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🚨🇬🇧 In July 2024, Crux Investor walked through Ionic Technologies' Belfast demonstration plant with the people who run it. Two years on, almost every claim made on camera has a public-record answer. One hour, four interviews, one model from start to finish: demonstration plant → commercial plant. 🧵 🎬 What You're Watching One hour inside Belfast: the July 2024 Crux Investor tour, re-watched in October 2026 🎥Four Crux Investor videos recorded on site on 24 July 2024 and published in August 2024, cut together into one hour: 🧑‍🔧 Thomas Kelly, Director of Operations, Belfast's wind ecosystem, UK funding, how fast the plant was built ⚗️ Fergal Coleman, Head of Technology, the process, reactor by reactor 🎙️ Tim Harrison (MD) and Brett Lynch (Chairman), the business model and why four elements only 🏗️ Tim Harrison on Queen's Island, the commercial plant site in the old Harland & Wolff yards ⚗️ The Process, in Fergal Coleman's Words "We receive the magnets, we crush them, we grind them into a fine powder and we digest them in this reactor here using a strong acid." Precipitation and purification give a mixed rare earth oxide. The lights-from-heavies solvent-extraction circuit then splits NdPr from Dy and Tb. A second circuit, "same principles, more stages but smaller volume", splits Dy from Tb. Each stream is precipitated as an oxalate and calcined to oxide: "our final product, which is what it's all about." ✅ Crusher, mill, digestion, precipitation, SX hall, calcination. It is the same sequence drawn, room by room, on the planning application lodged in September 2026. The equipment got bigger; the chemistry did not change. 🧲 Why Belfast? Kelly's Numbers, as Stated in 2024 🌬️ About 8.7 GW of offshore wind installed within 150 nautical miles of Belfast, and a deep-water dock built for turbine installation and decommissioning 200 metres from the plant door 💰 Magnets are "something like 1% of the mass of a wind turbine but like 45% of the value" 🎓 A team of 27, built on Queen's University chemistry and chemical-engineering graduates; technology developed at Queen's, business acquired by Ionic Rare Earths in 2022 🏭 Demonstration plant: 30 tpa of magnets in, around 10 tpa of separated rare earth oxides out, taken from design to 24/7 operation in 12 to 18 months with Advanced Propulsion Centre support 🔁 "We see material that could be recycled domestically being sent abroad to be processed... not a comfortable position for anyone" 💼 The Business Model Explained by Harrison and Lynch 🎯 Four elements only: praseodymium, neodymium, terbium, dysprosium. "Those four elements today represent nearly 80% of the value in the rare earth supply chain, and in the next 10 years it'll be 90%." 💷 Downstream and capital-light: "it's tens of millions, not billions, if we were upstream and doing mining and refining" 🔗 A closed loop between magnet makers, alloy makers and the recycler, aimed at customers who are "not price sensitive, defence for a start" 📐 Commercial plant: 1,200 tpa of magnets to 400 tpa of separated magnet rare earth oxides, on Queen's Island 🗓️ The 2024 timetable: feasibility study "very close", investment decision by end-2024, production in 2026 ⏩ Two Years Later.........The Scorecard What was said on camera in July 2024, against the public record in October 2026: ✅ "The world's first rare earth permanent magnet [with] 100% recycled rare earths... with Less Common Metals and Ford" → delivered. ASX, 11 May 2026: Belfast oxides converted to metal and strip-cast alloy by LCM, made into magnets by GKN to Ford's specification, tested at Ford Dunton and built into two rotors at Halewood teapaw.org/roblun1/status/2103664… ✅ "Auto 2030... further support from APC" → the programme became DRIVE35, and Belfast holds a £12m capital grant Offer in Principle (January 2026), conditional, not yet awarded ✅ Feasibility study "getting very close" → published 18 November 2024: 1,200 tpa feed, 400 tpa separated REO at 99.5%+ purity, £85m capex (quoted at £89m in the company's September 2026 release) ✅ "Working through the permitting and approvals" → full planning application LA04/2026/1680/F lodged 18 September 2026 for a 2.3 ha plot in Titanic Quarter, statutory consultations running to 30 October ✅ Engineering → front-end engineering design under way with Tenova since July 2026 ✅ Demonstration plant → more than 30 months of 24/7 operation; Industry Minister Chris McDonald toured it on 2 July 2026 and was handed a bag of 99.5%-plus didymium oxide ✅ Partners → leadership of the £11m APC-funded CirculaREEconomy consortium with EMR, Ford, Bentley, Wrightbus, LCM and BGS; supply agreements with Advanced Magnet Lab under a US defence contract (May 2026) ⏳ Investment decision → not yet. The 2024 timetable did not hold. The company's current path is a Q4 2026 funding package with an intended AIM admission, then a planning determination expected in Q1 2027. No funding announcement has been made. 📈 What Changed Around Them 📅In July 2024 Harrison put dysprosium at "about $250 a kilo" and terbium at "around $750 a kilo". By late July 2026 Platts was reporting indicative dysprosium values of $2,300–2,500/kg CIF North America against just over $200/kg FOB China, and terbium at $4,800–5,000/kg. 🎛️The heavy rare earth circuit Kelly described as still being "developed further" in 2024 is now the part of the flowsheet the Western market prices most highly. Whether Belfast captures those prices depends on contracts that are not public. 📍One name in the videos has changed hands: LCM, the alloy partner in the Ford chain, was acquired by USA Rare Earth in a deal that closed on 18 November 2025. It remains a UK plant in Cheshire. 