Australian critical minerals projects: commitment and readiness
Edition one. The magnet suite. November 2026. Register as at 28 September 2026, 19:58 AEST.
This edition, in numbers
Every figure below is queried from the register at the instant printed on the cover. None is copied from a section and none is estimated. There are no quarter-on-quarter or year-on-year deltas anywhere in this block, because this is the first edition and there is no prior reading to subtract.
| Projects covered | 20, of 130 carried in the register |
| Projects with a binding offtake | 5 of 20, across 7 binding offtake rows |
| Japanese and Korean counterparty rows | 7 rows inside the twenty, across 6 distinct positions, of which 2 bind. Both binding rows are at one operator, Lynas. Sumitomo appears twice at North Stanmore, on a memorandum the company records as expired and on the non-binding Letter of Intent that replaced it. One of the six positions, Dubbo and KCF Energy, is recorded unknown and noagreementdisclosed, and Sections 2 and 3 both state it is a framework agreement rather than an offtake. The count of binding positions is two on any reading |
| Projects whose stage field is set by a government listing | 8 of 20. Their stage field is set by the Resources and Energy Major Projects listing at 31 October 2025 rather than by a JORC report or company study. Seven of the eight also hold a company study fact the stage field does not reflect, and four of those stage fields are stale against the register's own facts. Section 3 names them |
| Facts held | 977 across the twenty, of 1,532 register-wide. Every one carries a document title and a page or section reference. Of the 501 whose value can be machine-checked against the page they cite, 61 do not reproduce on it; five of those 61 fall inside this edition and are named in Section 5 part 12 |
| Grades verified | 26 of 180. The remainder: 77 partly verified, 33 asserted, 39 absent, 5 contradicted |
| Absences, split | The 39 absent grades divide 29 not-in-record and 10 not-searched. The first asserts a fact about the public record; the second says our collection did not reach it, and they are never rendered identically |
| Contradictions carried | 5 contradicted grades, stated and not resolved. Separately the conflict table holds 11 rows against these twenty projects: 7 open and publishable, 3 open and not publishable, 1 resolved. Section 5 part 10 prints all eleven |
The last four rows are the ones no incumbent prints. They state how much of this register is verified, how much is not, which absences are findings about the public record and which are limits of our own collection, and what the register carries unresolved. A reader who has to rely on a standing register has to know all four.
Contents
| Section | What it answers | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Commitment | Who holds the offtake, on what instrument, and what stands between the project and production. One row per project. |
| 2 | Delivery | The gate table and the runway table. What stands in the way, and whether the company can pay for the wait. |
| 3 | Verdicts | One page per project. Produces or does not, when, gated by what. Five questions, nine categories. |
| 4 | What Moved | Offtakes, approvals, funding instruments and stated timelines. In this edition, a baseline rather than a difference. |
| 5 | The Boundary | Where the evidence stops, for the edition as a whole, stated once and in one place. |
| 6 | House Take | Judgement, labelled, so the reader knows exactly where the register stopped and a person started. |
The order is fixed and does not change between editions.
Before you read
This is a register of what the public record establishes about twenty Australian magnet-suite projects, and of where that record goes quiet. Edition one carries all twenty because it is the first and has nothing to difference against. Later editions rotate the verdict pages and report the movement instead.
Section 1 is printed here in full. Sections 2 to 6 are delivered complete with this issue, and what appears under each heading below is that section's opening and its operative findings.
Three rules bind every page.
Every fact is anchored to a document and a page. If a claim cannot name where it came from, it is not in here. That is a statement about the reference and not about whether the reference checks out: 1,532 of 1,532 facts carry one, and of the 501 whose value the register's own checker can test against the cited page, 61 do not reproduce. Section 5 part 12 prints that figure and names the five that fall inside this edition.
A blank never means none. A field that is empty because nobody has published is a different finding from a field that is empty because the work is not done, and the register records which one it is on every grade it carries.
There is no score, no ranking, no valuation, no price forecast and no investment view. Nothing in this issue says one project is better placed than another, and nothing in it is advice.
1. Commitment
The availability map. Every one of the twenty projects.
The interactive availability map is Figure 1, which sits outside this document and is not reproduced here. What follows is the same position in print.
