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EXETER, N.H. (AP) -- Tucked inside a New Hampshire office park, a small refinery zaps mining waste with electricity to tease out critical minerals needed for key U.S. weapons systems, including missiles used in the Iran war.
It can play a part in helping America break the chokehold China has on processing critical minerals, but it will take up to a year and a half to build a new factory as the Trump administration pushes to expand domestic production. The company, Phoenix Tailings, recently got a $500 million loan from the Pentagon to ramp up its work, after starting out eight years ago as a backyard lab seeking a cleaner metal-refining method. It's just the latest critical minerals company the government has backed.
The task that workers carry out in heat-resistant suits and sealed face masks has become more urgent as the Iran conflict draws down key munitions such as Tomahawk cruise missiles and THAAD interceptors. While the White House is demanding military contractors speed up production, it's also imposing stricter rules banning them from sourcing critical minerals from China.
"It will be a tall order and a challenge to replenish these stocks and scale up in the timeframe needed to meet defense demand and regulations," said Anthony Balladon, chief commercial officer and a co-founder of Phoenix Tailings. He said the company is working hard to boost capacity.
Although the U.S. is quickening its pace to build domestic supplies of critical minerals free of control from its most formidable rival, it will likely take years for companies across the industry to build new mines and boost production of the high-powered magnets essential in many high-tech applications. Extracting some of the hard-to-pronounce elements from existing mine waste can help satisfy the growing demand in the meantime, but it will likely take several companies to do that.
Phoenix Tailings taps waste from traditional mining as well as recycled magnets and disk drives as raw materials, working to counter China in processing where it has the strongest hold on the supply chain.
The company based in the Boston-area city of Woburn, Massachusetts, plans to build a bigger facility to extract and produce critical metals needed in not only defense but also the aerospace and automotive industries.
"We call it the freedom facility because, ultimately, the purpose of this is to ensure that the entire Western Hemisphere, the United States and its allies are free of Chinese influence within the rare-earth space," Balladon said.
On a recent afternoon, two technicians in heat-resistant hazmat suits were operating an apparatus of cylinders, tubes, funnels and control panels set up on a platform with bright yellow railings. A chemical process involving electricity removes oxygen and turns the material into a grayish metal that can be used to make the extremely strong permanent magnets used in fighter jets, missiles, radar systems and drones.
The metals that Phoenix Tailings refines and other critical minerals play "an outsized role" in defense systems, Balladon said. A $150 million weapons system won't work if it's missing critical minerals that may be worth only $20,000 to $30,000, he said.
The defense sector is particularly reliant on the metal samarium and needs 50 to 100 tons each year, but U.S. capacity is very limited, he said.
Phoenix Tailings is among the few companies capable of producing the final metal, according to Balladon, but its capacity is only about 200 kilograms a year. He said the company will scale up to about 5 tons in the next three months but that it will be next year or 2028 before it reaches its goal of 120-ton capacity.
Arnold Magnetic Technologies for years relied on China for samarium to produce the extremely strong, stable-in-high-temperatures magnet that goes into precision-guided missiles such as Tomahawks.
That doesn't work anymore. For Arnold, the solution to getting the critical minerals it needs has come from a relic of Europe's past rare-earth industry -- abandoned mining dirt in the French city of La Rochelle.
Solvay, a Belgium-headquartered chemical company, stopped separating and processing rare earths from the mined dirt in the 2000s. That was when China was building up most of the world's processing capacity with a determination to dominate the industry.
China weaponized that near-monopoly last year by choking off its flow of processed critical materials and forcing the U.S. government to back off during a trade war. Solvay then restarted work and has added other rare earths this year, including samarium.
"This ramp‑up is driven by several factors: rapidly growing demand for permanent magnets, increased geopolitical focus on supply chain security, and strong customer demand in Europe and the United States for more diversified, resilient and traceable sources of supply," a Solvay spokesperson said.
For Arnold Magnetic Technologies, paying more to get its supply from Solvay instead of China has not been a deal-breaker, because the samarium-cobalt magnets it makes account for only a small cost in a weapon system, said Matt Blake, Arnold's CEO.