March 2, 2026. Strait of Hormuz.

Iranian naval forces mined the world's most critical shipping lane, closing a waterway through which approximately 20% of global oil shipments pass — and roughly 50% of global seaborne sulfur exports. The war had started two days earlier with coordinated US and Israeli strikes on Iran. The closure was immediate, total, and 104 days long.

Sulfuric acid — used to leach rare earth metals from ore at facilities including Mountain Pass and Lynas's Malaysian separation plant — comes primarily from sulfur. With the Strait shut, spot prices roughly doubled from pre-war levels. Robert Friedland of Ivanhoe Mines warned in April that if the closure continued, the industry was "especially concerned about the availability of precursor materials necessary for the mining industry to continue operating." The Oregon Group, which tracks critical minerals supply chains, put it plainly: shortages were hitting "uranium and some rare earth projects especially hard."

Yesterday, June 14, the United States and Iran announced a peace agreement. Signed in Switzerland, the deal ends more than three months of war. The Strait reopens upon signing. Sulfuric acid markets should begin normalizing as Middle Eastern sulfur exports resume.

The rare earth emergency will not normalize.

Today, G7 leaders gather at the Hôtel Royal in Évian for a summit assembled months before the first strike on February 28. The agenda covers critical mineral supply chain diversification, a permanent coordinated secretariat, and Allied stockpile frameworks. Those priorities exist because China controls 94% of global sintered permanent magnet production and refines more than 70% of every other major strategic mineral. The war added a second supply chain shock on top of that structural reality. The peace deal removes the second shock. The first was never about the Strait.

French Finance Minister Roland Lescure drew the parallel explicitly in May: the G7 is attempting to do for rare earths what the International Energy Agency did for oil after OPEC's 1973 production monopoly. The IEA took years to build meaningful supply diversification; it operated within a framework that gave member states clear obligations, a shared reserve, and coordinated release mechanisms. The G7 has no such architecture yet for rare earths. The question at Évian is whether it can agree to begin building one. Leaders have 143 days before China's suspended export controls expire and 200 before the Pentagon's Chinese-origin magnet ban takes effect.

The war is ending. The calendar is not.

The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly 50% of global seaborne sulfur exports. Sulfur is the feedstock for sulfuric acid — essential to the chemical leaching processes used to extract rare earth metals from bastnäsite ore. The March 2 closure drove spot prices sharply higher; acid prices had already risen before the conflict on prior supply tightness, and China simultaneously halted its own sulfuric acid exports in spring 2026. The Oregon Group noted that shortages were affecting "nickel, copper, uranium and some rare earth projects especially hard." Western leaching operations including Mountain Pass depend on consistent acid supply. The Strait reopening should progressively ease pricing, though China's export ban remains in effect.

The New South Wales government approved RZ Resources' A$693 million Copi mineral sands project on May 27 — clearing the path to first production in early 2029. Located 75 kilometers northwest of Wentworth in far southwestern NSW, Copi will produce titanium minerals, premium zircon, and rare earth-bearing monazite and xenotime from up to 400,000 metric tons of critical mineral ore per year across an 18-year mine life. Japan's JX Advanced Metals and Marubeni are investors; US, Japanese, Indian, and Australian governments have all provided support. RZ also owns the mineral separation plant on the Brisbane River — the only major mineral processing facility of its kind on Australia's east coast — which will commission in 2027 and accept third-party feedstock before Copi's own ore arrives.

The Phalaborwa project in South Africa's Limpopo province sits next to two enormous dunes of phosphogypsum — 35 million tonnes of acidic waste from decades of phosphate rock processing for fertilizer and sulfuric acid production. Rainbow Rare Earths plans to extract rare earths from the waste starting in 2028, with the US International Development Finance Corporation committed despite a significant diplomatic rift between Washington and Pretoria. The Trump administration has treated Phalaborwa as a strategic priority that overrides bilateral tensions. Project director Alberto Bruttomesso: "They crushed it, they milled it, they put energy into it — all that to make the phosphogypsum, which is what's needed to make rare earths." The hard chemistry has already been done.

Roland Lescure, French Finance Minister, at Lacq, France
May 5, 2026

EUROPIUM

Europium is the luminescent dopant in the red phosphors that authenticate euro banknotes — a deliberate choice because europium fluorescence under UV light is nearly impossible to replicate without separated europium oxide, which China supplies at roughly 95% of global output. It also powered the red component of flat-panel displays for three decades before LEDs displaced most of that market. Europium now sits in MP Materials' SEG+ concentrate alongside samarium and gadolinium — the medium heavy fraction no Western facility separated commercially until this year. China did not add europium to its April 2025 export licensing regime, but it sits adjacent to every rare earth that it did.

A US Department of Energy research team has developed AI agents capable of designing and optimizing critical mineral recovery methods from industrial waste in days rather than the months conventional engineering approaches require. The system was trained by deliberately breaking the separation process repeatedly until it ran out of failure modes to solve — essentially learning the chemistry by exhausting every way to get it wrong. The AI approach is being positioned as a way to accelerate the permitting and engineering timelines that have slowed Western rare earth processing projects. Industrial waste streams — mining tailings, phosphogypsum, coal ash — are among the most promising near-term rare earth feedstock sources in the US.

— Department of Energy / Northern Miner

The Trump administration's 15% universal import tariff, applied to virtually all non-USMCA goods including Chinese rare earth materials, is set to expire July 24, 2026 — six weeks from today. Congress has not passed extension legislation. The Trump administration has initiated Section 301 investigations that could form a replacement framework, but no successor tariff has been formally announced. If the tariff lapses without a replacement, import costs for rare earth materials, magnets, and downstream components from China would fall by 15% of customs value — potentially reducing incentives for Western buyers to source from costlier non-Chinese alternatives.

— TechTimes

Sovereign Metals (ASX: SVM) announced that heavy rare earth-rich monazite has been confirmed in four planned production pits at its Kasiya graphite and rutile project in Malawi — potentially opening a third revenue stream beyond graphite and titanium. Kasiya already holds the world's largest known natural graphite deposit by contained graphite. The monazite discovery adds dysprosium and terbium-bearing material to a project that has attracted investment from Rio Tinto. Kasiya is one of the few large-scale projects globally that could simultaneously supply graphite, a titanium feedstock, and heavy rare earth minerals from a single permit area.

— Sovereign Metals

Saskatchewan Research Council's rare earth separation program is producing commercial-grade rare earth metals with six operators and an AI-driven process system — compared to approximately 80 workers needed at a comparable Chinese facility. OilPrice.com reported that SRC built its AI dataset by deliberately running the separation process to failure repeatedly until the system internalized every way the chemistry could go wrong. The productivity gap reflects not just automation but accumulated institutional knowledge. A competitor starting from zero, the report noted, would have "no operating history, no accumulated process data, no trained workforce, and no AI dataset built from years of real-world production."

— OilPrice.com