■ ECONOMICS
What does a kilogram
actually cost to make?
Two parts. Unit economics: a plant model with every assumption yours to overwrite, run identically across four archetypes. Side by side: the producers on the measures that decide whether a project gets financed.
Break the business yourself
Every project on this map runs the same machine. Feed goes in at some grade, some fraction of it is NdPr, some fraction of that survives to a separated oxide, and the whole cost of the plant lands on whatever comes out the door. The lever is not the size of the orebody. It is grade multiplied by NdPr share multiplied by recovery, and then the capital cost divided across the result.
The four columns are archetypes rather than companies: a hard rock integrated operation, an ionic clay project, a monazite byproduct stream bought as feed, and a magnet recycler. They differ by three or four orders of magnitude on feed tonnage and on grade, which is the point. Read the revenue per tonne of feedstock row to see why a recycler can pay to truck material across a continent and a clay miner cannot.
Provenance warning, before you quote anything. No producer publishes a fully-loaded cost per kilogram. Every default in the table below is an assumption assembled for this site and run through identical arithmetic for every column. They are starting points to argue with, not reported results. Substitute your own and stop depending on anyone's estimate, including this one.
Hover any output's name for the formula behind it.
What this model does not do
It treats every rare earth other than NdPr as a flat credit per kilogram. That is a simplification, and it is the main thing to fix before anyone leans on the output.
The industry convention is better, and it is worth stating precisely.
Basket allocation changes answers rather than decorating them. A deposit heavy in cerium and lanthanum carries tonnage that earns almost nothing, and how much of the plant's cost you push onto the NdPr decides whether the project reads as cheap or marginal. Rebuilding this calculator to output C1, C2 and C3 per element is the single highest-value change on the roadmap.
On price assumptions
The price input above defaults to a round number on purpose. Published long-term price forecasts for NdPr, dysprosium and terbium are the product a subscription business sells, and they are not reproduced here. Put your own number in the field, or your provider's, and run both a base and an upside case. The margin picture flips between them, and on published margin curves a meaningful share of projects sits below the line in the base case and above it in the upside. That is the whole investment question in one chart you have to go and license.
The producers, side by side
Two to four companies in the columns, the measures you choose in the rows. Every figure carries a marker for how well it is known: Disclosed, Reported, Estimated, Carried. A blank says why it is blank, because "not disclosed" and "does not exist separately" are different facts.
Events per quarter