The Real Bottleneck in the U.S. Rare Earth Supply Chain
Why is feedstock the true bottleneck in the U.S. rare earth supply chain?
In this clip, Kanishka Roy breaks down the “mine to magnet” ecosystem and explains why magnet manufacturing is expanding faster than rare earth production. The real constraint isn’t building magnets, it’s developing and scaling rare earth feedstock. Tactical Resources aims to address that bottleneck with an operational mine and surface level tailings ready for processing.
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Michael J. Blankenship is a licensed attorney and is a partner at Winston & Strawn LLP. Joshua Wilson is a licensed Florida real estate broker and holds FINRA Series 79 and Series 63 licensure. The content of this podcast is intended for informational and educational purposes only and should not be interpreted as legal, financial, or compliance advice. The views and opinions expressed by the hosts and guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the official policies or positions of any regulatory agency, law firm, employer, or organization.
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Michael Blankenship: So let's double click on that. With the tacticals fit within the broader US mind to magnet supply chain strategy, you know, where, where do you see that fit and, and really what's the relative position of it to others from the why is the feed stock and, and the real bottleneck?
Kanishka Roy: Yeah, there's, there's really a lot of nuance here.
So as you look at the mind to magnet supply chain in rare earths and companies playing in this ecosystem, a key observation is that there are a number of magnet manufacturers cropping up. And there are really two primary reasons for this one. Well, it's just the easier part of the ecosystem. Relatively speaking.
It's easier to make magnets from rare earth elements than it is to actually construct and permit and mine and develop and process and produce rare earth elements. Just the difference in time and resources and costs is quite different. But also. There are significant differences in the technology expertise and know-how on the processing and separation side, not just doing it efficiently, but also doing it in an eco-friendly manner.
The second reason is that there just aren't many near term at scale sources of these rare earth elements in the us. There may be multiple sites that potentially have rare earth deposits, but these usually take 10, 20 years to develop and billions of dollars of CapEx. So here's where there's a lot of noise in the sector with many companies claiming to be rare earth companies, perhaps.
Even with Rare Earth as part of their names, but at this stage of their evolution, there are probably more magnet producers rather than rare earth producers because they just don't have the at scale feedstock. So the single largest bottleneck in this sector, we think is having access to this rare earth feedstock or tailings.
And this is where tactical resources made the strategic decision not to focus on the crowded magnet manufacturing space and instead focus on where we have critical timing and acceleration advantages. And that's getting rare earth elements produced because we already have an operational mine and existing pile of tailings on the surface.
Again, currently only MP materials is the other commercially producing rare earth elements at scale. And we at tactical hope to be the second, in many ways, unblock that bottleneck in the supply chain, uh, that we're talking about.