium Inc. The separation technology it now builds around, RapidSX, came with the acquisition of Innovation Metals Corp., completed May 11, 2020 for C$5,801,000 in shares and cash. The Louisiana subsidiary is Ucore North America.
Headquarters: Alexandria, Louisiana, United States. Parent company head office is Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Ownership: Wholly owned by Ucore Rare Metals Inc. (TSXV: UCU; OTCQX: UURAF). No shareholder above 10% is disclosed in a company document; Ucore does not publish a shareholder register. Shares outstanding 152,497,451 as of September 15, 2026.
Revenue: Not publicly disclosed. This company does not publish revenue and no named third party has published an estimate of it.
Pre-revenue. Ucore's management discussion and analysis for the nine months ended September 30, 2025 states that the company has no operating revenues. All rare earth oxide produced to date has been shipped as qualification samples rather than sold.
Source

Capacity

Each date below links to the document the figure came from. A capacity figure with no source is not on this page.

What	Figure	Status	As of
Total design throughput at full build, Alexandria, Louisiana — three production lines of approximately 3,000 t/yr each plus a first machine of approximately 600 t/yr	approximately 9,600 t/yr of TREO contained in qualified feedstocks. This is a throughput figure — oxide contained in the mixed rare earth carbonate and mixed rare earth oxide fed to the plant — and not a figure for separated oxide product. Ucore publishes no recovery rate that would allow one to be derived from the other.	Announced	2026-08-05
Enhanced Machine A, the first unit to be installed — a two-by-eight-inch-diameter RapidSX contactor assembly, configuration verified at the Kingston, Ontario facility	approximately 600 t/yr of TREO. Verified as an equipment configuration; not installed and not commissioned.	Under construction	2026-08-05
Commercial production of separated rare earth oxide at Alexandria	none. Ground was broken May 29, 2025 and the first long-lead item, a 4,000-gallon glass-lined leaching reactor, was placed in April 2026. Commissioning of Machine A is targeted for the first half of 2027; no commissioning dates have been published for Production Lines 1, 2 and 3.	Under construction	2026-08-14
Capital cost of the first stages, per the Orbital Engineering report dated May 27, 2026 — Enhanced Machine A US$60 million, Production Line 1 US$44 million, oxide production and packaging US$31 million	US$135 million cumulative	Announced	2026-05-28
Contracted feedstock supply for the complex	none published. The Sumitomo Corporation of Americas collaboration of June 15, 2026 covers feedstock sourcing, downstream offtake development and Japanese distribution, but no tonnage, term or binding status is published. The Vulcan Elements arrangement of March 24, 2026 is expressly a non-binding memorandum of understanding. Discussions with Hastings Technology Metals were described in March 2026 as discussions only.	Announced	2026-06-15

Narrative

The Louisiana Strategic Metals Complex is Ucore Rare Metals' first commercial-scale separation plant, in a brownfield building at the England Airpark in Alexandria, Louisiana. It uses RapidSX, a solvent-extraction process acquired with Innovation Metals Corp. in 2020 that runs conventional extraction chemistry in contactor columns with phase separators rather than in banks of mixer-settler tanks. Ground was broken in May 2025 and the first long-lead equipment arrived in April 2026. An engineering report prepared by Orbital Engineering, Inc. and dated May 27, 2026 set the plant at approximately 9,600 metric tons per annum of contained TREO throughput across three production lines of roughly 3,000 metric tons each, preceded by a first unit, Enhanced Machine A, of approximately 600 metric tons per annum; capital cost for Machine A, the first production line and oxide packaging was put at US$135 million. Commissioning of Machine A is targeted for the first half of 2027 and no dates have been published for the three production lines. The project is supported by a United States Department of Defense, latterly Department of War, other transaction agreement that had reached US$27.0 million cumulatively by September 2026, and purchase orders for the plant carry a DPAS DO-B8 rating. Ucore's demonstration plant at Kingston, Ontario is profiled separately. Ucore is pre-revenue and no feedstock supply contract has been published.

