Radify’s sci-fi plasma reactors could break China’s dominance of rare earth elements

Rare earth elements might represent small slivers of the global metals market, but they’re big sticks on the geopolitical stage, where China wields its considerable heft as a bargaining chip during trade disputes.

Countries like the U.S. have started taking steps to reverse China’s dominance. New mines have opened, and manufacturers are popping up to make magnets and motors. But it has been a slow process. China built its position over several decades

“The unfortunate part is that in order to be able to support an entire industrial base, you’ve got to have that whole supply chain node-matched in terms of capacity,” Zach Detweiler, co-founder and CEO of Radify Metals, told TechCrunch. He thinks one node in particular has been overlooked, the part that turns metal oxides into pure metals. “That’s this missing middle we’ve identified,” he said.

Most metal refining uses either heat or water (in combination with other elements) to strip metal oxides of their oxygen, leaving pure metal that’s easier to incorporate into alloys that make, for example, stronger magnets or more efficient electronics. Both processes are effective, but also highly polluting.

Another option has been known for a while, but it was considered too expensive to use in commercial production. It involves stripping oxygen using plasma, which is basically a superheated soup of super-energetic particles. The process’s only waste is water vapor.

Now, Radify thinks it has cracked the plasma problem through a combination of more efficient power electronics and some clever engineering to handle the metallic powders. It recently gave TechCrunch an exclusive look at its technology. The startup has raised just under $3 million from investors including Overture, Founders Inc., Mana Ventures, and Acequia Capital.

Radify said its reactor can transform a wide range of metal oxides. Today, it’s focused on dysprosium and samarium, two rare earths that are key ingredients in magnets and electronics.

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Inside the reactor, hydrogen is heated until it forms a plasma, then metal oxide powder is blown into the chamber, where it’s reduced — that is, the oxygen that’s bound to the metal is removed. On the other end, pure metal emerges. Need to make a different metal? Just tweak the operating parameters for the reactor.

The design allows the company to make smaller reactors compared with the massive equipment the industry uses today. That could reduce manufacturing costs while also adding flexibility.

“When China bottoms out the price of dysprosium and starts selling it for a dollar a kilogram because they want to kill a lot of the businesses out there, we don’t die because we can pivot to titanium or zirconium,” Detweiler said. “We become substantially more resilient to a lot of the volatility that’s endemic of the metals industry.”

Currently, the five-strong Radify team is refining the technology in its lab in Campbell, California. It hopes to produce several kilograms of pure metal per day by the end of the year. In the coming months, it plans to raise more money to build a pilot reactor capable of making up to 100 kilograms per day.

If Radify can reproduce the results it’s seeing today at a larger scale, it could give Chinese producers a run for their money. Today, rare earths outside of China sell for several times the Chinese price. Detweiler thinks that Radify can produce rare earths that cost just 50% more than China’s prices in the near term. “But I also expect Chinese spot prices to go up,” he added. Once the company starts scaling, it expects to reach parity and possibly lower.

Beyond rare earths, the company is exploring a range of other metals, including hafnium, uranium, scandium, and titanium, which are used in electronics, aerospace, and other fields. The plasma-based technology also works on more widely used metals like iron and aluminum, though currently its not efficient enough to challenge the incumbents. But if it eventually gets to that point, “we’ll have completely changed how humans make metal,” Detweiler said.