Chinese firms control roughly 90 percent of the global markets for rare-earth oxides and rare-earth metals, and a single radioactive ore called monazite has become the West's most credible countermeasure. Hundreds of companies and agencies across North America, Australasia and Europe are now chasing that countermeasure. Most will not catch it.

The stakes extend well past semiconductors, LEDs, lasers, displays and catalysts. Essentially all powerful electric motors rely on rare-earth permanent magnets, from EV drivetrains and robots to tactical drones and ballistic-missile submarines. Analysts have begun calling the contest a "mineral war." The term is not subtle. It is apt.

"The future is monazite," declares Jack Lifton, an analyst who has studied the industry since 1962 and co-chairs the Critical Minerals Institute. "Right now, in my opinion, monazite is the most important rare-earth ore."

Why Monazite, and Why Now?

Monazite is plentiful and unusually well composed. Heavy mineral sands, the most sought-after form, contain monazite grains that hold 45 to 70 percent rare earths by weight — frequently all four magnet elements: neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium.

"The best distribution of rare-earth elements that you can find anywhere is in monazites," says Constantine Karayannopoulos, former CEO of Neo Performance Materials. "The real money is in those four elements." Dysprosium and terbium, both heavy rare earths, are almost absent from bastnaesite, the ore that dominates today.

The catch is thorium. Monazite carries weakly radioactive thorium and uranium, so its processing falls under strict rules from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Stored residues with no planned use count as nuclear waste. "The thorium is the single biggest problem," says James Kennedy, president of the consultancy ThREE. "The liability suddenly far exceeds the value of anything you've mined and sold."

Who Is Actually Producing?

Energy Fuels, operator of the only conventional uranium mill in the United States, is the outlier. A modest $22 million investment at White Mesa Mill in Utah now yields mixed neodymium-praseodymium oxides, plus pilot-scale dysprosium and terbium oxides — materials otherwise produced almost exclusively in China.

In September 2025, Energy Fuels sold 1.2 tonnes of neodymium-praseodymium oxide to POSCO International of South Korea. In December 2025 it announced first dysprosium oxide output. The company has spent more than $200 million securing monazite in Brazil and Madagascar, raised a further $700 million, and in June received a $725 million conditional loan commitment from the U.S. Department of War's Office of Strategic Capital.

Its feedstock strategy is the elegant part. Chemours, which mines heavy mineral sands in Florida and Georgia for titanium and zirconium, ships 500 tonnes of monazite annually to White Mesa. "Effectively, monazites are waste," Karayannopoulos points out. "So you don't have to dig another mine."

Former CEO Mark Chalmers frames the roadmap plainly: "We're playing a long game. We're doing the engineering right now on a larger facility that will have the capacity to produce up to 6,000 tonnes per year." For scale, Lynas Rare Earths — the largest producer outside China, processing Mount Weld monazite in Malaysia — turned out roughly 12,000 tonnes in its latest fiscal year. Iluka Resources, meanwhile, is building an AU $1.8 billion (US $1.3 billion) refinery at Eneabba, Australia, to work through a million-tonne monazite stockpile.

What Can Go Wrong?

The Saskatchewan Research Council offers the cautionary tale. Its Saskatoon plant was due to produce 40 tonnes of rare earths per month by the end of 2024. It did not. "Full operation" at 400 tonnes per year was planned for early 2025. That did not happen either. SRC now targets late 2027, by which point the project will have cost more than CA $216 million, according to CEO Mike Crabtree. An industry observer puts it bluntly: "Their problem is they haven't got enough feedstock to run on a continuous basis."

The irony is structural. One of the world's largest, highest-grade monazite deposits sits at Alces Lake, just 800 kilometers from Saskatoon. Developing it would likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars in mine and infrastructure, which explains why Canada, despite attractive deposits, has no operating rare-earth mines at all.

Can the Industry Grow Up?

Speculation remains the sector's chronic disease. The Trump administration took a 10 percent stake in USA Rare Earth for $277 million and extended a $1.3 billion secured loan, yet there is no mine at the company's Round Top deposit in Texas — and possibly never will be. "The rare-earth mining business is the Afghanistan of mining," Kennedy quips.

Geoff Atkins of Ucore Rare Metals told a 2022 industry convention that unless firms abandon pump-and-dump financing and deliver actual production volumes, "we're not going to have any hope of getting the volumes we need to give the certainty to the downstream supply chain." With Energy Fuels targeting 6,000 tonnes per year and Iluka's Eneabba plant under construction, the next two years will show whether monazite finally breaks the pattern — or joins it.