Rare earths heat intensifies

This month’s vast International Energy Agency Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026 report provided a timely snapshot of a fast-moving rare earth elements market and one of the world’s major international mining conferences in Australia in October is shaping to do the same.

The 372-page IEA tomb described 2025 as one of the most turbulent years this century for a sector that has become an increasingly prominent topic in the highest political offices and certainly in boardrooms. As one mining industry leader said in Riyadh earlier this year, few politicians knew what rare earths were not long ago.

The IEA’s report said the landscape for rare earths policy support and partnerships had rapidly evolved, with China’s market dominance and export controls, and Trump 2.0, key factors.

“International partnerships have increasingly become a cornerstone of many countries’ efforts to secure rare earth supply chains,” the agency said.

“Governments have deployed a range of policy instruments to reduce vulnerabilities across rare earth supply chains, spanning trade, project financing, research and development and international partnerships.”

The policy steps, strategic partnerships, financing and technical innovation and RE markets will all take centre stage at the upcoming IMARC 2026 event in Sydney, which brings together layers of mining value chains, national and regional governments, and leading technology vendors like few other world forums.

Lynas Rare Earths heads a list of IMARC rare earths participants that includes billion-dollar project developer Arafura Rare Earths and takeover target Australian Strategic Materials, which should be part of US-based Energy Fuels before IMARC’s October 27 start. It also features a company developing “the mine of the future” in Greenland and one with a foot on a tier-one resource in Brazil.

Critical Metals Corp and St George Mining are part of an IMARC mining investment hub cohort that also includes companies such as Axel REE, Barkly Rare Earths, Critica and Moonlight Resources.

Arafura moves to conclude financing of its major Nolans RE project in Australia’s Northern Territory and Energy Fuels’ A$450 million acquisition of ASM were among 2026 first-half financing and M&A deals that saw rare earths account for more than 9% of the total US$102 billion mining and metals transaction value in the period.

The world’s largest rare earths producer outside China, Lynas’ RE sales leapt from circa-A$550 million in fiscal 2025 to nearly $950 million in FY26, largely on the back of higher neodymium-praseodymium (NdPr) production and sales volumes. Its Australian share market value had climbed 26% in 2026 at the time of writing to c$15.5 billion.

This year’s multi-year, US$140 million rare earth supply deal with the US Government, using a $110/kg floor price that’s in line with Lynas’ recently updated, long-term agreement with Japan Australia Rare Earths, underlined vital sector themes playing out this year. Foremost among these is the strategic rather than volumetric importance of a number of rare earths used in everything from iPhones and washing machines to electric vehicles and military systems. US, Japanese and other government-backed pricing mechanisms, and finance, that help sustain secure supply lines outside of the dominant Chinese RE ecosystem had been essential in “addressing a dysfunctional market”, Lynas market development general manager Alex Logan told a recent business forum in Perth, Western Australia.

That unhealthy market reliance on China for 90% of RE magnet supply that left dependent international end-users vulnerable to provision controls also made investment in new supply virtually impossible due to price manipulation.

“We often talk about supply chain security for various things like fighter jets and all the sexy stuff but last year a really good example of the consequences was Ford in Detroit had to stop manufacturing the humble Ford because they couldn’t get access to rare earths,” Logan said in Perth.

“So I think governments and OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] have worked out that risk.

“They’ve seen the tangible effects of that [supply concentration].

“We’ve seen a demand consequence of that – a demand benefit – that’s allowed us to invest further in our assets. Here in WA that’s resulted in $1.3 billion of investments to expand our business, both at Mt Weld [flagship mine] and Kalgoorlie [Australia’s first RE separation plant] and that’s allowed us to grow our output and offer that supply chain diversification to our customers.”

Supply and demand

The IEA report said a staggering US$6.5 trillion of “downstream production” in the automotive, electronics, defence, aviation, transport and data centre sectors was at risk, mainly in the US, Europe Japan and Korea, from Chinese rare earth supply constraints.