On the uncommitted volume column. It cannot be filled from this register today, and Section 5 part 1 sets out why at length: offtake.volume holds 30 rows across the twenty and every one of them is a sentence rather than a quantity, and planned production is not held on a common basis, so seven projects hold no capacity fact at all and five hold two unreconciled figures in the same field. A percentage would require dividing a sentence by a mixture of ore tonnages, product rates and life-of-mine totals. It would be a number and it would be wrong in a way no reader could see. It is not attempted. The position is described project by project below and it is not totalled.
| Project | Who holds the offtake | Binding or not | Uncommitted volume | The gate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Balranald | Not named. Iluka states customer contracts exist and are confidential | unknown, agreement exists and terms withheld | Not computable | None outstanding on the record. Physical: commissioning took longer than expected |
| Browns Range (Wolverine) | Iluka Resources Ltd | Binding. 30,500 t contained TREO, up to 5.5 ktpa, first 7+ years. The operator discloses that some satisfaction dates for conditions precedent have passed, which may entitle Iluka to terminate | Not computable | Works Approval and Mine Development and Closure Proposal both under assessment. FID not made |
| Copi | An unnamed prominent global Japanese non-ferrous metals enterprise | MOU, terms withheld. An aggregate of about 80 per cent of future production sits across several unnamed counterparties and is not attributable to this row | Not computable | No approval fact recorded |
| Cummins Range (Stage 2) | None | No agreement disclosed for Stage 2 product. Concentrate samples being prepared in support of offtake negotiations | Not computable | No approval fact recorded. Scoping study is the most advanced study held |
| Donald | Energy Fuels Inc (REEC); Astron Ltd by option (HMC); unnamed prospective HMC offtakers | Binding for 100 per cent of Phase 1 and Phase 2 REEC, to its own joint venture partner's mill in Utah. The HMC arrangement is an option, and separate discussions are non-binding | Not computable | Groundwater Extraction Licence under s 51 Water Act 1989 (Vic), required and not obtained. FID not taken at 31 Aug 2026 |
| Dubbo | KCF Energy Co. Ltd | unknown, no agreement disclosed. A framework agreement to introduce third parties, not an offtake. Ran to 31 Dec 2025 and no document held records a renewal | Not computable | FID. The company was removed from the ASX official list on 31 Aug 2026 |
| Eneabba Rare Earths Refinery | An unnamed global automotive company, identity commercial in confidence | Binding. 1,200 t of magnet rare earth oxides from 2028 over four years, take-or-pay on 90 per cent of that volume | Not computable | Physical. Construction under way, commissioning expected 2027 |
| Euston | None | No agreement disclosed, and the finding is not-searched. Euston is not named in Iluka's annual report, half-year report or latest quarterly, and the only Euston-specific document held is a locality map | Not computable | No approval fact recorded. The only document held is a locality map |
| Fingerboards | None | No agreement disclosed. "Offtake Available: 100%", which in that publication is a sales field: the output is entirely unsold | Not computable | Environment Effects Statement. Draft self-referral lodged, no decision recorded |
| Goschen | Iluka Resources Ltd; Mitsui & Co., Ltd; Shenghe Resources (terminated) | Binding for 100 per cent of rare earth concentrate over 20 years, conditional on FID, full funding, approvals and commercial production, any of which the buyer may waive. Mitsui holds a letter of interest over heavy mineral concentrate, terms not published | Not computable | FID, not made, having been planned for mid-2026 |
| Governor Broome | None | No agreement disclosed, and the company states negotiations have not yet been undertaken | Not computable | Retention Licence R70/22 is listed as Granted and held by the transferee in the quarterly for the quarter ended 30 Jun 2026, so the ministerial consent to the transfer has evidently been given. The date it was given is not established by any held document. No other approval fact is recorded |
| Jacinth-Ambrosia | Not named. Iluka sells zircon under contracts it states are confidential | unknown, agreement exists and terms withheld | Not computable | Producing. Both pits recorded as being mined |
| Kalkaroo | None | No agreement disclosed. The Sandfire transaction of 6 Feb 2026 is an earn-in and exploration alliance with no product sales terms | Not computable | No approval fact recorded. Most advanced study held is from 2018 |
| Koppamurra | Neo Performance Materials Inc | Non-binding memorandum over 50 per cent of stage 1 production. No term, tonnage or price published | Not computable | A Mining Lease Application is targeted for 2026 submission per the pre-feasibility study of 25 Jun 2026, and no Mining Lease has been granted |
