Welcome back to CMJ,
Today, with two new features:
Audio briefing: yes, you can listen online at your convenience (just click on ‘listen online’ at the top of the email). Available now to all premium subscribers.
New section to bring more color on what the market is currently pricing and potential unseen opportunities
Let’s get right into it.
Table of Contents
20-second highlights:
The IEA priced the West's exposure to China's rare earth controls at ~US$6.5 trillion of annual downstream production. But it also disclosed what could be done to avoid this loss.
~US$4.2 trillion of that exposure sits inside IEA member countries, and the automotive sector carries over US$3 trillion of it outside China. The REE controls behind the figure are suspended until November 10, 2026, which makes the exposure a dated option.
Commercial-grade dysprosium (Dy) came out of a Colorado recycling line this week, from feedstock that, curiously enough, never touched a mine.
An allied government froze the voting rights of shareholders in one of the few Western deposits built around the heavy rare earths (HRE), after a forced-sale order was simply ignored for a second time.
A new wave of pricing mechanisms: a coordinated multilateral stockpile proposed by the West's own energy agency, sized at ~US$9.2 billion. It competes directly with the government-backed price floors already running under MP Materials and USA Rare Earth.
And still on the IEA report, it quietly dropped a bomb on graphite’s economic impact: a full disruption of the battery-grade trade would put over US$300 billion of annual downstream production at risk, and the October 2025 controls already reach the whole battery chain.
Illustration of the International Energy Agency (IEA) headquarters in Paris
IEA’s Stockpile solution
The number itself isn’t big news, but it reassures what the past year has signaled.
The IEA's Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026, recently published on July 16, estimates that full implementation of the rare earth controls China expanded in October 2025 (suspended to November 2026) would put ~US$6.5 trillion per year of downstream production outside China at risk across automotive, high-tech, defense and energy. ~US$4.2 trillion sits inside IEA member countries, and automotive carries over US$3 trillion outside China.
IEA (2026), Economic value of downstream production at risk from full export controls of rare earths by sector, 2025, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/economic-value-of-downstream-production-at-risk-from-full-export-controls-of-rare-earths-by-sector-2025, Licence: CC BY 4.0
The IEA also estimates that the critical minerals sector investment fell 9% in 2025, the first decline after several years of growth. Lithium experienced the largest decline, at ~40%, while copper companies increased investments by 8%.
China and Indonesia accounted for more than ¾ (three quarters) of refined-supply growth over the past two years. Indonesia leads nickel, of course, and China leads virtually everything else in this report.
The only exception was rare earths, where new U.S. projects and increased Malaysian production produced a modest decline in concentration. Excluding rare earths, the average share of the top refining country rose to 72% in 2025, up from 70% in 2023.
In contrast, here are the Western advances of the week:
The US Department of War invested US$25M in ReElement Technologies' Indiana refining campus.
USA Rare Earth produced commercial-grade dysprosium (Dy) and neodymium-praseodymium (NdPr or didymium) oxides from recycled magnet scrap in Colorado.
Australia froze the voting rights of defiant shareholders in Northern Minerals.
Each move (regardless of its size and expression) lands at the right node. But none moves the denominator. Pay attention to the increments:
Continue reading the full briefing
Continue reading the briefing now
Upgrade to get access to this briefing and other subscriber-only content. Subscribe for $25/month or $250/year. Try for free for 7 days; cancel anytime.
Unlock full access →