America’s Rare Earth Reckoning Is Less Than 60 Days Away | OilPrice.com By Michael Scott – Nov 05, 2026, 8:00 PM CST
In February 2026, President Trump announced one of the most ambitious industrial security initiatives of his presidency: Project Vault, a $12 billion strategic stockpile of critical minerals and rare earths designed to protect American manufacturers and the defense industrial base from supply disruptions.
This announcement was backed by a $10 billion loan from the U.S. Export-Import Bank, the largest single financing in the agency’s 92-year history, plus roughly $2 billion in private capital from companies like General Motors, Boeing, Google, and Stellantis.
It was a welcome and necessary move. But there’s a problem with Project Vault that almost nobody is talking about: a stockpile of raw rare earth materials that can’t be processed into usable metals and magnets is just an expensive collection of rocks. And right now, the ability to do that processing in North America barely exists.
REalloys (NASDAQ: ALOY) is a company working to change that, and what it’s built may help determine whether Project Vault actually works or becomes the most expensive broken promise in the history of American industrial policy.
To understand why the stockpile might not work, you have to understand the difference between having rare earths and being able to use them.
The $12 Billion Question Nobody Is Asking
Project Vault covers all 60 minerals on the USGS 2025 Critical Minerals List, with initial emphasis on the 15 rare earth elements. The way it works is simple enough, as private companies sign material purchase agreements with the stockpile at a specific inventory price. This creates a reserve that manufacturers can draw from if supply chains are disrupted.
But here’s the question that matters most: what form will those materials be in when they go into the vault?
Rare earths in their raw form, even as separated oxides, are not usable by manufacturers. A defense contractor building missile guidance systems can’t use dysprosium oxide any more than a fabricator can use iron ore. The oxide has to be converted into high-purity metal through a process called metallization, then precision-alloyed to exact specifications, and then fabricated into a finished permanent magnet.
Only then does it become something a manufacturer can actually put into a fighter jet, a drone motor, or a precision-guided munition.
China controls approximately 90% of global rare earth processing and an even larger share of finished magnet production. If the materials going into Project Vault haven’t been processed into usable form, and if there’s no domestic capability to do that processing when the time comes, then the stockpile is just a warehouse full of material that still needs to go through China before anyone can use it.
That defeats the entire purpose.
The Capability America Lost and Can’t Easily Rebuild
The West didn’t lose its rare earth processing capability to espionage or theft. It lost it to economics.
Starting in the 1980s and accelerating through the 1990s, China made a deliberate decision to invest heavily in rare earth mining and processing. State support absorbed losses, environmental controls were minimal, and labor was cheap. The result was a production cost that no Western facility could match. One by one, processing operations across North America and Europe shut down. The last major U.S. rare earth mine, Mountain Pass in California, closed in 2002.
But what disappeared was far more than a few facilities. The people who knew how to run them retired or moved on and the specialized equipment was decommissioned. The institutional knowledge of how to separate 17 individual rare earth elements, how to convert oxides into metals at extreme temperatures and how to alloy those metals to exact specifications for defense and industrial use…all of that accumulated expertise simply ceased to exist in the West.
Converting rare earth oxides into defense-grade metals and alloys involves multi-stage solvent extraction to separate 17 individual elements, metallization at temperatures above 1,200 degrees, and precision alloying across thousands of micro-steps. The Center for Strategic and International Studies identifies this metallization step as the least developed and most difficult capability to rebuild outside China. It’s the kind of expertise that can only be built through years of hands-on operation, and no amount of capital can compress the timeline.
That’s the fundamental challenge Project Vault faces. You can buy the raw material. You can store it. But if you can’t process it into something usable, you haven’t solved the problem. You’ve just moved the bottleneck from the mine to the warehouse.
One Company That Helps Fill the Gap
REalloys has built something that addresses exactly this vulnerability: a proven, operational platform for converting rare earth oxides into defense-grade metals, alloys, and magnets, all within North America and all without any critical reliance on Chinese technology.
The company’s Euclid, Ohio facility has a proven track record of developing heavy rare earth metals, alloys, and magnets for government and commercial partners.
It has worked on several contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and NASA. The expertise behind it spans more than 40 years of applied specialty metals development, including eight years of focused work with U.S. national laboratories and the Defense Logistics Agency.
Midstream, REalloys (NASDAQ: ALOY) holds an exclusive 80% offtake on NdPr, Dy and Tb rare earth production from the Saskatchewan Research Council’s Rare Earth Processing Facility in Saskatoon. That facility, designed and built entirely without Chinese technology, is targeting first commercial production by early 2027. Its AI-driven separation system runs the entire process with six people compared to the roughly 80 a comparable Chinese facility would require, and it produces products with higher yield and greater efficiency.
Upstream, the company has locked in feedstock agreements spanning Saskatchewan, Wyoming, Appalachia, Kazakhstan, Brazil, and Greenland, creating a diversified, non-Chinese raw material network. And downstream, a recently signed a letter of intent for a strategic partnership with South Korean magnet manufacturer JS Link<
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