It’s the chemical industry, distilled.

Current Chemicals is getting more money from its Dutch owner, Momentum Global Ventures, to make more neodymium fluoride, dysprosium fluoride and other rare-earth fluorides, the salts that get reduced to metal for the magnets in motors, wind turbines and missiles.

A little history:

It makes them at GE's old Ivanhoe Road plant in Cleveland, which spun out of Current Lighting in February. For decades the plant made the phosphors for GE's lamps: the powders inside a fluorescent tube that turn the mercury's UV light into visible light, many of them built on rare earths like europium and terbium. By 2020 it was already making rare-earth oxides and fluorides alongside them, so the move to magnets isn't much of a stretch.

Why does it matter now?

Most rare-earth fluoride is made in China, and from January 1, 2027, the Pentagon can't buy neodymium magnets with any step done there, mining and refining included. Current Chemicals is one of the few US companies already making the fluorides. The usual way is to react the oxide with hydrofluoric acid. Up the road in Euclid, REalloys says it has a way to skip the acid, so far only in the lab.

Nouryon now plans to start making modified methylaluminoxane (MMAO) at its site in Jiaxing, China, in the first half of 2028.

Feeling déjà vu?

We mentioned this plan last October, when Nouryon said MMAO would start at Jiaxing in 2027, so it looks like they're about a year behind. They haven't said why.

Why MMAO, and why China?

It's driven by solar. The film that seals the cells to the glass in a panel has mostly been EVA, but EVA forms acid and resists potential-induced degradation poorly, which matters more in the newer, more efficient panel designs. Polyolefin elastomers (POE) insulate better and let less water vapor through, so they've been taking share, and China has been building its own: its POE imports fell 20% to 728 KTA in 2025 and another 39% through August.

Where does MMAO come in?

Making POE can take it twice. First for the comonomer: MMAO is the cocatalyst for the ethylene tri- and tetramerization that makes 1-hexene and 1-octene. Then for the polymer: the single-site catalysts that put those alpha-olefins into polyethylene chains need an activator, usually an aluminoxane like methylaluminoxane (MAO), to methylate the metal and pull off a ligand. MMAO is a modified MAO that, unlike MAO, can be sold in non-aromatic solvents like heptane instead of toluene.

Spanish sulfuric acid maker WeylChem Bilbao got its shareholder's approval for a feasibility study into "substantially" expanding the sulfur-melting unit at its plant in the Port of Bilbao.

What's the plant?

Befesa built it in 2012 as a sulfur burner: it burns 120 KTA of refinery sulfur to sulfur dioxide, oxidizes that to sulfur trioxide and absorbs it into 350 KTA of sulfuric acid and oleum, selling the spare heat as power. Ineos bought it in 2015 and sold it to ICIG in 2021, which folded it into WeylChem. Most of its sulfur arrives solid, by truck, and is melted on site.

Why melt more?

Most of Europe's molten sulfur goes to burners like this one, making acid for things like caprolactam and titanium dioxide. Refineries, its main source, are running less and closing, and crude got sweeter once Russian barrels were banned. Contract prices rose by about half in 2024, and some Benelux acid plants shut for lack of sulfur. Europe has little capacity to remelt solid sulfur, and Argus sees none new for at least two years. WeylChem Bilbao already sells molten sulfur across Europe, so a bigger melter could let it take in more cheap solid sulfur and sell it on as liquid to acid plants that can't melt their own.