CRITICAL MINERALSThe Country’s Largest Magnesium Supplier Shut Down. Now What?
The U.S. supply of the critical mineral looks uncertain. The largest producer, US Magnesium, filed for bankruptcy in September. Its half-century-old Rowley smelting plant on the west shore of Utah’s famed lake could shutter for good. US Magnesium’s bankruptcy has consequences for the supply of a critical mineral — and the environment.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and The Salt Lake Tribune, a nonprofit newsroom in Utah.
Only a few years ago, if you popped open a can of soda anywhere in the United States, the container you held more likely than not contained bits of magnesium harvested from the Great Salt Lake.
Now, the country’s supply of the critical mineral looks uncertain. The largest producer, US Magnesium, filed for bankruptcy in September. Its half-century-old Rowley smelting plant on the west shore of Utah’s famed lake could shutter for good.
The news comes as a relief for many environmental and Great Salt Lake advocates, but it also stokes broader anxieties over the supply chain for a material used in all kinds of products from car parts to wind turbines to solar-panel scaffolding and missiles.
“If we remove any [magnesium production] capacity we have here, that means that we’re wholly dependent, essentially, on imports,” said Simon Jowitt, Nevada’s state geologist and the director of the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology.
Other industry insiders say losing US Magnesium isn’t necessarily a cause for alarm.
“They haven’t been producing, really, for about three years,” said John Haack, president of Tennessee-based MagPro LLC, a magnesium metal recycling company. “The marketplace has pretty much adjusted.”
Commercial magnesium comes from evaporating salty brine or seawater, mining dolomite rock, or recycling scrap metal. Until its production plant shut down in late 2021 due to equipment failures, US Magnesium asserted that it was the largest source of primary, non-recycled magnesium in North America.
“There is no other significant producer of primary magnesium in the United States,” said Ron Thayer, the company’s president, in a sworn declaration filed in federal bankruptcy court on September 10, “and primary magnesium is a critical component to United States defense contractors.” It will take a $40 million investment for magnesium production to resume at the Rowley plant, Thayer later testified in a deposition.
Just how much magnesium the company produced each year before it shut down is a carefully guarded trade secret. The U.S. Geological Survey reported this year, however, that the United States has the capacity to produce 64,000 metric tons of primary magnesium metal, compared to China’s 1.8 million tons.
