Técnicas Reunidas Produces First Commercial-Grade NdPr Oxide in Madrid, Advancing Europe's PERMANET Magnet Value Chain

Introduction

A pilot plant inside a Madrid technology center has done something no European facility has publicly demonstrated before: it has turned rare earth feedstock into neodymium/praseodymium (NdPr) oxide that meets the purity and compositional specifications required by commercial magnet manufacturers. Técnicas Reunidas, the Spanish engineering and construction group listed on the Madrid Stock Exchange, announced the achievement on June 8, 2026, attributing it to its patented RARETECH® separation process.

The announcement is modest in scale, measured in first kilograms rather than tonnes, but its significance lies in what it validates rather than what it produces. Commercial-grade NdPr oxide requires a combined neodymium-praseodymium purity exceeding 99 percent, strict lanthanide contamination limits, and a controlled neodymium-to-praseodymium weight ratio typically in the range of 75:25 to 80:20. Clearing that bar at pilot scale is the threshold that separates a working separation technology from a laboratory concept, particularly for a process architecture that departs significantly from the solvent extraction methods that have dominated rare earth refining for decades.

Europe currently relies on imports for approximately 90 percent of its rare earth elements, with virtually all commercial refining and the overwhelming majority of permanent magnet production concentrated outside the continent. The European Union's current domestic permanent magnet output barely reaches 1,000 tonnes per year and is not projected to cover more than 20 percent of anticipated European demand. Against that backdrop, a verified commercial-specification separation step on European soil, however small in volume, represents a concrete marker in a build-out that has until recently consisted more of policy declarations than operating hardware.

RARETECH® and the Case for Chromatographic Separation

The RARETECH® process is best understood by contrast with the technology it seeks to displace. Conventional rare earth separation relies on solvent extraction, a liquid-liquid process in which organic solvents selectively pull individual lanthanides out of an aqueous solution across sequences of mixer-settler stages. To achieve the purity levels required for magnet-grade oxides, these circuits can require hundreds of stages, consuming large volumes of flammable organic solvents and generating substantial organic waste that requires specialist disposal. Capital costs and operating costs are both significant, and the environmental footprint is a growing concern in jurisdictions with tight regulatory frameworks.

RARETECH® approaches the same separation challenge using extraction chromatography: specialized columns packed with selective resins that combine the high selectivity of solvent extraction chemistry with the operational simplicity of a column-based system. High-performance liquid chromatography has been gaining ground in hydrometallurgy as a route to cleaner, more controllable separation of critical metals including lanthanides, and Técnicas Reunidas has developed its own engineering configuration around this principle. The company describes the technology as offering high purity output, feedstock flexibility, and a reduced environmental impact relative to conventional mixer-settler circuits.

The patent application for RARETECH® is currently in process, meaning the core chemistry and engineering configurations are being actively protected as proprietary intellectual property. Técnicas Reunidas has been developing rare earth processing capabilities since at least 2020, when it filed the RARETECH trademark with the European Union Intellectual Property Office, and it already supplies a carbonate-form separation technology under the RARETECH brand. The Madrid announcement marks the first confirmed production of fully separated, commercially specified oxide product, specifically the NdPr mixed oxide that feeds directly into neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnet alloy production.

What remains absent from the announcement is the commercial detail that would allow external assessment of the technology's deployment readiness. Recovery rates, energy consumption per kilogram of product, operating cost per tonne of NdPr oxide, capital cost of a commercial-scale facility, and a timeline to first industrial-scale operation were not disclosed. Those figures will ultimately determine whether RARETECH® can compete economically with both incumbent Chinese separation capacity and the conventional solvent extraction plants being developed by Western competitors. The pilot result establishes technical viability; the economics of scale remain to be demonstrated.

PERMANET: Europe's 34-Partner Magnet Value Chain Initiative

The NdPr oxide production milestone is embedded within a larger European framework. PERMANET, which stands for PERmanent MAgnet Network for the European Transition, is a Horizon Europe initiative awarded a 16 million euro grant by the European Commission. Técnicas Reunidas leads the consortium, which now encompasses 34 partners across 11 countries, spanning mining developers, processing technology providers, magnet manufacturers, recyclers, and research institutions.

The project's stated ambition is to create the first complete European value chain for permanent magnets, covering extraction, processing and refining, magnet manufacturing, and end-of-life recycling. It aims to coordinate 13 fully scalable innovations, three sustainable technology hubs, and a set of enabling activities including strategic venturing and investment support. PERMANET also explicitly targets unconventional feedstock sources, including waste electrical and electronic equipment and end-of-life electric vehicle components, recognising that European primary mining output alone is unlikely to meet projected demand.

