Ionic Technologies

Why rare earth FLUORIDES are the real hand-off to metal (1 Oct 2026) 🚨🧲 Everyone talks about rare earth SEPARATION. Almost nobody talks about the step that actually turns a separated oxide into magnet metal, and that step wants a FLUORIDE, not an oxide. Ionic Technologies (ASX: IXR) is now funding research to make that conversion without hydrogen fluoride. Here's why it matters. 🧵 🌏 The Choke Point Nobody Watches ⛏️Mining gets the headlines, separation just starting to get some love, but the Western supply chain breaks one step further downstream: 🔥metallisation. China holds roughly 90% of the world's capacity to turn rare earth oxides into metal and alloy, and produced about 91% of refined magnet rare earths in 2024. A separated oxide made in Belfast, Eneabba or Texas is worth nothing to a magnet maker until something converts it to metal. 🏭 ⚗️ Two Ways to Make the Metal, Both Want Fluoride 🔹 Light rare earths (Nd, Pr): molten-salt electrolysis in a fluoride bath (NdF₃–LiF) at ~1,050°C. The oxide only dissolves to a few weight percent in that bath, so an oxide-fed cell lives on a knife edge between sludge at the bottom and oxide starvation at the anode. 🔹 Heavy rare earths (Dy, Tb): calciothermic reduction. Their melting points (~1,412°C and ~1,356°C) sit above practical electrolysis bath temperatures, so they are made by reducing the fluoride with calcium metal. The by-product CaF₂ melts at ~1,418°C and floats off as a clean slag. Try it with the oxide and you get CaO, melting near 2,570°C, a refractory crust that traps the metal. For Dy and Tb, fluoride isn't a preference, it's the chemistry. 👇 🔗xitter.gq/roblun1/status/2060998… 💨 The Hidden Emissions Problem 🔥When an oxide-fed electrolysis cell runs lean on dissolved oxide, the anode starts oxidising the fluoride bath itself: the "anode effect". 🌬️The off-gas is CF₄ and C₂F₆, perfluorocarbons with global-warming potentials of roughly 6,600× and 11,000× CO₂. RWTH Aachen measurements found continuous emission of about 74 g CF₄ and 12 g C₂F₆ per kilogram of rare earth metal, hundreds of kilograms of CO₂-equivalent per kilogram of metal, and estimated around 25 million tonnes CO₂-eq a year from rare earth electrolysis globally. Keeping cells fluoride-rich and oxide-fed in balance is how you suppress it. 🌡️ ☠️ So Why Doesn't the West Just Make Fluorides? Because the industrial route is hydrogen fluoride. Wet: react the rare earth salt with HF, then dry at 600–700°C in a dry HF atmosphere. Dry: react the oxide with a 200% excess of anhydrous HF at 700°C+. Or use ammonium bifluoride, which releases HF when heated. Anhydrous HF is one of the most dangerous chemicals in industry, the US Ames National Laboratory calls the HF hazard "a considerable technical gap" for a Western rare earth metal supply chain. That gap is why so many Western flowsheets stop at oxide and ship it east. 🚢 🔬 The HF-Free Breakthroughs Ames National Laboratory (Nature Communications, 2025) made NaNdF₄ by reacting neodymium salts with sodium fluoride in water at room temperature, dried it in air with no HF evolved (confirmed with an HF gas detector to 600°C), and reduced it with calcium at ~880°C to neodymium metal at 70–80% yield, with the sodium fluoride acting as its own flux. The metal assayed 925 ppm oxygen, 176 ppm carbon and 52 ppm nitrogen, real metal, XRD-confirmed, from a lab-scale tantalum crucible. Solid-state and mechanochemical fluorination with fluoride salts are the other branches being explored. 🧪 👇 🔗osti.gov/servlets/purl/25714… 🏁 Who Is Moving on the Fluoride Step 🔹 REalloys (NASDAQ: ALOY), the US heavy rare earth metallisation company building with the Saskatchewan Research Council, announced in March 2026 a patent-pending HF-free fluorination process for converting rare earth oxides into metallisation-grade fluorides: Independent lab analysis showed 0.34 wt% oxygen, below the ~1 wt% metal-makers typically require. The reagent chemistry is undisclosed, the result is laboratory scale, and REalloys itself lists pilot and continuous production as still to be proven.👇 🔗realloys.com/realloys-press-… 🔹 Less Common Metals in Cheshire is the Western metal-maker at the end of this chain. It has run Nd and NdPr fused-salt electrolysis since 2017 (over 120 tonnes a year) alongside DyFe alloy, and historically made rare earth metal by vacuum reduction of the fluoride with calcium, exactly the kind of customer a dry, metal-ready fluoride is made for. 🇬🇧🇺🇸 🔹 Ionic Technologies is the recycler at the front of the chain, now co-funding the research to bridge the gap (details below). So the field has a national lab proving the science, a metal-maker filing patents, an established Western metal-maker that needs the product, and a magnet recycler funding the research. 