Where public sources disagree

Ucore's own website and Ucore's own engineering documents give different plant capacities. The Strategic Metals Complex page describes production scaling from 2,000 t/yr in 2026 to 5,000 t/yr in 2027 and a potential 7,500 t/yr in 2028. The May 28, 2026 engineering release and the August 5, 2026 scale-up release describe a first machine of approximately 600 t/yr followed by three lines of approximately 3,000 t/yr each, totaling approximately 9,600 t/yr, and contain no 2,000, 5,000 or 7,500 figure. The company has not said which supersedes which.
The top-end figure appears in three versions: 7,500 t/yr on the company's Strategic Metals Complex page; 10,000 t/yr of REO throughput in the management discussion and analysis filed November 25, 2025 and in a company release of September 19, 2025; and approximately 9,600 t/yr in the May and August 2026 releases.
The word used for the tonnages differs between company documents. Filings and the engineering releases say throughput, and the May 2026 release specifies TREO contained in qualified rare earth feedstocks. The Strategic Metals Complex web page says production. The two are not the same measurement and the difference is the plant's recovery rate, which is not published.
First-stage capacity is given as 2,000 t/yr by Ucore and as 2,500 t/yr TREO by Metal Tech News on February 18, 2026.
The schedule has moved by roughly two years across company and state sources. Louisiana Economic Development announced on April 6, 2023 that operations would begin in early 2025 reaching 7,500 t/yr by 2027. A Ucore release of September 21, 2023 gave 2,000 t in 2025 rising to 7,500 t by 2027. The current company page gives 2,000 t/yr in 2026 rising to 7,500 t/yr in 2028. The August 2026 position is first commissioning in the first half of 2027.
Three dates are given for the US$18.4 million Department of Defense award: May 14, 2025 in the company news release, June 2, 2025 in the management discussion and analysis, and July 14, 2025 as referenced in the May 2026 engineering release. The company does not reconcile them.
Performance claims for RapidSX differ between the company's own technical and economic assessment, accepted by the Department of War on April 7, 2026, and trade press. The assessment gives 5.4 times less mixing time, 1.8 times less settling time and a footprint up to 60% smaller. Metal Tech News reported on February 18, 2026 that the process is nearly ten times faster and needs roughly one third of the space.
No independent validation of RapidSX performance has been published. The conventional solvent extraction pilot plant used as the comparison basis was, per Ucore's release of February 17, 2026, also constructed by Ucore at its own facility, and the preparer of the technical and economic assessment is not disclosed. The Department of War accepted the report as a contract deliverable, which is not the same as independent verification.

Sources

Strategic Metals Complex — Ucore Rare Metals Inc. (2026-09)
Engineering report drives optimized commercial deployment plan — Ucore Rare Metals Inc. (2026-05-28)
Ucore verifies Louisiana RapidSX equipment scale-up configurations — Ucore Rare Metals Inc. (2026-08-05)
Louisiana Strategic Metals Complex, US — Mining Weekly (2026-08-14)
US$18.4 million initial construction funding from the US Department of Defense — Ucore Rare Metals Inc. (2025-05-14)
Additional US$4.6 million from the US Department of War — Ucore Rare Metals Inc. (2026-09-14)
Strategic collaboration with Sumitomo Corporation of Americas — Ucore Rare Metals Inc. (2026-06-15)
Management discussion and analysis, nine months ended September 30, 2025 — Ucore Rare Metals Inc. (2025-11-25)
Ucore will invest $75 million to establish rare earth metals manufacturing facility in Alexandria — Louisiana Economic Development (2023-04-06)

How this page is sourced

Everything here comes from public sources — company filings, annual reports, exchange announcements, government releases and trade press. Every figure is linked to the document it came from and carries the date that document was published, because a capacity number without a date is not a fact, it is a rumor with a decimal point.

What is deliberately absent: material nonpublic information. I have spent more than two decades in this industry and a good deal of what I know about these companies I learned under NDA. Those obligations do not expire and they do not bend for a website. Nothing I have been told in confidence appears here in any form, and nothing on this page — or missing from it — should be read as a signal about what I know privately. I hold NDAs absolutely. It is the reason clients tell me things.

Judgment is the other thing left out on purpose. This page reports what has been published and who published it. Whether a target is credible, whether a ramp will hold, whether a capacity figure survives contact with the plant behind it — that is the work I do for clients, and it does not belong in a free reference page.

Where public sources disagree, I say so rather than picking a winner. Where a figure has not been published, the field says so rather than carrying an estimate. An empty field is information too.

Public filings tell you what a company has said. Whether it holds up is a different question, and the one I get hired to answer.

Get in touch

← Back to Ucore Rare Metals — Louisiana Strategic Metals Complex in the atlas · the full supply chain atlas