The rare-earth elements (REEs) are a set of 17 nearly indistinguishable lustrous silvery-white soft heavy metals. They have diverse applications in electrical and electronic components, lasers, glass, magnetic materials, and industrial processes.  
      The U.S. company EF Inc (EF) will become a commercial supplier of REEs in 2021. It has entered a three-year supply agreement to receive a minimum of twenty five hundred tons per year of natural monazite sands from which it will recover uranium at its Mesa mill in Utah. A Canadian company named International Consolidated Uranium Inc has announced that it has acquired the Laguna Salad uranium project in
Argentina because it will also be able to produce vanadium from the project.
     EF is located in Lakewood, Colorado. It expects to begin processing the monazite sands from Chemours’ Offerman Mineral Sand Plant in Georgia in the winter of 2021. It plans to recover uranium and a marketable mix of REE carbonate from the sands. It says that producing REEs will be an important step in re-establishing a fully integrated U.S. REE supply chain. It estimates that REEs in the monazite sands coming from Chemours will supply close to ten percent of the total current U.S. REE demand.
      EF says that it is involved in discussions with other parties to obtain additional supplies of monazite. It is working with the U.S. Department of Energy in order to evaluate the possibilities of processing other types of REE and uranium bearing ores produced from coal-based resources. EF’s plan is to process more than fifteen thousand tons of monazite and other sources of ore each year for the recovery of REEs and Uranium. This should provide more than fifty percent of the REEs consumed in the U.S. on an annual basis. The U.S. currently imports almost all of its REE, uranium and vanadium even though it has sufficient domestic resources for them.
      Mark Chalmers is the President and CEO of EF. He said, “Our goal is to domestically produce the raw materials needed for clean energy and advanced technologies, while creating green jobs in an economically challenged part of the country … Importantly, in the United States we are highly regulated and operate to the highest standards, which means we produce these minerals more responsibly than many of the countries from which we currently import.”
     U.S. President Trump declared a national emergency in October to deal with the threat to U.S. national security, foreign policy and economy from its undue reliance on supplies of critical minerals from other nations.
     International Consolidated Uranium (ICU) has signed an option agreement to purchase U308 Corporation’s one hundred percent interest in the Laguna Salada uranium and vanadium project in Argentina. In 2014, a preliminary economic assessment was made of the project in the Chubut Province of Argentina. The assessment projected an annual production of six hundred thousand pounds of U3O8, a uranium compound and one million pounds of V2O5, a vanadium compound. The cash cost of production would be about twenty-two dollars per pound of U3O8, net of a vanadium by-product credit. The deposit in Argentina has almost four million pounds of U3O8.
     ICU recently signed option agreements to acquire a one hundred percent interest in the Ben Lomond and Georgetown uranium projects in Australia from Mega Uranium and a one hundred percent interest in the Mountain Lake uranium project in Nunavut, Canada from IsoEnergy Ltd. Philip Williams is the CEO of ICU. He said that the company believes that Laguna Salada is one of the more advanced projects in its portfolio with substantial mining and processing work done by the previous owners. He also said, “We are also attracted to the project for its vanadium by-product, the exploration potential beyond the known resources and the jurisdiction due to its pro-nuclear stance.”