My last post (reference and linked in this post) described the extraordinary efforts the federal government is pursuing to find and extract rare-earth and other critical elements,
However, there is frequently more than one road to Rome. One of the largest users of rare-earth elements are industries that use these to make permanent-magnets, and these are used in high performance motors that are needed for electric vehicles and also in wind turbines.
The alternate road in this case, is to use a very common compound but modify its molecular structure such that it performs much like a permanent-magnet that uses rare-earth elements, but without the rare-earth elements.