USA13 July, 20262 min read
Pentagon Invests $25 Million In ReElement Technologies To Expand Gallium And Germanium Production In Indiana
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DoD invests $25 million in Indiana-based ReElement to expand gallium and germanium production. Gallium and germanium are critical minerals for defense technologies like radar and missiles.
Pentagon backs ReElement
The U.S. Department of Defense announced a $25 million direct investment in ReElement Technologies Corp., an Indiana-based critical mineral refiner, to accelerate domestic production of gallium and germanium.
The funding, executed by the department's Economic Defense Unit in partnership with the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment, will support equipment installation and working capital at ReElement's Marion, Indiana refining campus.
Tech Times said the announcement came three days after Reuters reported ReElement stopped pursuing a separate, earlier $80 million Pentagon loan after failing to satisfy the federal government's due diligence requirements.
The San Joaquin Valley Sun said ReElement will use the funding to purchase and install equipment at its planned commercial facility in Marion, Indiana, aiming to refine rare earths and other critical minerals using novel processing technology.
China chokehold and policy
Tech Times framed the move as part of a strategic effort because the U.S. has zero domestic gallium production and no meaningful government stockpile of it, while China produces roughly 98 to 99 percent of the world's primary gallium. It added that every major GaN-based radar system currently deployed across the U.S. military sits downstream of a chokepoint controlled by one government that has twice tightened without warning.
Michael Cadenazzi, Assistant Secretary of War for Industrial Base Policy, said at a Center for a New American Security event in June, "You can dream all day long about scaling [weapons production] but if you don't have germanium, gallium, and rare earths, it is a pipe dream,". The San Joaquin Valley Sun linked the investment to a broader Trump administration initiative to secure domestic supplies of critical minerals and diversify away from China, which it said dominates the global supply chain for rare earths processing and magnet production.
What the money is for
Tech Times said the money will go toward processing end-of-life magnets and recycled industrial scrap into high-purity rare earth oxides, yttrium, gadolinium, germanium, and gallium. It described ReElement's core technology as Ligand Assisted Displacement chromatography, a continuous separation process developed at Purdue University over roughly 40 years and licensed exclusively to ReElement in January 2021.
The San Joaquin Valley Sun said ReElement will use the funding to purchase and install equipment at its planned commercial facility in Marion, Indiana, aiming to refine rare earths and other critical minerals using novel processing technology. South China Morning Post reported the Pentagon said on Monday it would invest US$25 million in ReElement Technologies, with ReElement aiming to use a novel processing technology to refine rare earths and other critical minerals at its planned commercial facility in Marion, Indiana.