| Lynas (Mt Weld and Kalgoorlie) | Japan Australia Rare Earths B.V. (JOGMEC and Sojitz); United States Government; JS Link, Inc | Three binding. JARE: 5,000 tpa NdPr firm plus the equivalent of half of all heavy rare earth oxides, to 2038, US$110/kg NdPr floor. United States Government: about US$96 million, stated in value with no tonnage. JS Link: exclusive supply to January 2038, no tonnage published. All three apply company-wide and are not allocated to either site | Not computable | Producing. Kalgoorlie commenced production in 2024 and is in ramp-up |
| Nolans | Traxys North America; an Indian group under India's government-backed magnet scheme | Binding term sheets, not long-form agreements, 500 tpa NdPr plus 7 tpa Dy/Tb each, subject to conditions precedent including the long-form documentation itself. Arafura separately states it has announced five binding offtake commitments; the register holds two and the gap is an open conflict | Not computable | FID taken 21 May 2026. No Northern Territory environmental approval instrument was retrieved in the batch collected |
| North Stanmore | Sumitomo Corporation | A non-binding Letter of Intent for up to 30 per cent of annual production, or 1,000 tpa of MREC including up to 50 t of DyTb, initial five-year term. It replaced the December 2024 MOU, which the company records as having expired on 31 Oct 2025 without a binding term sheet | Not computable | No approval fact recorded. A mining lease grant sits in a grade anchor and in no approval field |
| Sandy Mitchell | None | No agreement disclosed, stated by the company in its own scoping study | Not computable | Mining Licence ML 100409 granted, about 406 ha |
| Wimmera | None | No agreement disclosed. The rare earth concentrate is internal feedstock to its own parent's refinery rather than a marketed product | Not computable | Environment Effects Statement in preparation since a 2019 determination, still not submitted |
| Yangibana | Baotou Sky Rock Rare Earth; China Rare Earth Holdings; Ganzhou Qiandong Rare Earth | Three MOUs from 2017, terms withheld, a combined 6,000 tpa across all three with no individual volume. No document held confirms they survive | Not computable | Part V works approval and operating licence under the Environmental Protection Act 1986 (WA), required and not granted. Miscellaneous Licence G 09/13 pending since Nov 2017 |
The criterion, and what this table does with the rows it does not print separately. The query is every offtake row held against the twenty projects at the instant on the cover, and it returns 30 rows, not 20. Twenty rows are printed, one per project. Sixteen of the 30 rows are merged into six cells: Donald, Goschen, Lynas and Yangibana carry three rows each, and Nolans and North Stanmore carry two each. No row is dropped and every counterparty in all 30 appears in its project's cell.
2. Delivery
Section 1 answered whether the material can be got. This section answers the other half: what stands between each project and production, and whether it can pay for the wait. It carries the gate table for all twenty projects, the runway table built from Appendix 5B item 8.7 and item 4.6 as each company filed them, a part on where the record goes quiet on delivery, a house take and a boundary.
Governor Broome holds the shortest runway in the suite at 1.06 quarters of funding, on cash of A$926,000 at 30 June 2026. North Stanmore reports 8.10 quarters of funding on A$11,184,000 of cash at the same date. Nolans holds the longest runway in the suite by a wide margin.
It states facts and does not weigh them. Four of its fields mean something other than what they appear to mean and it explains each before using it: quarters of funding is the company's own arithmetic and not a judgement, every item 8.7 and 4.6 figure is a whole-of-entity figure and not a project figure, REMP status measures whether money is committed and not whether anything is built, and the Western Australian stage field measures whether dirt has moved.
3. Verdicts
Section 3 carries one page per project, twenty in all. What follows is its opening and its twenty headlines.
What a verdict says, and what it never says
A verdict answers three things about one project: whether the public record establishes that it produces, when, and gated by what. It is a reading of the nine categories against the five questions, anchored line by line, and every page prints all nine category rows with no row omitted. A verdict is not a score, a rank, a valuation or a view on any company. Where the record does not answer, the page says so and says where the search stopped.
180 grades across twenty projects and nine categories: 26 verified, 77 partly verified, 33 asserted, 39 absent, 5 contradicted. Two zero columns in that distribution are findings rather than gaps. No project anywhere in the suite reaches verified on technology readiness, because verified requires sustained production at or near nameplate and the two operating projects cannot reach it. None reaches verified on competing jurisdictions, because no statistical authority publication is held anywhere in this register.
Read the customers and downstream columns together. Twelve of the twenty carry a customers grade above absent. Nineteen of the twenty are absent on downstream requirements. For those nineteen, nothing in the public record held states what a buyer requires of the product the project intends to sell.
