REalloys (NASDAQ: ALOY) has signed an agreement that could give it priority access to up to 30% of production from a 2-billion-ton Appalachian rare earth resource network, expanding its growing pipeline of domestic and allied feedstock ahead of the Pentagon’s 2027 ban on Chinese-origin materials.
The deal comes just two months after unveiling its buildout of the largest heavy rare earth metallization facility outside of China.
Under a new Letter of Intent released on Wednesday with Patriot Exploration & Mining, REalloys would gain preferential allocation rights to rare earth production from more than 150 tested sites stretching across the Appalachian Basin from Alabama to Pennsylvania. It’s an all-American resource base that contains neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium–the four magnet metals at the center of the Pentagon’s effort to remove Chinese material from U.S. defense supply chains.
The agreement adds another source of domestic feedstock to a network that already includes projects and partnerships spanning North America, Greenland, Brazil, and Kazakhstan as REalloys continues assembling the raw material pipeline behind its growing processing and metallization platform.
And they are doing it just as the Pentagon attempts to rebuild weapons inventories it has blown through in the Iran conflict, while simultaneously removing China from the rare earths supply chains that make them possible. With nearly half of the U.S. arsenal of precision strike missiles now gone, and only 7 months before the Pentagon’s deadline, defense industry chiefs are sounding the alarms.
Washington is sounding its own alarm bells by pouring billions into American and allied rare earth projects. The sentiment in the White House is that you can’t create a domestic rare earths supply chain with strong policy alone: You need money, too, and the government is feeling generous.
This week alone, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) awarded $67 million to advance a rare earth extraction project in Louisiana, while USA Rare Earth secured access to a proposed $1.6-billion federal financing package tied to the CHIPS and Science Act to accelerate mining, processing, refining, and magnet manufacturing capacity in Texas.
REalloys is already securing the feedstock, processing capacity, and metallization infrastructure that those rules will require.
Patriot is the latest addition to a feedstock network that now stretches across North America, Greenland, Brazil, and Kazakhstan.
REalloys has spent the past several months securing supply agreements across multiple jurisdictions while simultaneously funding processing capacity in Saskatchewan and expanding metallization capacity in Ohio.
Together, those assets are intended to create a supply chain capable of taking rare earth material from feedstock through separation, metallization, alloy production, and eventually magnet manufacturing without relying on Chinese processing.
“The defense industrial base has a 2027 deadline and a supply chain gap that REalloys intends to resolve,” CEO Lipi Sternheim said in Thursday’s announcement.
APPALACHIA SECURES DOMESTIC FEEDSTOCK
The Patriot agreement is not centered on a conventional mine development story.
Patriot reports access to roughly 2 billion metric tons of above-ground rare earth-bearing material spread across more than 150 tested sites throughout the Appalachian Basin. The resource base contains more than 40 U.S.-designated critical minerals, including neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium.
REalloys isn’t the only company racing to lock up domestic rare earth feedstock.
MP Materials Corp. (NYSE: MP), the operator of Mountain Pass in California, the only active rare earth mine in the United States, secured a landmark public-private partnership with the Department of Defense in 2025 that included a $400 million equity investment, a 10-year price floor on NdPr oxide at $110 per kilogram, and a 10-year magnet offtake agreement from the company’s new Texas facility. The company posted record first-quarter 2026 results in May, with NdPr oxide production up 63% year-over-year to 917 metric tons and revenue reaching $90.6 million. MP is also commissioning heavy rare earth separation at Mountain Pass, including terbium and dysprosium, the same materials that make the Appalachian feedstock so strategically relevant.
The Appalachian agreement comes just days after REalloys provided a major update on its Saskatchewan partnership with the Saskatchewan Research Council.
REalloys (NASDAQ: ALOY) is building its supply chain upstream around the SRC’s commercial rare earth processing operation in Saskatoon, and downstream at REalloys’ metallization and alloying platform in Euclid, Ohio.
Under its agreements with SRC, REalloys has committed roughly $20.6 million toward targeted upgrades, engineering, permitting, commissioning, and expanded throughput capacity at the Saskatoon facility. The upgrades are expected to increase NdPr output by another 25% while doubling dysprosium and terbium production. Target annual output now stands at approximately 525 tonnes of NdPr, 30 tonnes of dysprosium, and 15 tonnes of terbium.
In exchange, REalloys secured exclusive preferred rights to as much as 80% of the facility’s expanded commercial output, giving the company long-term access to one of the only multi-feedstock commercial-scale rare earth processing streams in North America.
Separately, REalloys contracted SRC to design, build, and commission a standalone commercial-scale heavy rare earth metallization system dedicated specifically to dysprosium and terbium metal production. Once completed, that system will be transferred to the company’s Ohio facility, significantly expanding downstream heavy rare earth metallization capacity for U.S. defense customers.
