Nobody Opens a Mine for These Metals. Governments Are Paying for Them Anyway

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Thursday, August 13, 2026

Nobody opens a mine to produce gallium, and nobody opens one to produce scandium. Gallium comes out of bauxite refining and, in smaller volumes, zinc processing. Scandium was produced exclusively as a by-product in 2025, mostly from nickel and titanium streams and processed residues, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Both sit on the USGS list of 60 critical minerals published in November 2025, alongside every rare earth element. By-product supply does not answer to its own price. It answers to whatever the host metal is doing. That structure is why a near-surface system carrying all three, in a country Washington is courting for critical minerals, reads differently than the grades alone suggest.

What each metal does explains the urgency. Gallium goes into the chips behind military radar, and into LEDs, phone networks and electric vehicle electronics. Scandium makes aluminium stronger and lighter, which is why it goes into aircraft. Rare earths make the permanent magnets inside electric motors, wind turbines and defence systems. The problem is where they come from. The U.S. Geological Survey puts China at roughly 99 percent of the world's primary gallium production and calls it the leading scandium producer. The International Energy Agency puts China at about 60 percent of rare earth mining and 91 percent of the refining that turns ore into usable material. Beijing restricted gallium exports in 2023, banned them to the United States in December 2024, and added scandium to its rare earth export controls in April 2025. Supply outside China stopped being a commercial question some time ago.

Spark Energy Minerals Inc. (CSE: SPRK) (OTCPK: SPARF) has reported results from eleven additional reverse-circulation holes at Cruzeta, part of its Arapaima Project in Minas Gerais. The batch takes reported holes at the target to 28 since drilling began in December 2025 and delivers the strongest gallium result recorded at Cruzeta to date: 91.4 g/t gallium oxide over two metres, inside a 32-metre interval from surface grading 73.9 g/t. Gallium appears from surface in all eleven holes. Beneath it the rare earth zone continues, with ARA-RC-023 returning 42 metres at 1,767 ppm total rare earth oxides and peak two-metre samples across the batch reaching 4,668 ppm.

The Element That Was Already in the File

The more consequential disclosure is scandium, and how it arrived. Scandium has been in the routine multi-element suite since the first Cruzeta batch and appears in the certificates for every hole. What changed is that Spark compiled and interpreted the complete 28-hole dataset for the first time. Seven holes carry a scandium interval from surface, the best running 30 metres from surface at 21.5 g/t scandium oxide in ARA-RC-021, including 26.1 g/t over two metres in a sample that also assays 75.3 g/t gallium oxide. That overlap is the finding. Scandium at Cruzeta tracks the iron and titanium oxide fraction of the weathering profile, the same fraction carrying the gallium, not the clay fraction hosting the adsorbed rare earths. Spark intends to add scandium to the metallurgical scope now underway at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), which is already carrying out the gallium and rare earth testwork on Cruzeta material.

Gallium Gets Government Money

Alcoa Corporation (NYSE: AA) shows what the gallium question is now worth to governments. On 14 July 2026, Alcoa and government and industry partners from Australia, Japan and the U.S. reached a final investment decision on a gallium plant at Alcoa's Wagerup alumina refinery in Western Australia, with Alcoa as construction and operating manager. Chief Executive William F. Oplinger called it a shared commitment by governments and industry to strengthen critical mineral supply chains. Three governments underwriting a by-product circuit is a fair measure of how thin the alternatives are.

Scandium's Only North American Source

Rio Tinto (NYSE: RIO) holds a comparable position in scandium. Its Sorel-Tracy complex in Quebec became North America's first producer of scandium oxide in 2022, using a process its own scientists developed to draw high-purity material from titanium dioxide waste streams with no additional mining. In November 2025 the company announced a transaction with the Canada Growth Fund, which is investing roughly C$25 million to expand nameplate capacity there to nine tonnes a year. Nine tonnes a year, roughly 15 percent of the 60 tonnes the U.S. Geological Survey estimates was consumed globally in 2025. That is the scale at which a meaningful supply increment registers in this market.

Where the Heavy Feedstock Has to Come From

MP Materials Corp. (NYSE: MP) sits at the other end of the chain. In second-quarter results released August 6, the company reported $126.1 million of consolidated revenue and price protection income, more than double the prior-year period, and a long-term agreement to supply separated gadolinium to a U.S. aerospace and defense customer. MP has been building heavy rare earth separation capacity at Mountain Pass, initially targeting dysprosium and terbium, and has said the circuit was designed to process third-party feedstocks alongside its own, though the company has not quantified that capacity. That is the other half of the supply problem: separation capacity matters only if somebody can supply the material.

Washington's Brazil File

Much of that search has landed in Brazil, holder of the world's second-largest rare earth reserves. In February 2026 the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation reached a $565 million financing agreement with Serra Verde, operator of the Pela Ema ionic-clay mine in Goiás, including an option for the U.S. government to acquire a minority equity stake. 

In April 2026 USA Rare Earth (Nasdaq: USAR) agreed to acquire Serra Verde for approximately US$2.8 billion. Serra Verde is not the only Brazilian ionic-clay project drawing U.S. federal money. The DFC has committed up to US$5 million in project development funding to Aclara Resources (TSX: ARA) for its Carina heavy rare earths project, also in Goiás, convertible into equity should Aclara raise construction capital, and Aclara has since been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy for federal funding on heavy rare earth processing, subject to award negotiations. 

The Serra Verde financing was announced in the same week as this year's Critical Minerals Ministerial. Goiás signed a state-level memorandum with the U.S. government in March 2026. That same month a U.S. interagency delegation drawn from the State Department, the Department of Energy and the Department of Commerce visited Minas Gerais, where Arapaima sits, and met the state economic development secretariat. That is capital moving ahead of diplomacy.

Spark remains an exploration-stage company with no mineral resource estimated at Arapaima and no economics established. No metallurgical recovery of gallium, rare earths or scandium has been demonstrated, and the scandium numbers carry a further qualifier: across the 28 Cruzeta holes, 41 percent of samples returned at or below the analytical detection limit, which is why the planned lower-limit re-analysis matters. What the eleven holes accomplished is narrower but real. They took Cruzeta to a 28-hole dataset, produced the strongest gallium result yet reported at the target, and turned a routine line in the assay certificates into a third critical mineral worth testing. ANSTO now has three elements to answer for.

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