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Posted: 2022-05-01 06:10:18

Shortly after Amanda Lacaze took over as chief executive of rare earths miner Lynas, she gave its shareholders an undertaking: when the boomtime arrives, Lynas would be ready.

It was not a small ask. While all commodity markets are prone to boom and bust, Australia-listed Lynas – the only major producer of rare earths outside China – has known more hard times than most.

In the 2010s, the price of its products had crashed to rock bottom, and debt was piling higher. Meanwhile, local opposition was growing to the low-level radioactive waste produced at its Malaysian processing plant which began operations in 2013. It came to a head in 2018 when the government added a condition to the renewal of the company’s operating licence, requiring it to remove the waste from Malaysia by the following year or shut it down. Some thought the business could be on the verge of collapse.

“There may have been a few times when I put my head down on the desk,” Lacaze tells The Age and the Herald.

Lynas chief executive Amanda Lacaze.

Lynas chief executive Amanda Lacaze.Credit:Joe Armao

But in volatile global commodity markets, much can change in four years, and today, rare earths – a group of 17 metals needed to make permanent magnets for products such as smartphones, military weapons, wind turbines and, crucially, electric cars – are back in hot demand amid the global push to electrify transport and cut carbon emissions.

Benchmark prices for Lynas’ key metals neodymium and praseodymium – NdPr, for short – were sitting around $US35 a kilogram just two years ago but have risen as high as $US120, says Lacaze. Phone calls from buyers looking for long-term purchase agreements have become markedly more urgent.

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“That’s useful, but theoretical, if you don’t have an operating plant that your people can run efficiently,” she says. “We did our heavy lifting in the tough years.”

While the journey Lynas has taken to get here has been “not so simple”, it has emerged today in an enviable position. The company, which mines its rare earths in Western Australia and ships the raw material to Malaysia for processing into rare earth oxides, has overcome its long-running saga with Malaysian politicians, secured environmental approvals from the government to build a permanent waste-disposal facility, and had its crucial licence to operate in the country renewed. Last week, in a new milestone, construction began on a $500 million processing plant in Kalgoorlie, WA, to process concentrate from its mine at Mt Weld.

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