Magnet Projects Bring Big Spending to U.S.
In addition to holding items on our refrigerators, magnets have a variety of purposes in the industrial sector and are used in high-tech equipment like wind turbines, electric vehicles, power transformers, health care, and aerospace and defense. Compared to conventional magnets, rare earth magnets are known for their exceptional strength and durability, making them essential in a wide range of applications, but these magnets come with downsides such as a scarcity of rare earth elements. Industrial Info is tracking more than $1.5 billion worth of projects involving magnets, including both those that employ rare earth elements and those that don’t as well as a plant for recycling magnets.
One of the largest of these U.S. magnet projects comes from Germany’s VACUUMSCHMELZE GmbH & Co. KG (Hanau) in Sumter, South Carolina, about 100 miles north of Charleston. Operating under its U.S. monicker Vac Magnetics LLC, the company is building a grassroot plant that will manufacture rare earth magnets for the automobile sector. The plant will produce high volumes of rare earth magnets, supplying a range of vehicles from General Motors Company (NYSE:GM) (Detroit, Michigan), including the Chevrolet Silverado, Cadillac Lyriq and the Hummer. Design-build firm Evans General Contractors Incorporated (Atlanta, Georgia) is expected to wrap up construction toward the end of next year. Subscribers to Industrial Info's Global Market Intelligence (GMI) Project Database can learn more by viewing the project report.
Some companies are taking a top-down approach to magnet production, mining the rare earths used in them in addition to manufacturing the magnets. Texas Mineral Resources Corporation (Sierra Blanca, Texas) and USA Rare Earth LLC (New York, New York) completed construction of a pilot-scale rare earth mine and separation facility in Hudspeth County, Texas, in 2022. Having demonstrated the project's technical and economic feasibility, the companies are ready to bring the project to full-scale operations, with an aim of supplying a magnet-production facility in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
The Oklahoma plant will have a pre-used magnet production line transferred from North Carolina to produce 1,200 tons per year of rare earth magnets. Subscribers can learn more by viewing the project reports on the expansion of the mine and separation facility in Sierra Blanca, Texas, and the magnet-production plant in Oklahoma.
When rare earth magnets operate at high temperatures for extended periods or are exposed to other magnetic fields, they can sometimes lose their magnetism, making magnet recycling an up-and-coming field. Enter Noveon Magnetics Incorporated (San Marcos, Texas), which completed an expansion of its neodymium magnet-recycling facility in San Marcos in 2024. Upon reaching the 2,000 tons per year of recycling capacity that the expansion provides, Noveon will continue ramping up the plant by 2,000 tons per year each year until reaching a capacity of 10,000 tons per year. The ramping project could begin this year, taking up to five years with breaks between capacity additions. Subscribers can click here to learn more about the project.
With the rarity of rare earths production in the U.S., some companies are working to develop powerful magnets that don’t employ these elements. One contender is iron-nitrogen magnets, which benefit from abundant and relatively inexpensive materials, capabilities of working at high temperatures without magnetic loss and magnetic potential that could exceed rare earth magnets. Niron Magnetics Incorporated (Minneapolis, Minnesota) is developing iron-nitrogen magnets and is scaling up a previously completed pilot plant in Minneapolis to 100,000 kilograms per year of magnets. The aim is to further the technology to construct a commercial-scale plant of up to 10 million kilograms per year eventually, although this remains some years in the future. Subscribers can learn more by viewing the reports on the pilot plant’s scale-up and commercial-scale plant.
Subscribers to Industrial Info’s GMI Database can click here to view reports for all of the projects discussed in this article and click here for the related plant profiles.
