MP Materials Starts Producing Neodymium Magnets in the US
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
In mid-January, a top United States materials company announced that it had started to manufacture rare earth magnets. It was important news-there are no large U.S. makers of the neodymium magnets that underpin huge and vitally important commercial and defense industries, including electric vehicles. But it created barely a ripple during a particularly loud and stormy time in U.S. trade relations.
The press release, from MP Materials, was light on details. The company disclosed that it had started producing the magnets, called neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB), on a trial" basis and that the factory would begin gradually ramping up production before the end of this year. According to MP's spokesman, Matt Sloustcher, the facility will have an initial capacity of 1,000 tonnes per annum, and has the infrastructure in place to scale up to 2,000 to 3,000 tonnes per year. The release also said that the facility, in Fort Worth, Texas, would supply magnets to General Motors and other U.S. manufacturers.
The Texas facility, which MP Materials has named Independence, is not the only major rare-earth-magnet project in the U.S. Most notably, Vacuumschmelze GmbH, a magnet maker based in Hanau, Germany, has begun constructing a plant in South Carolina through a North American subsidiary, e-VAC Magnetics. To build the US $500 million factory, the company secured $335 million in outside funds, including at least $100 million from the U.S. government. (E-VAC, too, has touted a supply agreement with General Motors for its future magnets.)
In another intriguing U.S. rare-earth magnet project, Noveon Magnetics, in San Marcos, Texas, is currently producing what it claims are commercial quantities" of NdFeB magnets. However, the company is not making the magnets in the standard way, starting with metal alloys, but rather in a unique process based on recycling the materials from discarded magnets. USA Rare Earthannounced on 8 January that it had manufactured a small amount of NdFeB magnets at a plant in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
Yet another company, Quadrant Magnetics, announced in January, 2022, that it would begin construction on a $100 million NdFeB magnet factory in Louisville, Kentucky. However, 11 months later, U.S. federal agents arrested three of the company's top executives, charging them with passing off Chinese-made magnets as locally produced and giving confidential U.S. military data to Chinese agencies.
The multiple US neodymium-magnet projects are noteworthy but even collectively they won't make a noticeable dent in China's dominance. Let me give you a reality check," says Steve Constantinides, an IEEE member and magnet-industry consultant based in Honeoye, N.Y. The total production of neo magnets was somewhere between 220 and 240 thousand tonnes in 2024," he says, adding that 85 percent of the total, at least, was produced in China. And the 15 percent that was not made in China was made in Japan, primarily, or in Vietnam." (Other estimates put China's share of the neodymium magnet market as high as 90 percent.)
But look at the figures from a different angle, suggests MP Materials's Sloustcher. The U.S. imports just 7,000 tonnes of NdFeB magnets per year," he points out. So in total, these [U.S.] facilities can supplant a significant percentage of U.S. imports, help re-start an industry, and scale as the production of motors and other magnet-dependent industries" returns to the United States, he argues.
And yet, it's hard not to be a little awed by China's supremacy. The country has some 300 manufacturers of rare-earth permanent magnets, according to Constantinides. The largest of these, JL MAG Rare-Earth Co. Ltd., in Ganzhou, produced at least 25,000 tonnes of neodymium magnets last year, Constantinides figures. (The company recently announced that it was building another facility, to begin operating in 2026, that it says will bring its installed capacity to 60,000 tonnes a year.)
That 25,000 tonnes figure is comparable to the combined output of all of the rare-earth magnet makers that aren't in China. The $500-million e-VAC plant being built in South Carolina, for example, is reportedly designed to produce around 1,500 tonnes a year.
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