👀 Bottom Line 📺Watch the hour as a time capsule. The chemistry, the site and the plan are the ones on the planning register today. The Ford validation, the grant offer, the feasibility study, the FEED contract and the planning application have all arrived since the cameras left. The one item still open in 2026 is the one Harrison said he was working on in 2024: the money to build it. 1️⃣ Separation. Cutting and grinding sintered NdFeB throws off 20–30% of every block as swarf, and end-of-life magnets arrive oxidised, coated and mixed. A separator's chemistry has to take whatever turns up, magnets, swarf, MREC, mixed REOs, and turn all of it into individually separated, high-purity Nd, Pr, Dy and Tb oxides. Mixed carbonate or alloy powder is an intermediate; separated oxide is the first product in the chain with a global price and a global buyer. 2️⃣ Metallisation. Oxide is not magnet feed. It has to be reduced to metal, electrolysis for NdPr, the fluoride route for Dy and Tb, and strip-cast to alloy, and that is its own specialist industry with only a handful of Western operators (think LCM, Phoenix Tailings, REalloys). The Ford chain shows the hand-offs in order: Belfast oxides → LCM metal and alloy → GKN magnets → Ford test. Without separation the chemistry stops at a mixed product. Without metallisation the oxide has no Western home. Those two steps are where the value is made, and where the West is shortest. 🧲 @IONIC_RE @IONICTECH_UK @cruxinvestor @QUBelfast #MagnetRecycling #IXR #IonicRareEarths #IonicTechnologies #Belfast #TitanicQuarter #QueensUniversityBelfast #NdFeB #NdPr #Dysprosium #Terbium #CriticalMinerals #CircularEconomy #SolventExtraction #Ford #DRIVE35 #APC #InnovateUK #OffshoreWind #UKManufacturing #SupplyChain #ASX #CruxInvestor

🚨🇺🇸 Terbium oxide at US$7,500/kg. Dysprosium at US$3,250/kg. Chinese heavy rare earth exports to the US down 99%. Platts just put numbers on the Western heavy rare earth squeeze, and they're not pretty. 🧵 📈 The Numbers Platts (S&P Global) assessed North American rare earth oxide prices at fresh highs on 30 September as buyers fought over the little non-Chinese material that exists: 🔴 Terbium oxide⚫️ CIF North America: US$7,500/kg, up 53% (+US$2,600/kg) in a single month 🔴 Dysprosium oxide⚪️CIF North America: US$3,250/kg, up 41% 🔴 Samarium oxide🟡CIF North America: US$1,000/kg, up 25% Since Platts launched these assessments in March: terbium +53%, dysprosium +171%, samarium +470%. 🇨🇳 Meanwhile in China: Flat 🪙The same day, Platts assessed terbium oxide FOB China at US$1,005/kg and samarium oxide FOB China at US$100/kg, both unchanged month on month. That's a 7.5x premium for terbium and roughly 10x for samarium, purely for being outside China. Same element, same oxide, different passport. 🚢 Exports to Zero 🇨🇳Chinese customs data released 21 September showed exports of terbium, dysprosium and scandium fell to zero in August. Shipments to the US, Japan and South Korea: zero. Total dual-use rare earth compounds and metals exported: 14 tonnes. 🏗️📉Exports over the first eight months of 2026 were down 61% year on year, with shipments to the US and Japan each down 99%. 🎯 Who's Buying Chris Berry of House Mountain Partners told Platts the rally "has more to do with purchasing of non-Chinese inventory rather than anything else." US defence contractors are stockpiling ahead of the 1 January 2027 DFARS restrictions on Chinese material in defence supply chains. "The defense base is realizing that the Jan. 1 date is a hard stop, though there are loopholes, and is looking to stockpile as much heavy rare earth material as possible, and there isn't that much to go around." "This isn't a demand shock in the West, but does scream out that heavy rare earth materials are extremely difficult to obtain." 🤝 Truce Extended, Nothing Fixed 📅On 24 September Trump and Xi extended the rare earth trade truce by two months, pushing expiry to 10 January 2027. Market participants told Platts the extension has done little to ease concerns among consumers seeking secure non-Chinese supply. A truce on paper doesn't put terbium in a warehouse. teapaw.org/roblun1/status/2080275… 🧲 Why Recyclers Should Be Watching The IEA puts China at 61% of rare earth mine supply and 91% of refining and processing capacity in 2024. The constraint is not rocks, it's separation. ⚪️Dysprosium and ⚫️Terbium are the elements that let NdFeB magnets survive heat in missile guidance, radar, satellites and EV traction motors. 🧲Older magnets carry far more of them than new ones. Every end-of-life magnet in the West is a small stockpile of exactly the material now trading at US$3,250 and US$7,500/kg, if someone can separate it to magnet grade. Caveat: these are CIF North America assessments on thin volumes of legacy Chinese-origin material, not long-term procurement terms. Nobody should model a plant on them. But the direction, and the gap to China, is the whole investment case for Western heavy rare earth separation. 👀 Bottom Line North American heavy rare earth prices are at record highs while Chinese domestic prices sit flat, because the West has almost no separation capacity of its own and China has stopped shipping the heavies. 🪖✈️🛰️🚀Defence buyers are hoarding ahead of a hard 1 January deadline. The truce buys time, not tonnes. Whoever can produce separated Dy and Tb outside China, from mines or from magnets, is selling into the tightest market in the industry's history. 📄 Source: S&P Global Platts, "North American rare earths at new highs on US stockpiling, tight Chinese exports", 30 Sep 2026 🔗 spglobal.com/energy/en/news-… #RareEarths #Dysprosium #Terbium #Samarium #HeavyRareEarths #CriticalMinerals #NdFeB #PermanentMagnets #SupplyChain #China #ExportControls #DFARS #Defense #Platts #Stockpiling #MagnetRecycling #RareEarthSeparation #EV #Reshoring