Coverage and claim rules

Every load-bearing statement on this site traces to a cited source with a date. This page states exactly what the Factbook claims to cover, what its statuses mean, and where its limits are.

Coverage universe

The Factbook covers five chains: rare earths → permanent magnets, graphite → battery anodes, gallium → chemicals and substrates, germanium → chemicals, substrates, and optics, and lithium → battery-grade carbonate and hydroxide monohydrate. Each chain has its own manifest scope; jurisdictions are never pooled into another chain's completeness claim.

The completeness claim is scoped to a named-source manifest, not to the world. A facility belongs when it satisfies its chain's frozen inclusion rule. Rare-earth separation, graphite processing, and documented gallium/germanium recovery or later stages use their own named-source thresholds. Lithium uses three classes: named recovery or chemical processing inside its nine jurisdictions; standalone feedstock anywhere only with an operative government financial action; and Chile/Argentina projects inside the frozen advanced-stage temporal bound. Announcements and conditional proposals do not become operative financial support. "Complete" means every source occurrence maps to one candidate and every candidate has exactly one structured disposition.

Lithium scope: as of Aug 18, 2026, the nine jurisdictions are United States, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, EU/EEA, Japan, South Korea, Chile, Argentina. Eligibility is preserved at the manifest date; a later pause or cancellation is appended to the facility or instrument history rather than rewriting membership.

Manifest dated Aug 18, 2026: 178 expected facilities (44 separation-or-later, 61 processing-or-later, 1 government-involved mining, 9 government-involved feedstock) drawn from 131 named sources.

Documented exclusions (checked, deliberately not listed) are recorded in the manifest itself — for example, mining projects whose reported government support could not be confirmed on an official URL, and facilities named only in secondary sources.

Deposit records

Deposit records follow different rules from facility records: they are imported deterministically from USGS datasets, not hand-curated. Known sites come from the USMIN rare-earth release (ver. 4.0, June 2019, doi:10.5066/F7FN15D1), the 2022 graphite release (doi:10.5066/P99RK9SU), the 2021 gallium release (doi:10.5066/P9S73UYY), the 2020 germanium release (doi:10.5066/P9CPYTFN), and the USGS 2020 lithium selected-sites dataset. The lithium release selects approximately 20 sites above 15,000 tonnes contained lithium and excludes Arizona, Colorado, New England, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Wyoming. The Earth MRI focus areas release supplies prospectivity areas, not resources or discoveries.

Three caveats. First, an occurrence is a documented mineral presence; most occurrences will never become mines. Second, resource estimates on deposit pages are as compiled by USGS from the cited studies, with their original dates and resource classes; they are not current company reserve statements. Third, each USMIN release is a dated snapshot. Projects that advanced after publication are covered by facility records, which are hand-curated and kept current. Where a tracked facility sits on a USMIN deposit, the records link to each other.

Provenance model

Records carry two kinds of dated statements. Immutable events record things that happened — a status change, a financial commitment, an opportunity transition. They are never edited or deleted; current state is derived from the event ledger. Versioned claims record current assertions — a capacity, an ownership, a material flow. A claim is superseded only by a newer claim that names it; the old claim remains in the record's history.

Every load-bearing statement carries: a source (URL, publisher, publication date, retrieval date, and an archive link or an explicit note of why none exists), an evidence locator (page, section, or table for multi-page documents), an as_of date (when it was true), a verified_at date (when a curator last confirmed it), and a confidence grade:

• confirmed — stated by a government source or by the subject organization about its own actions;
• reported — stated by press or third parties; not independently confirmed on a primary source;
• inferred — a mapping or attribution the curators made (for example, assigning an unstated product form to the nearest material in our vocabulary). Every inference says so.

Page freshness is the oldest verified_at among a record's active claims — a page cannot look fresh because one field was recently touched. Historical events never refresh a page.

Status semantics

Facilities are modeled as production lines, each with its own status history (announced, permitted, financed, under construction, commissioned, operating, idled, restarted, cancelled). One site can legitimately show an operating line beside one under construction. "Operating" requires a source stating production — an opening ceremony is "commissioned."

Federal instruments use a financial event ladder: announced (including letters of interest), conditional-commitment (approved but conditions unmet — no funds flow), definitive-agreement (executed documents), obligated (funds committed), disbursed (funds moved, recorded per tranche). A conditional loan commitment is not financing; the Factbook never upgrades a state beyond what the source states.

Opportunities follow forecast → NOI → open → closed → selected → awarded (or cancelled/archived). Amendments, Q&A postings, and deadline changes are recorded as events but do not change lifecycle state. Open-state opportunities are re-verified against the live system within seven days; the verification date is shown. Monitored systems: SAM.gov, DOE eXCHANGE, ARPA-E eXCHANGE, Grants.gov, the DLA BAA, and DIBC. Completeness for opportunities means complete within those six systems.

Date conventions

• When a source states only a month, the record uses the first of that month with the imprecision noted.
• Japanese fiscal-year-only grant decisions use the fiscal year start (April 1) with date_basis: announced, flagged in the claim.
• Undated evergreen pages carry their retrieval date (or verified archive-snapshot date) as "published no later than."

Lithium quantity and conversion rules

Product mass, contained lithium, and lithium-carbonate equivalent are separate bases. lithium-conversions-v1 uses CIAAW-2024 atomic weights and preserves the source number beside every derived number. One tonne of pure lithium carbonate contains 0.1878519 tonnes Li; one tonne Li equals 5.3233429 tonnes LCE; and one tonne of pure lithium hydroxide monohydrate equals 0.8804156 tonnes LCE.

The registry rejects ambiguous material identity, unspecified hydroxide hydration, and assay-free variable-grade feed. Only true capacity claims enter capacity totals. Commercial product cohorts exclude pilot and demonstration claims, non-allocated swing capacity stays in a combined cohort, and unresolved capacity bases remain visible outside totals.

Corrections

History is protected mechanically: continuous integration rejects any commit that deletes or rewrites an existing claim or event, unless the commit carries an explicit correction entry recording what changed, why, and what replaced it. The correction log ships with the site's source data.

Briefings are editorial, records are not

Briefings explain what a set of records adds up to. They are held to the same sourcing rule as the rest of the site, every figure linked to the document it comes from and primary documents quoted rather than paraphrased, but they are not records: they carry no claim or event envelopes, they are not covered by the manifest, and the validator that guards record history does not touch them. Where a briefing rests on reporting rather than a primary document, it says so on the page.

Limits

• The Factbook covers five launched chains through their configured endpoints. Cathodes, battery cells, packs, and vehicles are outside the lithium chain; antimony is not present.
• Deposit coverage is a curated national set drawn from USGS USMIN and Earth MRI, not every known occurrence. The scope of each import is stated on the deposits index.
• Capacity figures are recorded only where a source publishes a number and its basis (nameplate, demonstrated, or target). Absence of a capacity figure means no source states one.
• Private-company statuses often rest on company disclosures; those carry "confirmed" for the company's own actions but are not audits.
• Engineering property data (the MatWeb domain) is out of scope by design.
• A small number of sources still lack archive snapshots; each carries a dated note, and archive backfill runs as an ongoing pass.