The twenty headlines
Every project in the edition. No row omitted. Each line carries the operative finding from that project's verdict. The full verdict, its gate, its nine anchored category rows and its boundary are in Section 3, which uses each project's full name.
| Project | The verdict | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Balranald | Commercial production was reported in June 2026 against a February 2023 FID expecting first production in H1 2025, and no rare earth recovery figure appears anywhere in the record held, while Iluka discloses that customer contracts for the project exist and are commercially confidential without naming a counterparty or a volume. |
| 2 | Browns Range | It holds the only binding, project-specific, arm's length magnet rare earth offtake in the suite, and the company itself discloses that some satisfaction dates for conditions precedent under that agreement have passed, while construction had not commenced and FID had not been made. |
| 3 | Copi | It carries a declared Ore Reserve and a route described to a consent authority, and the only costed figure it publishes is a New South Wales planning Capital Investment Value of A$639 million signed by a quantity surveyor, which is not a study capital cost; no operating cost, NPV, IRR, discount rate or study class appears in any of the four held documents. |
| 4 | Cummins Range | A staged design deliberately avoids the power, water and reagent question by routing concentrate to an unnamed offshore facility, 27 per cent of the production target is Inferred material, and no offtake of any kind is disclosed for Stage 2 product. |
| 5 | Donald | Its water is in the ground and its cost estimate is filed under securities liability, but the groundwater extraction licence was still recorded as required and not obtained at 31 December 2025, and its binding rare earth offtake is to its own joint venture partner's mill in Utah. |
| 6 | Dubbo | Its Ore Reserve rests on one flowsheet while its headline economics rest on a different, cheaper flowsheet the company states cannot yet support a reserve, and the announcement feed records the company being removed from the ASX official list on 31 August 2026. |
| 7 | Eneabba | It is Australia's first rare earth separation plant and was nearing 60 per cent complete at 30 June 2026, and no pilot or demonstration of its separation flowsheet appears anywhere in the 38 Iluka and IGO documents held. |
| 8 | Euston | It has a JORC position inside its operator's annual statement and almost nothing else: one document is held for it and that document is a locality map, and four of its nine grades are labelled as gaps in our collection rather than silences in the record. |
| 9 | Fingerboards | No completed study of any class is held for it, its output is wholly uncommitted, in November 2025 it engaged a consultant to begin identifying where about 3.0 GL a year of water might come from, and this register holds no document stating a resource or reserve figure for it at all: the Victorian Government Environment Effects Statement that would carry one is not held and could not be retrieved. |
| 10 | Goschen | It holds the only verified customer grade in the suite, a take-or-pay agreement for all of its rare earth concentrate over 20 years, and that agreement is conditional on FID, full funding, approvals and commercial production, any of which the buyer may waive. |
| 11 | Governor Broome | It holds the shortest runway in the suite at 1.06 quarters of funding on cash of A$926,000 at 30 June 2026, every element of its infrastructure belongs to somebody else with no agreement held for any of it, and its retention licence is listed as Granted and held by the transferee in a quarterly on the record while the date the ministerial consent was given is not established. |
| 12 | Jacinth-Ambrosia | It is an operating mine whose zircon and titanium route is verified from its operator's own quarterly volumes, and it is in this suite only because rare earth elements appear in its mineral list: no rare earth product, recovery or monazite stream is disclosed for it anywhere. |
| 13 | Kalkaroo | It is a copper and gold project with a rare earth credit its own economic model excludes, no rare earth recovery route has ever been defined for it, and it answers the JORC Code's NPV requirement inside its 2018 maiden Ore Reserve with a conclusion instead of a number, while publishing that study's pre-tax NPV of A$564 million, IRR of 26 per cent and A$332 million of pre-production capital three years later in a corporate presentation. |
| 14 | Koppamurra | Its June 2026 pre-feasibility study states in three places both that its continuous pilot has not yet run and that it is running, and the 68 per cent recoveries in its financial model come from batch and column testwork rather than a continuous circuit. |
| 15 | Lynas | It is the only rare earth producer in the suite with product on the water, contracted to 2038 with a disclosed US$110/kg NdPr floor, and it is also the clearest demonstration that a verified arrangement is not a guaranteed supply: 2025 grid outages caused significant lost production and it was urgently assessing off-grid options. |
| 16 | Nolans | It took FID on 21 May 2026 and holds the longest runway in the suite by a wide margin, both of its held offtakes are binding term sheets rather than long-form agreements, and the company states it has announced five binding offtake commitments against the two the register holds. |
| 17 | North Stanmore | Its own August 2026 study states that the tenure required to connect the project to water does not exist and its 7 MW power station is a build-own-operate assumption with no provider and no gas source, and it reported 8.10 quarters of funding on A$11,184,000 of cash at 30 June 2026. |
| 18 | Sandy Mitchell | It holds a granted mining licence and a scoping study that claims a net present value and an internal rate of return while publishing neither, and the only recovery figure disclosed for it is cerium, which has no magnet application. |
| 19 | Wimmera | It completed a pre-feasibility study in February 2023 and published nothing from it, its Environment Effects Statement has been in preparation since 2019 and has still not been submitted, and its magnet output depends on a separation plant whose own technology readiness this register grades absent. |
| 20 | Yangibana | Its Stage 1 costs are stated at AACE Class 3 accuracy with both a C1 and an all-in sustaining cost, the only project in the suite to disclose both, and Stage 2 hydrometallurgy is excluded from both the capital estimate and the economic evaluation and has since been restructured around a plant in Thailand. |
4. What Moved
This is a baseline, not a difference. Sections 1, 2 and 3 report position. This section is meant to report change and in this issue it cannot, because there is no prior issue to difference against. Every number in it is a first reading. The value of the section arrives in edition two, when the same query against the same eleven feeds produces a second reading and the two can be subtracted.