The strategic rationale behind that ambition is not difficult to quantify. Permanent magnets are essential components in more than 200 product groups, with electric vehicle motors and wind turbine generators representing the most volumetrically significant near-term applications. Demand projections to 2050 suggest that European neodymium requirements could increase approximately fourfold and dysprosium requirements by as much as twelvefold relative to current consumption levels. Europe currently imports 100 percent of the rare earths that underpin this demand, with no market-ready substitutes for the critical heavy rare earths that govern motor performance in high-temperature applications.

At a PERMANET clustering event hosted by the Iberian Sustainable Mining Cluster in March 2026, representatives from parallel EU initiatives including REMHub, REEsilience, SUSMAGPRO, REProMag, GREENE, and SICAPERMA gathered to move beyond discussion toward coordinated action. A speaker from REMHub noted that recycling still faces a core economic challenge: the cost of recovering rare earths from secondary sources remains higher than the cost of importing primary material from China, a dynamic that will require either regulatory support or sustained price differentials to resolve at commercial scale. That tension, between the strategic imperative for European independence and the economic reality of Chinese cost structures, runs through every layer of the PERMANET initiative.

Two Commercial Agreements: Spain's Jaén Province and Brazil's Araxá

Alongside the PERMANET milestone, Técnicas Reunidas has signed two project agreements that translate the RARETECH® demonstration into commercial deployment pathways, one targeting a project inside the European Union and the other in one of the world's most significant rare earth provinces.

In February 2026, Técnicas Reunidas and Australian-listed Osmond Resources Limited signed a collaboration agreement for what the parties describe as the first comprehensive rare earth project in the EU, spanning mining through to separated oxide production. The project, branded the Orión EU Critical Minerals Project, covers more than 228 square kilometres in the province of Jaén in southern Spain. The mineralisation is monazite-hosted, a phosphate mineral that carries neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium, among other rare earths. Bulk channel samples from the Avellanar Zone have returned monazite grades of approximately 1.6 percent and total rare earth oxide grades above 1 percent at surface. Osmond Resources carries a market capitalisation of approximately A$90 million as of mid-2026, and the company expects to complete drilling, resource estimates, a scoping study, and flowsheet confirmation by the end of June 2026. Under the agreement's structure, Osmond will own the planned processing facility, with Técnicas Reunidas providing RARETECH® technology alongside full engineering, procurement, and construction services.

The second agreement, formalised approximately in May 2026, is a memorandum of understanding with St George Mining Limited, another Australian-listed company, focused on the Araxá rare earth deposit in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. St George Mining holds 100 percent ownership of what it describes as the largest hard-rock rare earth deposit in South America, a carbonatite-hosted system in the same geological province as Brazil's dominant niobium production operations. Carbonatite-hosted deposits in the Araxá district typically carry elevated concentrations of light rare earth elements including neodymium and praseodymium, making them well suited to an NdPr-focused processing strategy of the kind RARETECH® is designed to execute. The initial scope of work under the MoU covers application of RARETECH® technology to rare earth refining, including mixed carbonate and oxide production and element fractionation, with provision for St George Mining to commission additional engineering work including full industrial plant design. St George Mining CEO John Prineas described the partnership as an opportunity to access European market channels following the company's earlier alliances with REalloys in the United States and MagBras in Brazil.

Together, the two agreements extend RARETECH® from a single pilot demonstration into a technology platform being actively evaluated for deployment across two jurisdictions and two distinct geological feedstock types. Whether either advances to construction will depend on resource definition, financing, regulatory clearance, and, critically, the commercial metrics that Técnicas Reunidas has not yet made public.

The Monazite Problem: Radioactivity, Regulation, and the Thorium Constraint

Both of the project agreements anchored to RARETECH® technology involve monazite as the primary feedstock, and monazite carries a complication that distinguishes it from the oxide and carbonate ores processed at most Western separation facilities. Monazite typically contains between 5 and 10 percent thorium oxide and between 0.2 and 0.4 percent uranium oxide by weight, making it a naturally occurring radioactive material (NORM) that triggers specific regulatory obligations wherever it is processed.

Thorium must be separated from the rare earth product stream and managed as a radioactive material under applicable waste classification and disposal frameworks. In most European jurisdictions, a commercial-scale monazite processing operation would require environmental licensing, radiation protection approvals, and waste management planning that adds both cost and time to project development. The regulatory pathway has not been publicly outlined for either the Orión project in Jaén or any other prospective RARETECH® deployment in EU territory. Processing monazite at the pilot scale achieved in Madrid's Technology Center is a different regulatory proposition from operating a facility at the throughput levels required for commercial viability, and the gap between those two regimes will be one of the defining constraints on the project's near-term timeline.

This is not a problem unique to Técnicas Reunidas or to RARETECH®. It reflects a structural challenge facing European rare earth development more broadly. As noted in my analysis of the Western rare earth build-out in June 2026, the combination of technical validation, capital availability, and regulatory durability is exactly what distinguishes projects that complete from those that stall. The monazite regulatory question in Spain and the EU is the clearest near-term test of whether RARETECH®'s demonstrated technical capability can be translated into operating industrial infrastructure within a timeframe that serves the EU's stated supply security goals.