🧭 📜 The IP Angle This is also an intellectual-property race, and both ends are visible in primary documents. REalloys says it has filed patent applications covering its fluorination chemistry and process design, and lists the outcome and scope of those applications among its risks. The QUB advert asks the Research Fellow to contribute to patent preparation, and EPSRC's partnership terms put the business partner's cash alongside the grant. Separation IP got Ionic Technologies to 99.5%+ oxide; protectable fluoride IP would be the next link. Early days, but the filings are where this gets decided. 🔐 🇬🇧 Where Ionic Technologies Comes In A two-year Research Fellow post at Queen's University Belfast, Prof Swadzba-Kwasny's group, funded through an EPSRC Materials Innovation Partnership with Ionic Technologies , will develop hydrogen fluoride-free routes to convert recycled rare earth oxide feedstocks into rare earth fluorides, including the calcination and powder engineering needed for downstream metallisation, with industrial-scale trials at Ionic Technologies. EPSRC's scheme requires the business partner to match the grant in cash (minimum £250k award), so this is Ionic Technologies' own money going into the step after separation. Ionic Technologies shared the ad itself, tagging Ionic Rare Earths. 🤝 👇 🔗hrwebapp.qub.ac.uk/tlive_web… 👀 Bottom Line Separation IP gets you to 99.5%+ oxide. The oxide-to-fluoride step is what gets that oxide to a metal furnace safely, and today that step is dominated by HF chemistry in China. The West is finally moving on it from every direction: Ames National Laboratory has proved the HF-free chemistry in the lab, REalloys has filed patents on its own route, Less Common Metals is the UK metal-maker that would consume the product, and Ionic Technologies is putting its own cash into the QUB research. If Belfast can hand metal-makers a dry, metal-ready fluoride made without HF, it extends the Ionic Technologies flowsheet one link closer to the magnet. Nobody has this at commercial scale yet, REalloys is lab results, QUB is TRL 1–3 with demo-plant trials, but it's the right problem, and the right players are now working on it. @realloys @IONICTECH_UK @QUBelfast #RareEarths #IXR #IonicTechnologies #QUB #Belfast #Metallisation #RareEarthFluorides #NdFeB #Dysprosium #Terbium #NdPr #MagnetRecycling #CriticalMinerals #EPSRC #PFC #SupplyChain #MineToMagnet #REalloys #LessCommonMetals #AmesLab #IP

🚨🇺🇸 Missouri could become a major new hub for rare-earth magnet recycling, and Ionic Rare Earths’ Belfast technology is central to the plan. US Strategic Metals and Ionic Rare Earths USA, a wholly owned subsidiary of IXR, are proposing a 50:50 joint venture to develop what they intend to be America’s first integrated rare-earth permanent-magnet recycling facility near Fredericktown, Missouri. 🧲♻️ 🇺🇸USSM Chief Commercial Officer Mike Hollomon discussing the proposed Fredericktown facility, Ionic’s Belfast technology, targeted products, jobs and commissioning window. 🏭The plant would be housed inside an existing 50,000-square-foot building at USSM’s permitted critical-metals campus, where the company plans to process as many as 18 strategic metals. 🇬🇧 Ionic brings the technology: Ionic Technologies’ patented hydrometallurgical process, developed and demonstrated in Belfast, Northern Ireland, is designed to recover high-purity individual rare-earth oxides from end-of-life magnets and manufacturing scrap. 🇺🇸 USSM brings the site and capital: USSM would contribute US$95 million towards construction, while the partners would jointly fund an initial US$5 million engineering and demonstration program. Target feedstocks include: 🔹 End-of-life and production-scrap NdFeB magnets 🔹 Samarium-cobalt magnets and manufacturing waste 🔹 Magnet swarf and other rare-earth-rich secondary materials Potential recovered products include: ⚛️ Neodymium and praseodymium 🔥 Dysprosium and terbium 🛡️ Samarium 🎯 Yttrium and other strategic rare earths Hollomon said the facility could create 50–60 jobs and is expected to open in late 2027 or early 2028. This is the real strategic prize: retaining valuable magnet materials inside the United States and transforming domestic waste into separated rare-earth oxides that can re-enter Western supply chains. 🔄🏭 For Ionic Rare Earths, Missouri could provide a highly capital-efficient pathway to commercialise its separation IP at US scale, linking Belfast’s technology platform with US feedstock, infrastructure and demand. ⚠️ Important context: the 50:50 joint venture remains based on a non-binding term sheet. Definitive agreements, engineering, feedstock contracts, commercial capacity and final construction commitments must still be secured. But the strategic model is compelling: 🇬🇧 Belfast technology + 🇺🇸 Missouri infrastructure + ♻️ American magnet waste = a new domestic rare-earth supply chain. 🎧🔗 podcasts.apple.com/de/podcas… @IONIC_RE @IONICTECH_UK @ussmetals #NdPr #DyTb #Yttrium #Dysprosium #terbium #strategicrareearths #MAIL #REO #IonicRareEarths #IonicTechnologies #RareEarths #MagnetRecycling #CriticalMinerals #NdFeB #CircularEconomy #SupplyChain #Missouri #IXR