Reinvent rare earth processing; upend the status quo. That’s the small task founders of Long Beach start-up Maglut Heavy Industries set themselves and they say they’re now on their way.
Emerging from stealth this week with a closed-event reveal of the company’s ARC-1 – or Advanced Rare Earth Chromatography First Generation – separating process, Maglut says it is talking to both potential feedstock suppliers and offtake partners for the purified oxides it is generating. CEO and co-founder Curtis Wu said Maglut’s next milestone was demonstration-scale deployment of its process.
It has also embarked on a big talent recruitment drive, its website touting for chemists, geochemists, metallurgists, engineers and process control and IP experts. This is a small firm in a rush.
“We were able to validate that this technology works. The next stage of our growth is validating the scale-up,” chief operating officer and co-founder, Azhar Yerzhanova (right), says of work that has produced “99.9% purity and higher” rare earth oxides from various feed material. Wu adds: “We’ve increased the scale 1000x. In the next stage we have to increase by another 100x. We believe that if we can do that we can put America back on top.”
The reference to China’s dominance of global rare earth processing and metallisation, and broader stranglehold on vital industrial and defence supply chains, features in a lot of US start-up investor presentation decks at the moment.
Maglut has raised US$3.1 million of pre-seed funding to advance its chromatography-based platform “to process and refine rare earth elements domestically” in the US.
California deep-tech VC funds Julian Capital and Wave Function Ventures backed the raise.
Rare earth separation and refining is dominated by solvent extraction methods that are energy-intensive and produce substantial toxic waste. Yerzhanova says Maglut’s proprietary process is informed by biotechnology techniques used in the purification of biological medicines.
“Our system is water-based,” she says.
“With our in-house resin running chromatography on rare earths we’re able to drive down the cost significantly by increasing the performance,” Wu (below) says. “All 17 rare earths will come out separated in a single pass.
“The genius of our approach is that it doesn’t just release all the rare earths at the same time; It actually releases them in sequence.
“Because they come out at different times you can just collect them separately and you can get really high purity and really good separation.
“We think that our approach is the only approach that can credibly reach cost superiority relative to China. We don’t see anything else out there that we think is credible.
“Rare earth processing is one of the clearest examples of a sovereign capability America let atrophy.
“The countries that control access to critical minerals will shape the next era of technology. Our mission is to rebuild domestic manufacturing of rare earth materials by reimagining the way they are processed.”