Javier Limpo, Corporate Director of the Proprietary Technology Development Division at Técnicas Reunidas, indicated in the company's announcement that the Madrid milestone reinforces the company's strategic commitment to sustainable mining and rare earths, and to technologies that contribute to global decarbonisation objectives. That framing aligns RARETECH® directly with the EU's regulatory and political environment, where sustainability criteria and carbon accounting are increasingly integrated into procurement and permitting decisions. Whether the technology's reduced organic solvent consumption and column-based process design translate into a measurably faster or lower-cost regulatory approval pathway in European jurisdictions remains to be tested in practice.

Where This Fits in Europe's Rare Earth Race

Técnicas Reunidas is not the only organisation advancing separation technology in Europe, but its PERMANET leadership role and the Madrid demonstration place it at the centre of the EU's most structured institutional attempt to build a full magnet value chain. The distinction between producing mixed mineral concentrates, the current output of most European rare earth projects, and producing commercially specified separated oxides is not a minor technical step. It is the step that determines whether European feedstock can reach European magnet manufacturers without transiting Chinese refining capacity, which has been the default route for the vast majority of European rare earth material to date.

Building on the analysis of the Western rare earth processing push covered in this publication earlier in June 2026, the pattern emerging across both the United States and Europe is one of parallel but structurally distinct build-outs. The U.S. effort is characterised by federal procurement deadlines, defence-linked funding vehicles, and a relatively concentrated set of beneficiaries. The European effort is more diffuse, coordinated through Horizon Europe consortia and the Critical Raw Materials Act framework, and is attempting to simultaneously develop primary extraction, secondary processing, magnet manufacturing, and recycling rather than sequencing those investments. PERMANET exemplifies that ambition: 34 partners, 13 scalable innovations, and a mandate that spans mining to end-of-life recovery.

The economics of that ambition remain genuinely uncertain. Chinese dominance in rare earth separation and magnet manufacturing is not simply a function of geography or resource access; it reflects decades of accumulated process expertise, infrastructure investment, and scale advantages that keep per-unit costs below what new entrants can currently match. A March 2026 PERMANET stakeholder event surfaced this explicitly, with participants noting that recycling and secondary recovery remain more expensive than Chinese primary imports in the current price environment. Without long-term offtake agreements, supportive public procurement policies, or a sustained regulatory premium on non-Chinese supply reflecting environmental or security criteria, European separation capacity faces the same market structure challenge that has constrained Western rare earth development for years.

Técnicas Reunidas brings a specific credibility to this challenge that distinguishes it from earlier European rare earth technology ventures. The company employs nearly 14,000 people, generated more than 4.4 billion euros in revenue in 2024, and has delivered more than 2,600 industrial projects across more than 70 countries over 65 years. Its RARETECH® technology has already been tendered or deployed in the United States, Japan, Austria, Switzerland, Australia, South Africa, Brazil, and Turkey in various forms. The Madrid NdPr oxide result is therefore not the output of a start-up pursuing first-time validation; it is an established engineering contractor demonstrating that its in-house separation chemistry can produce the specific intermediate product that the European permanent magnet supply chain most urgently needs.

Conclusion: A Marker, Not a Milestone Crossed

The production of commercial-specification NdPr oxide at the Técnicas Reunidas Technology Center in Madrid is a genuine technical achievement and a meaningful signal for European rare earth development. It confirms that a European engineering organisation has developed a proprietary separation process capable of producing the magnet precursor material that the continent's electric vehicle and wind energy industries will require in substantially greater quantities through the 2030s and beyond. It anchors the PERMANET initiative with a concrete output rather than a projected one, and it supports the credibility of the Osmond Resources and St George Mining commercial agreements that depend on RARETECH® technology advancing to industrial scale.

But the distance between first kilograms of pilot-scale product and a commercial rare earth separation plant processing thousands of tonnes of feedstock annually is substantial. The announcement disclosed no recovery rates, no operating cost estimates, no capital cost projections, and no construction timeline. The Osmond Orión project is still completing its resource estimate and scoping study. The St George Mining Araxá agreement covers processing test work, not plant construction. And the regulatory framework for commercial monazite processing in Spain and the EU has not been publicly mapped.

The Madrid result is best understood as a marker: it establishes that RARETECH® works at pilot scale under commercial specifications, which is a necessary condition for everything that follows. It is not yet evidence that Europe will have a functional domestic rare earth separation industry by the time its permanent magnet demand reaches the levels projected for the mid-2030s. That outcome will depend on decisions made in the next 24 to 36 months across licensing, capital raising, offtake contracting, and regulatory approval processes that are still in early stages. Técnicas Reunidas has demonstrated it has a viable technology. Europe now needs to demonstrate it can build the surrounding conditions that allow that technology to operate at meaningful industrial scale.