Today, China dominates rare-earth mining and processing. But that wasn’t always the case. Solcoa’s @hoomanrenezhad explains how the West lost its rare-earth mojo: "So contrary to popular belief, we do mine in the West. We have an enormous rare earth mine in Australia. There’s one in California." “The actual raw feedstock is not rare." “The bottleneck is what you do after it. It’s the processing. That is something that we’re completely unable to do in the West." “We actually invented these processes in America." "The technologies used to make rare earths in China today are American technologies from the Manhattan Project.” “We built this technology and these systems, and then we shipped it to China. China dominated. They matured it. They took over.” Now his company is trying to bring that capability back to the U.S. with a process built for today’s economics. “If we were just copying that same technology stack again, it was impossible. The economics don’t close.”