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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.

Stage

Developing. A DoD-funded separation plant with engineering complete in May 2026 and its first line due in the first half of 2027.

Listing

TSXV: UCU · OTCQX: UURAF
Investor relations

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.

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.

Latest reports

Across these reports

Ucore remains pre-revenue; cash rose from C$0.6 million to C$19.3 million in the nine months to September 2025, DoD/DoW funding grew from US$22.4 million to US$27.0 million, and C$69.0 million of equity was raised in August 2026. The Louisiana plan was restructured to a ~600 t/yr first machine plus three ~3,000 t/yr lines, and first commissioning moved from Q4 2025 (2024 target) to H1 2026 (2025 target) to H1 2027.

Stated dates

Figures are as the company reported them, linked to each report. This summarizes what changed between reports; it is not a view on the company or its shares.

Fact checks from the digest

Claims made about this company that the weekly digest has put against this atlas, newest first. The verdict and the working are here in full; the issue each came from is for subscribers.

1. narrower than claimed · Digest issue 008 · 12 October 2026

   Seven oxides and 3,600 metric tons, but not from the same equipment

   The claim — 7 oxides at 3,600 metric tons a year of TREO from Machine A and Production Line 1 — is narrower than it reads, on three counts.

   Product mix. 3,000 of the 3,600 is Production Line 1, which Ucore’s 28 May 2026 engineering release describes as dedicated to an NdPr product. Samarium, gadolinium, terbium and dysprosium are attributed to Lines 2 and 3. So the heavy-oxide capacity in the first phase is at most the approximately 600 metric ton Machine A.

   Basis. Ucore’s own wording makes the figure TREO contained in feed, not separated output, and it publishes no recovery rate.

   Timing. Machine A is targeted for the first half of 2027. None of the 3 production lines, Line 1 included, has a published commissioning date — so 3,000 of the 3,600 carries no date at all.

   Nothing here is the company overstating. Every figure reconciles to its own releases. It is a compression: two units with different jobs and different schedules, added together and given one description.

Sources

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

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