Yttrium was not the reason anyone first looked at American Terbium.

After the latest yttrium rally, a few shareholders asked whether we should change the name to American Yttrium. But if we change the name every time a rare earth price runs, our stationery printer may end up with a controlling interest. Still, I bought the domain, just in case.

We built American Terbium around dysprosium and terbium. The name gives that away, and that has not changed. What changed is that yttrium stopped behaving like a footnote.

When we first advanced Lost Basin, yttrium oxide was a low-priced byproduct, not the thesis. It sat in the technical work like a footnote. In 2025, USGS put the average 99.999% Y2O3 price at $9/kg FOB China. Reuters later reported European yttrium oxide at $270/kg in November, up 4,400% from January. By late February 2026, quoted prices outside China had printed above $800/kg.

Those figures are not apples-to-apples. A USGS FOB China annual average is not the same thing as a European CIF spot quote, and thin-market quotes can move on very little volume. A small-volume, panic-driven spot price is not a bankable mine plan.

Still, the signal is hard to miss. Asking whether yttrium can go higher is the easy part. The harder question is what price reliable non-Chinese yttrium supply needs in order to exist.

Why Yttrium Moved

On April 4, 2025, China placed export controls on yttrium metal, yttrium-bearing alloys, targets, yttrium oxide, and yttrium-bearing compounds. In plain English, that covered the product chain.

Reuters later reported that U.S.-bound shipments fell to 17 tonnes in the eight months after the controls, from 333 tonnes in the eight months before. A 60-ton March 2026 yttrium oxide shipment to the U.S. was an easing signal, but not a reopening. Reuters also reported that U.S.-bound yttrium oxide exports over the prior 12 months were still down 75% year over year. The tap was cracked, not turned back on.

A caveat matters here, and I agree with it: some analysts, including Adamas Intelligence, have warned that European ask prices can overstate the volume-backed market. A small-volume quote does not become project economics just because it looks dramatic in a chart.

Still, if the China domestic price and ex-China price disconnect by that much, the spread is telling you something: buyers are not only paying for yttrium. They are paying for access.

Chart note: price per kilogram of 99.999% yttrium oxide, CIF Europe. Source: Argus.

Why It Matters

Yttrium is easy to miss because it does not fit the standard magnet pitch.

Unlike dysprosium or terbium, yttrium is not mainly a high-temperature NdFeB additive. It sits in thermal barrier coatings for jet engines and power turbines, ceramics, phosphors, fiber optics, optical glass, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and YAG crystals used in lasers. USGS notes that substitutes exist for some uses, but are generally less effective, and that electronics, lasers, and phosphors are generally not directly substitutable.

That sounds less exciting than magnets, which is partly why the market missed it. It is exactly the kind of less-exciting material that can stop a high-value system from shipping. The tonnage might be small. The consequence for defense primes that need qualified material on time is not.

What Lost Basin Showed

Lost Basin was interesting before the yttrium price moved: the rare earth basket was unusually heavy, with dysprosium, terbium, and yttrium together at surface in a deposit style that has shown encouraging leach behavior.

The price move changed the market's attention, not the rocks.

The Lost Basin technical work references about 6,302 ppm TREO, with yttrium around 1,316 ppm, dysprosium at 221.5 ppm, and terbium at 35.3 ppm. Historical sample work has shown yttrium intensity as high as 1,671 ppm Y, or roughly 2,122 ppm Y2O3-equivalent using the standard conversion.

The geochemistry behind those figures comes from ALS, a certified laboratory, and is the basis of the NI 43-101 work, not a handheld screening result. We have also run our own metallurgical and leachability studies on Lost Basin material.

Chart note: comparison uses Y2O3-equivalent concentrations where possible. Lost Basin is shown as a historical sample high, not a resource or reserve average.

I am careful with that number because it is not a resource average, a reserve, or a mine plan. I am not going to call it the highest yttrium grade in the world before a maiden resource. What we have is a high-grade surface signal from a system we still need to drill, test, and convert into harder evidence.

That is the real exploration question: if these numbers are anywhere close to representative, and if the Dy-Tb-Y enrichment proves consistent across strike, Lost Basin is not just a sample story. It is a drill-ready project with billions of dollars of exploration potential. I am not presenting that as a resource statement, a reserve, a valuation, or a mine plan. It is the scale of the opportunity we need to test with drilling.

The narrower claim is more useful: Lost Basin is not a generic "rare earths" story. It appears to be a serious North American Dy-Tb-Y signal at exactly the moment customers are learning that abundance on a map is not the same as available supply.

The Patent Link

The more interesting part is what Lost Basin did to our process thinking.

Our leachability work did more than support a geological model. It forced a practical question: can the heavy fraction, including yttrium, be recovered selectively enough, cleanly enough, and early enough to matter commercially?

I am not going to turn a public newsroom article into a process disclosure, so the business point is simpler: Lost Basin has been a technical learning ground, not just a map pin.

That work helped give birth to the provisional patent portfolio we filed in April 2026. The portfolio covers pre-treatment, leaching, downstream recovery, process timing, and reagent recovery at a high level. The family most relevant here is YHREE, our provisional around selective yttrium and heavy rare-earth recovery.

The filings are not commercial proof, but they do show where our technical work is pointed: not simply toward finding rare earths, but toward separating the scarce part of the basket from the noise.

What We Need To Prove

Price spikes get attention. They do not build supply chains.

At American Terbium, a high yttrium number is not a victory lap. It is permission to ask harder questions.

Our job is to turn the grade and leachability signals into a product path. That means drilling, bulk sampling, repeatable metallurgical data, impurity control, product specification, a credible route into separation, and eventual qualification with customers who need dependable non-Chinese material.

This is the point where I do not want to fake technical certainty. The metallurgist owns the bench answer. My role is to make sure the bench answer changes the business decision.

If Lost Basin's Dy-Tb-Y profile can be translated into a partnerable heavy rare earth intermediate, the market has started to price a problem we were already studying. If it cannot, the price chart is just a very expensive screensaver.

The Real Lesson

To me, yttrium's move does not change American Terbium's strategy. It sharpens the same strategy.

The West does not need more rare earth slogans. It needs feedstock, process evidence, separation routes, qualified product, and customers willing to pay for supply they can actually receive.

Grade creates the opening. Drilling, leach studies, qualification, and bankability are what get us to supply.

Sources: USGS Yttrium Mineral Commodity Summary 2026, MOFCOM Announcement No. 18 of 2025, Reuters via The Business Standard, Reuters via Taipei Times, Adamas Intelligence.

Thumbnail credit: "The small blue yonder" by Angel Yanguas-Gil, Jeffrey W. Elam, and John N. Hryn. Yttrium oxide crystals activated by atomic layer deposition. Cropped for layout. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.