The current bottleneck is separation, not mining. There are at least ten startups claiming new separation technologies. They're flaky. A few:

- Rare Earth Technologies. [1] PitchBook says they have about $1 million in investment. LinkedIn says they have 7 employees. Their site says they are going to have a pilot plant running in 2025. Right.

- Northern Minerals (Australia) [2] "Progressing the completion of a Definitive Feasibility Study (DFS) for a commercial-scale mining and processing operation". Australian penny stock, current AU$0.02, way down from peak of 2021. Five years in, and they're still at a feasibility study?

- Ucore Rare Metals [3] They got far enough to make some samples at lab scale. They have a demo plant. More real than the two above. But moving too slowly.

There are others; see [2]. Maybe one of them will get their act together.

A big problem with this industry, which the original article should have mentioned, is that there was a rare earth glut in 2015, when China flooded the market. Many of the US players went out of business. Mountain Pass mine shut down. The article's proposed investment vehicle should be stress-tested against the historical data from the last glut to see if it holds up.

[1] http://rareearth.tech/

[2] https://rare-earth-mining.com/top-10-rare-earth-mineral-proc...

[3] https://ucore.com/

▲

phonon an hour ago | parent [-]

Take a look at Maglut

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-fvHJAMZf4

	▲	Animats an hour ago \| parent [-]
		They're still at bench scale. Is the technology good enough for someone to throw money at scaling it? At bench scale, you don't know how much it's going to cost. There are a lot of people at bench scale separation. None of the startups seem to be at small, profitable plant. That's when you can get serious investors.