GREENLAND ADDS SCALE
The Saskatchewan buildout is only one part of the supply chain. A recent Greenland deal combines one of the most sought-after rare earths venues in the world with the American domestic supply chain. And it’s been a behind-the-scenes battle with China all the way.
Last month, REalloys signed a definitive 15-year offtake agreement with Critical Metals Corp. covering 15% of Phase 1 production from the Tanbreez project in southern Greenland, one of the largest known heavy rare earth deposits in the world.
Critical Metals has disclosed Phase 1 production capacity of up to 15,000 metric tons of rare earth concentrate annually, with REalloys securing rights to 15% of monthly production as well as priority access to dysprosium- and terbium-rich concentrate streams.
Tanbreez also differs from most rare earth projects because of its unusually large heavy rare earth component. Critical Metals estimates roughly 27% of the deposit’s rare earth profile consists of heavy rare earths, a much higher proportion than most deposits dominated by light rare earth materials.
Tanbreez is so strategically valuable that it’s been at the center of a geopolitical tug-of-war between Washington and Beijing. Earlier this year, Reuters reported that U.S. and Danish officials privately urged the project’s owners not to sell to Chinese-linked buyers, reflecting growing concerns over China’s dominance of the rare earth supply chain. The project ultimately ended up under U.S.-based Critical Metals, preserving Western control of one of the world’s largest known heavy rare earth deposits at a time when governments are scrambling to secure non-Chinese sources of dysprosium and terbium.
Critical Metals Corp. (NASDAQ: CRML), the counterparty in REalloys’ Tanbreez offtake agreement, now holds a 92.5% stake in the project following its acquisition of the remaining interest in April 2026. The company broke ground on a pilot facility in Qaqortoq, Greenland, in January, engineered for Arctic conditions, with completion targeted for mid-2026. To date, Critical Metals has pre-sold roughly 75% of Tanbreez’s planned Phase 1 output to customers primarily in the United States and Europe, with REalloys’ 15-year agreement covering the dysprosium- and terbium-rich priority streams. Mining operations are targeted to begin in 2027, with first production expected by mid-2028.
SEVEN MONTHS TO AN ALL-AMERICAN RARE EARTHS SUPPLY CHAIN
The Department of War is leading the call for American rare earths, with a May memorandum to REalloys emphasizing the urgency of securing domestic supply before the New Year, with Dysprosium (Dy) and Terbium (TB), where REalloys has all the leverage, topping the list.
“REalloys is building the only large-scale heavy rare earth metallization platform in North America outside of China, purpose-engineered to produce defense-grade dysprosium and terbium metal at commercial scale with a zero-adversary-nexus supply chain,” the company said.
Led by the Who’s Who of the defense industry and Pentagon insiders, REalloys’ Euclid facility is already tackling the most complex step in the rare earth supply chain: metallization. This is the point where rare earth oxides are chemically reduced into high-purity metal and alloyed into the materials manufacturers actually use to produce permanent magnets.
It is also the least developed part of the supply chain outside China.
Some of that ground is starting to close. Energy Fuels Inc. (NYSE American: UUUU), which operates the White Mesa Mill in Utah, the only fully licensed conventional uranium mill in the United States, announced in March 2026 that it had produced the first kilogram of 99.9% pure terbium oxide from domestically mined ore, following initial dysprosium production in mid-2025. The company is targeting commercial-scale heavy rare earth output by Q4 2026, using ore sourced from mines in Florida and Georgia. It’s a meaningful data point: the feedstock exists on U.S. soil, the processing capability is coming online, and the question now is how fast the rest of the supply chain, metallization, alloying, magnet manufacturing, can catch up.
“Metallization is the least developed part of the value chain outside China,” REalloys co-founder Tim Johnston explained. “It requires deep, accumulated operating expertise and process control systems capable of managing complex variables in continuous production. Even with capital and strong execution, replicating that capability typically takes three to seven years or more, with meaningful technical and qualification risk.”
“We’ve already solved the hardest part, proving that rare earth metallization and alloying can be done domestically to the specifications real customers require,” Johnston said.
And it’s not only the Pentagon and the defense industry banking on this new American supply chain …
Rare earth magnets are one of the economy’s hidden operating systems.
Electric vehicles, consumer electronics, industrial robotics, and AI infrastructure all depend on permanent magnets made from rare earth alloys that North America has struggled to produce at scale for decades.
The industries built around those magnets are enormous: roughly $500 billion in annual EV sales, a $1 trillion consumer electronics market, hundreds of billions in industrial automation and robotics, and massive AI infrastructure investments that continue to climb.
A disruption in rare earth supply could prove more difficult to manage than a closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Oil can be rerouted, substituted, or released from strategic reserves. Rare earth magnets cannot. If those materials become unavailable, there is no quick substitute. Building new mines takes years. Building metallization and magnet manufacturing capacity takes even longer. That is why Washington is now spending billions of dollars trying to rebuild capabilities that were allowed to migrate overseas decades ago. REalloys is bringing it back home.
By. Michael Kern
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