“Our latest analysis shows that vast ​amounts of economic value depend on relatively small volumes of critical minerals, ​whose supply chains remain highly concentrated and are therefore vulnerable," the agency’s executive director, Fatih Birol, ‌said.

The report said demand for magnet rare earth elements such as neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium in regions outside China – which had doubled since 2015 – could grow by a further 50% over the next decade.

The supply response was gathering momentum. However, as the IEA and others have highlighted, there is growing urgency around incentivising downstream buying of ex-China magnet, battery and other metals and at the same time spurring adequate near-term investment in the midstream capacity needed to sustainably meet this demand.

“From today’s levels, mined supply for magnet rare earths rises by 30% to reach 104,000 tonnes REE in 2035 in the [IEA] base case and an additional 21,000t REE is added in the high-production case, which includes projects at earlier stages of development,” the agency says.

It has Australia and the US leading the new mine supply response, with Brazil, Laos, Tanzania and India making contributions and China’s share of global magnet RE mine output potentially falling below 50% for the first time in decades.

“Refined supply also increases similarly, reaching 125,000t REE in the high-production case in 2035,” the IEA says.

“[However], despite this progress cumulative planned production of metals, alloys and finished magnets from projects announced as of early 2026 amounts to around 57,000t of neodymium-iron-boron [NdFeB] in 2035, equivalent to 18,000t of magnet rare earth content, significantly less than diversified rare earth mining and refining capacities.

“This reflects a modest pipeline led by the United States, with notable contributions from Europe, Japan, Korea and Viet Nam. This pronounced tapering of diversified projects from upstream mining to downstream magnet manufacturing highlights the difficulty of establishing entire supply chains outside China.

“While resource development is advancing in several regions, the comparatively slower build-out of refining and magnet production suggests that critical midstream and downstream stages could remain bottlenecks.

“Without accelerated investment in these parts of the value chain, many regions may continue to depend on external processing and manufacturing, even as domestic extraction capacity expands.”

Abigail Hunter, executive director at the Washington-based SAFE Center for Critical Minerals Strategy, told a recent forum in the US capital the “anchoring of large downstream demand” by what were now internationally dominant Chinese industrial value chains was something the US government thought could be replicated by countries currently accounting for “two-thirds of the world’s GDP”, though mechanisms for building cooperative structures are not clear.

“We are [collectively] importing an incredible amount of embedded materials and so how do we use that to our advantage and say, we’re not going to necessarily continue with the status quo ... which will ultimately disadvantage our manufacturers, our automotive companies, our aerospace companies [and] our defence contractors from being able to compete,” said Hunter, who will be at IMARC 2026.

“There’s been a massive change in the procurement mindset for a lot of companies in the energy space, defence space, manufacturing space, following the April MOFCOM [China Ministry of Commerce] export controls on rare earths and magnets, where they really woke to the fact that they have these supply chain vulnerabilities and while the cost of these minerals may be a small part of their highly manufactured end product, ultimately missing that part is going to cost them a hell of a lot more.

“So overall I think we need to supercharge that midstream attention but anchor it in demand not only from us but from our allies.

“And then, if we were to cut ourselves off from Chinese supply today we wouldn’t necessarily have alternatives that are cost competitive at scale [and] at spec readily available.

“And that’s really where we need to focus on making sure that nascent industry or existing capacity is able to compete through government support in different forms ... and then working together with allies to make sure all of those projects are insulated when they come online from any type of price gouging or just strategic disadvantage, nefarious or not.

“We’re dealing with a web of roadblocks when it comes to diversifying our supply chains and standing up alternative supply that is cost competitive in the West.

“All of this creates this incredible structural advantage that is hard for us to unwind.

“It took decades for us to deindustrialise, so it’s creating a lot of challenges.

“We have so many holes in the ship to plug at the same time. But ultimately we’ve got to get to shore.”