{"id":8996,"date":"2026-05-27T07:30:26","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T11:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/?p=8996"},"modified":"2026-05-27T07:16:23","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T11:16:23","slug":"rare-earth-motor-virginia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/rare-earth-motor-virginia\/","title":{"rendered":"Until This Year, Almost Every Gram of the Heavy Rare Earth That Keeps a Cadillac Lyriq’s Motor From Demagnetizing Was Processed in China. A Canadian Mining Company Just Started Producing It in Virginia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Around 156 metric tons of dysprosium and 27 metric tons of terbium a year. That is what Aclara Resources says it can deliver out of a single Brazilian mine once its supply chain is fully wired, according to the feasibility study the company filed on April 13<\/a>. Those two metals, along with neodymium and praseodymium, are the heavy rare earths that keep permanent-magnet traction motors from demagnetizing under load. They power the Cadillac Lyriq, the Chevy Silverado EV, the GMC Hummer EV, the Rivian R1S, the Lucid Air, and roughly nine out of every ten electric vehicles built worldwide. Until very recently, almost every gram of them was processed in China.<\/p>\n

That is the part Aclara is trying to change. The Toronto-listed developer, majority-owned by Hochschild Mining, inaugurated a rare earth separation pilot plant at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg on March 19, with first separated NdPr oxides scheduled for May and the heavy rare earths \u2014 dysprosium and terbium \u2014 targeted for August. A commercial-scale refinery is on its way to the Port of Vinton in Louisiana. The feedstock will come from ionic clay deposits in Goi\u00e1s, Brazil, and the Biob\u00edo Region of Chile. None of it is supposed to touch China at any stage.<\/p>\n

The pilot in Blacksburg<\/h2>\n

The Virginia Tech pilot has been operating around the clock since April, staffed by a mix of Aclara engineers and Virginia Tech PhD researchers. It is designed to validate Aclara’s proprietary process for turning a mixed rare earth carbonate, or MREC, into separated oxides of neodymium-praseodymium, terbium, and dysprosium at 99.5 percent purity. The output is small by design. The point is not volume; the point is to prove that the chemistry works on U.S. soil before Aclara spends three-quarters of a billion dollars on the Louisiana facility.<\/p>\n

Aclara Chairman Eduardo Hochschild called the inauguration “a major milestone”<\/a> for U.S.-based separation of the very heavy rare earths China placed under export licensing last year. CEO Ram\u00f3n Bar\u00faa, who spoke at the ceremony alongside Argonne National Laboratory and Department of Energy representatives, has said publicly that Aclara is aiming to cover more than three-quarters of U.S. dysprosium and terbium demand by 2028 \u2014 roughly 200 tonnes of dysprosium, 30 tonnes of terbium, and 1,400 tonnes of NdPr oxides per year, according to a Mining.com report from October 2025<\/a> covering the company’s first U.S. plant announcement.<\/p>\n

That target, if it lands, represents about 14 percent of China’s official annual dysprosium-and-terbium output.<\/p>\n

Why China’s April 2025 controls still set the price<\/h2>\n

To understand why Aclara matters to American automakers, look at what happened to the global heavy rare earth market over the last 13 months. On April 4, 2025, China’s Ministry of Commerce issued Announcement No. 18<\/a>, placing seven medium and heavy rare earths \u2014 samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium \u2014 under a case-by-case export licensing regime. The licensing applies to oxides, alloys, compounds, and to NdFeB magnets that contain terbium or dysprosium, which covers practically every permanent-magnet traction motor on the road.<\/p>\n

The market reaction was immediate. According to the International Energy Agency<\/a>, export volumes of yttrium, dysprosium, and terbium dropped roughly 50 percent in the months that followed. Some U.S. and European automakers cut utilization rates or briefly idled plants while they waited on Chinese export licenses. Prices for the same materials in Europe ran up to six times what they cost inside China.<\/p>\n

A truce after the November 2025 Trump-Xi meeting suspended a separate, broader October 2025 control package for one year, until November 10, 2026. The April 2025 licensing framework was not part of that suspension. It is still in force. As CSIS noted<\/a> at the time of the original announcement, the United States is particularly exposed on heavy rare earths: until 2023, China processed roughly 99 percent of global heavy REEs, with a small Vietnamese refinery the only meaningful exception, and that refinery has been shut down for over a year because of a tax dispute.<\/p>\n

The chain runs from Goi\u00e1s to Louisiana<\/h2>\n

The Brazilian end of Aclara’s chain is the Carina Project in Goi\u00e1s, an ionic clay deposit Aclara has spent the last two years drilling and modeling. The April feasibility study put 156 tonnes of dysprosium and 27 tonnes of terbium on the table as average annual production once Carina is in steady-state operation, alongside a stream rich in neodymium-praseodymium and a long tail of yttrium and other heavy rare earths. Total mixed concentrate output: 4,378 tonnes of REO a year, with NdPr making up 27.2 percent of the mix and the heavy DyTb fraction at 4.2 percent.<\/p>\n

That concentrate is meant to travel north to a $277 million separation refinery Aclara is planning at the Port of Vinton in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana. Aclara announced the Louisiana facility on October 24, 2025<\/a>, and is targeting mid-2028 for operations. The construction schedule disclosed in the April technical report runs from Q1 2027 through Q3 2028, with pre-commissioning and ramp-up in Q4 of that year. The state’s chemical industry sits practically next door, which keeps reagent and logistics costs lower than most alternatives.<\/p>\n