It writes its test down before applying it, prints everything that test sorted, names which register field each event bears on, and declares where the feed does not reach. The announcement feed holds 2,721 rows across eleven ASX codes at 28 September 2026, of which 146 fall in the quarter and 34 are material events under its stated test.
5. The Boundary
This is where the evidence stops, for the edition as a whole, stated once and in one place. Sections 1, 2 and 3 each carry their own limits beside the findings they qualify. What that leaves undone is a reader's view of the whole: which questions this product answers everywhere, which it answers nowhere, and which it will never answer.
Read it as an asset. The benchmark of nine incumbents found none that prints a section like it, and the reason is commercial: a vendor selling certainty cannot afford to publish its own ceiling. This product is not selling certainty. It is selling the position of the line.
Twelve parts, and four of them state limits that bear directly on the numbers block above: uncommitted volume cannot be computed and is the number the product exists to carry; nothing in this register can say what Australian supply competes with; the register's own page checker cannot confirm the cited page for 61 facts and five of those fall inside this edition; and every absent grade checked against the document its anchor names was checked on these twenty projects only, leaving 177 rule-written absent grades unchecked on the other 110 projects in the register. The claim that absent is a finding holds for edition one and does not yet hold for the register.
6. House Take
This section is judgement. Everything before it is evidence with anchors, and everything in it is a reading of that evidence by the house. It is the only section where a view appears and it appears nowhere else in the issue. Every fact it rests on is anchored in Sections 1 to 5 and it introduces no new figure.
It names what would change its reading and the honest weakness in it: four observable events that would move it, against a register that reaches five of twenty projects with a change feed, holds no statistical authority among its 253 sources, and cannot compute the uncommitted volume its own product page calls for.
Nothing in it is advice. It says nothing about whether any project is a good investment, whether any equity is cheap, whether any project will succeed, or how any project compares to another as an opportunity. There is no score, no ranking, no valuation and no price forecast in this issue, and there will not be one in a later edition.
Colophon
The register at 28 September 2026, 19:58 AEST. 130 projects, 1,532 facts, 1,145 grades, 52 offtake rows, 117 funding rows and 2,721 announcement rows. Twenty projects, 977 facts, 180 grades and 30 offtake rows are in this edition.
Sources. 253 in the register. 101 sit behind this edition, queried as the distinct sources of the 977 facts on the twenty projects.
Licence. This edition prints facts and citations with no verbatim quotes, because a fact is not copyright and a document is. Of the 101 sources behind it, none carries a licence that affirmatively permits republication: 76 are company disclosure with no licence granted, 9 are recorded only as the unresolved string public, 7 are Crown or government copyright varying by instrument, 6 are all rights reserved, and 3 are United States securities filings on the public record. The register holds seven CC BY 4.0 sources and three further CC BY variants, and not one of them is a source of a fact on these twenty projects. The document corpus itself does not travel with this edition at any price.
Method. Five questions and nine categories, applied identically to every project. Every fact anchored to a document and a page. An absence type recorded on every grade, so that a blank never means none, and every absent grade in this edition checked against the document its anchor names.
Signature
Author: Christian Reiche, 28 September 2026.
Signed off by: Christian Reiche, 28 September 2026.
The house rule is that the machine produces first drafts and never last ones, and that no issue carries CMAA's name without a person's name on it.
What he is signing for, stated so the signature means something. Every figure in this issue is anchored to a primary document with a page reference. Every absent grade on the twenty projects was checked against the document its anchor names, or against the register table the anchor asserts is empty. Eighteen positive grades across fourteen projects were independently checked and no error was found.
What he is not signing for, because the issue says so in its own boundary section: the uncommitted volume column cannot be computed; no statistical authority is held among the sources, so competing supply rests on company filings; nineteen of twenty downstream specification grades are absent; fifteen of the twenty have no live announcement feed; and the absent claim holds for these twenty and does not yet hold for the other 110 projects in the register.