Australian rare earths to a magnet in a motor

Australia · Mount Weld, Western Australia 보유자 Lynas Rare Earths (채굴업체)

Mining a natural concentrate

Open-pit mining of deeply weathered carbonatite. Weathering has already done much of the concentrating work over geological time.

왜 이곳인가: Carbonatite pipes are rare, and ones with a thick weathered cap are rarer still.

Australia · Mount Weld concentrator 보유자 Lynas Rare Earths (채굴업체)

Flotation to a concentrate

Milled and floated to a mineral concentrate at roughly 40% rare-earth oxide.

나머지는 어떻게 되었는가: 980 tonnes of tailings, on site, in Australia.

왜 이곳인가: Concentrate at the mine, always.

Malaysia · Fremantle to Kuantan, Malaysia 보유자 Lynas Malaysia (정련업체)

First border crossing

Concentrate is shipped to Malaysia, where the plant that cracks it was built.

왜 이곳인가: The cracking and separation plant was permitted and built here rather than in Australia — a decision about chemistry, cost and permitting that took years and remains contested.

Malaysia · Kuantan, Pahang 보유자 Lynas Malaysia (화학)

Cracking it open with acid

Roasted with concentrated sulfuric acid to break the mineral apart, then leached. Thorium and uranium that came with the ore have to be separated and managed here.

나머지는 어떻게 되었는가: The radioactive residue is the reason this step is hard to permit anywhere, and the reason so few countries have it.

왜 이곳인가: Because someone was willing to build it and see it through.

Malaysia · Separation plant 보유자 Lynas Malaysia (정련업체)

Hundreds of stages to tell them apart

Solvent extraction through hundreds of mixer-settler stages, exploiting differences in ionic radius so small they are almost invisible. Out come separated oxides: neodymium-praseodymium, lanthanum, cerium.

나머지는 어떻게 되었는가: Cerium and lanthanum come out too, in larger quantities than anyone wants them. Surplus light rare earths are the industry's structural problem.

왜 이곳인가: This is the hardest step in the chain and the one with the fewest operators worldwide.

China · Metal and alloy plants 보유자 Metal and magnet makers (제조사)

Oxide to metal to alloy

The oxide is reduced to metal by molten-salt electrolysis, then strip-cast with iron and boron into a rapidly-quenched NdFeB alloy ribbon.

왜 이곳인가: Metal-making capacity outside China is very small. This is the step a Western mine cannot yet route around.

China · Ningbo or Ganzhou 보유자 Magnet manufacturer (제조사)

Making the magnet

Hydrogen decrepitation, jet milling to a few microns, pressing in a magnetic field to align the grains, sintering, machining, and a nickel-copper-nickel coating so it does not corrode. Dysprosium or terbium is diffused into the grain boundaries so it survives heat.

나머지는 어떻게 되었는가: Machining swarf is recycled internally — magnet scrap is one of the few genuinely closed loops in this industry.

왜 이곳인가: Roughly 30% of a sintered magnet's mass is rare earth. This is where the ore finally becomes a component.

Germany · Motor and vehicle plants 보유자 Motor and vehicle manufacturers (제조사)

Into a traction motor

1.6 tonnes of magnet is on the order of two thousand car traction motors, or the generator of a single large offshore wind turbine.

왜 이곳인가: Four countries, three oceans, five processing steps — from one tonne of Australian rock to the thing that makes an electric car move.