Rare earth developers are building the Western supply chain’s processing layer in the US South, where chemical plants, ports and petrochemical labour already exist. Louisiana is drawing three processing ventures, while explorers in Georgia and elsewhere in the region drill deposits that could eventually feed them.
The anchor is Aclara Resources. The company received a non-binding letter of interest in September for up to $750 million, about C$1 billion, from the US Export-Import Bank to finance its proposed Dynamo separation plant at the Port of Vinton, about 340 kilometres west of New Orleans. Aclara aims to start site preparation in the first quarter of 2027, subject to financing, and targets construction completion in the second half of 2028. The plant itself is costed at $494 million.
At full capacity, Dynamo could produce annual averages of about 1,300 tonnes of neodymium praseodymium oxide, 200 tonnes of dysprosium oxide and 35 tonnes of terbium oxide, according to Aclara’s October engineering update. The feedstock is not American: Dynamo would process material from Aclara’s Penco project in Chile, whose first stage has environmental approval, and Carina in Brazil, which is awaiting environmental licences. Aclara chief executive Ramon Barua said the company chose Louisiana for access to chemical suppliers and to operators and contractors with petrochemical experience around Lake Charles.
Two other ventures complete the Louisiana cluster. Canada’s Ucore Rare Metals is installing equipment at its separation plant in Alexandria, backed by federal defence funding, and ElementUSA plans to recover rare earths from bauxite residue at the Atlantic Alumina refinery in Gramercy. On the feedstock side, Rare Earths Americas is running a 25,000 to 30,000 metre drill program at its Foothills project about 110 kilometres southwest of Atlanta, Georgia, and plans an initial resource in the first quarter of 2027. Its monazite could potentially be processed at Energy Fuels’ White Mesa mill in Utah or the Saskatchewan Research Council plant in Saskatoon. USA Rare Earth has a feasibility study under way at Round Top in Texas, and Chemours already extracts mineral sands containing rare earths in Florida and Georgia.