Mulberry Industries has signed a non-binding offtake MoU with Ramaco Resources for customised rare earth oxide blends from the Brook mine in Wyoming, billed as the United States’ first new rare earth and critical mineral mine in more than 70 years and sourced from coal and carbonaceous ore. Ramaco has begun full-scale mining and is building a pilot processing plant to supply oxides including samarium, NdPr, yttrium, gallium and Dy/Tb on a non-exclusive basis. Mulberry will use the domestic feed to supplement its 10-year stockpile for NdFeB, SmCo and AlNiCo magnet production at its Georgia plant for defence, aerospace, automotive and robotics customers.

Western aerospace manufacturers are forecast to need 1.6 million tonnes of titanium by 2044, yet the US has no domestic sponge production since the Henderson, Nevada plant closed in 2020 and now relies on imports from Russia- and China-dominated supply chains, where China’s share of titanium metals has surged from 40% in 2019 to over 75% in 2025. Project Blue’s Nils Backeberg notes US ilmenite and rutile mining is largely tied to TiO₂ pigment, not aerospace-grade metal, making new melt and sponge capacity critical. Timet is responding with an $868 million, 500,000 sq ft “Project Aero” titanium melt/rolling facility in North Carolina (target 2027), a new microgrid-powered melt plant in West Virginia, and an 8,500 t/y electron-beam ingot expansion in Pennsylvania, signalling tighter qualification and sourcing pressures for defence and aviation programmes.

Ivanhoe Mines has started copper anode production at the Kamoa-Kakula direct-to-blister smelter in the DRC, a 500,000 tpa facility targeting 99.7%-pure anodes and an overall copper recovery of 98.5%, with first output achieved on 29 December, about five weeks after heat-up. The smelter is being ramped to handle concentrates from the Phase 1–3 concentrators, with 2026 mine output guided at 380,000–420,000 tonnes of copper and on-site concentrate inventories cut from 37,000 to about 17,000 tonnes. Stage 2 dewatering of the earthquake-flooded Kakula mine is complete, selective mining has restarted, and Stage 3 pump-station recommissioning is planned through Q2 2026 without constraining production.