A second deposit in Chile’s Biob\u00edo Region, the Penco Module, is still working through environmental permitting and is intended as a back-end feedstock source once Carina is up. Penco is designed to run on 100 percent recycled water, a deliberate response to the environmental pushback ionic clay mining has drawn elsewhere in Latin America.<\/p>\n

What the feasibility study actually says about the money<\/h2>\n

The headline numbers are the kind of figures that make rare earth project finance possible. Carina alone shows an after-tax NPV of about $1.7 billion at an 8 percent discount rate, an internal rate of return of 26.9 percent, and a payback period of 2.9 years, based on Argus Media long-term rare earth price forecasts. Construction capex for the mine is $678.2 million plus a $102.7 million contingency, for a total of $780.9 million. The economic model assumes Carina pays a separation fee to Aclara’s Louisiana refinery \u2014 about $314.4 million a year, or 34 percent of gross revenue \u2014 which is how the integrated mine-to-alloys plan is structured on paper.<\/p>\n

Across the whole supply chain, Aclara’s technical studies put combined after-tax NPV at $2.334 billion, combined IRR at about 26 percent, and total capex at roughly $1.207 billion, covering mining, separation, and an FEL-2-stage alloys facility further downstream.<\/p>\n

The financing gap is the obvious flag. So far, Aclara has closed a $50 million private placement backed by CAP S.A., Hochschild Mining Holdings, and New Hartsdale Capital, and secured $5 million in project development financing from the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation for the Carina feasibility work. That leaves well over a billion dollars to find before the Louisiana refinery is fully built and commissioned.<\/p>\n

Aclara is the fourth name on a short list<\/h2>\n

What the Blacksburg pilot really does is put Aclara on a list that, until this year, had three names on it. MP Materials at Mountain Pass in California, Energy Fuels at White Mesa in Utah, and Lynas Rare Earths with sites in Western Australia and Malaysia were the only Western producers capable of separating rare earths at scale. None of them does heavy rare earth separation in the United States today.<\/p>\n

That gap is exactly the one Aclara is targeting. The Louisiana refinery is structured to be the first U.S. facility producing significant volumes of heavy rare earth oxides integrated with its own ionic clay feedstock. As AutoNotion reported earlier this month<\/a>, the U.S. military stockpile of NdFeB magnets covers roughly two months of wartime demand, and the civilian EV sector is not in that buffer at all. The same dysprosium and terbium content that keeps a Cadillac Lyriq’s traction motor running at temperature also goes into the guidance systems on American precision-guided munitions, according to U.S. Government Accountability Office assessments cited in the same reporting.<\/p>\n

That national security overlap is why the financing landscape is shifting. The DFC put $565 million into Brazil-based Serra Verde in February 2026, a deal the Northern Miner described as part of broader U.S. government movement on Western Hemisphere rare earths. The Department of War \u2014 Defense’s renamed civilian-facing counterpart \u2014 locked in a $96 million binding letter of intent with Lynas USA on March 16<\/a>, including a $110-per-kilogram price floor on NdPr oxide. The same price floor was attached to a parallel agreement with MP Materials, anchoring a coordinated allied response to Chinese pricing tactics that have historically been used to flush non-Chinese producers out of the market.<\/p>\n

Aclara is not, strictly speaking, a Pentagon deal. The $5 million DFC backing it has secured so far is civilian. But the company sits in the same supply chain envelope as Lynas, MP, and Energy Fuels, and the Louisiana refinery would plug into the same allied network of U.S. magnet customers.<\/p>\n

What is still uncertain<\/h2>\n

The first separated light rare earth oxides out of Blacksburg are scheduled for this month, with heavy rare earths in August. Those dates come from Aclara’s own commissioning plan and have not yet been independently confirmed by a delivered shipment. The Louisiana refinery is at Q4 2026 basic engineering, two and a half years short of commissioning. The financing for the full chain is not closed. The Penco Module in Chile is not through environmental permitting. The Argus price forecasts that underpin the Carina NPV assume a Western supply chain that is, at this point, still being built.<\/p>\n

And there is the China variable on top of all of that. The April 2025 licensing regime is still in force. The October 2025 controls are on a one-year pause that ends November 10, 2026, six months before Aclara expects to break ground in Louisiana. If Beijing flips the controls back on, the price math in the feasibility study gets easier and the project gets faster. If China decides to flood the market with cheap Dy and Tb to pressure non-Chinese producers, the same math gets a lot harder.<\/p>\n

What is no longer in doubt is that the pilot in Blacksburg is running. Twelve months ago, the first conversations between Aclara executives and Virginia Tech leaders were still happening. Today, a separation circuit designed to produce 99.5-percent-pure dysprosium and terbium is generating data 24 hours a day, fed by clay that came out of Goi\u00e1s. For an industry that has spent the last decade taking China’s rare earth supply as a given, that is a different kind of starting point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Around 156 metric tons of dysprosium and 27 metric tons of terbium a year. That is what Aclara Resources says … <\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":9011,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,116,3],"tags":[38],"class_list":["post-8996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-electric-vehicles-evs","category-energy","category-news","tag-cadillac","resize-featured-image"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8996"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9014,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8996\/revisions\/9014"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}