(DCNF)—America’s aerospace industry is dusting off decades-old technology to protect critical components in jet engines.
The industry is scrambling to replace yttrium, a rare earth metal used in heat-resistant coatings that protect turbine blades, vanes and other jet-engine components from extreme temperatures, Reuters reported. China’s stranglehold on the metal has accelerated that search, with Beijing directly supplying about 70% of U.S. yttrium imports between 2021 and 2024, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
“There’s a huge shortage of yttrium, which is used for making turbine coating inside every jet engine,” REAlloys Inc. Chief Growth Officer Anupam Ghildyal told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Without that, they can’t build jet engines.
The shortage is forcing aerospace suppliers to reconsider technologies dating to the 1970s and 1980s. Suppliers are testing zirconium-dioxide coatings stabilized with magnesium or calcium instead of yttrium, while some companies are also attempting to recycle coating material, according to Reuters.
Chinese yttrium shipments to the United States plunged after Beijing imposed export controls, while prices rose and some coating suppliers rationed material or temporarily halted production, Reuters reported in February. GE Aerospace, Pratt & Whitney and Honeywell declined to comment to Reuters at the time, though aerospace supply-chain specialist Kevin Michaels said low inventories had not yet reduced engine production.
Oerlikon Surface Solutions, a major supplier of aerospace and turbine coatings, uses yttrium in thermal-barrier coatings designed to protect engine components from extreme heat.
China’s restrictions have pushed Oerlikon to seek alternative supplies. Dattatraya Kamatkar, global head of sourcing at Oerlikon Surface Solutions, told Manufacturing Dive in April that the company had to “get creative” securing yttrium oxide, including recycling material from its manufacturing process and working with U.S. suppliers and the federal government to secure additional supplies.
The pressure extends beyond aircraft engines. GE Vernova, one of the world’s largest gas-turbine manufacturers, began working with the U.S. government to increase its yttrium stocks after China’s restrictions disrupted supplies, Reuters reported in December. CEO Scott Strazik said the company had enough inventory to carry it into 2026 and that managing yttrium availability had become a daily focus. GE Vernova is also investing in alternative materials to reduce its dependence on the rare earth.
Honeywell, a major supplier of thermal-barrier coatings for aircraft and industrial gas-turbine engines, uses yttrium-containing materials to protect critical engine components from extreme heat. The company says its predominant aerospace coating is 6% to 8% yttria-stabilized zirconia, a ceramic material containing yttrium.
Those coatings are not confined to Honeywell’s own engines. Honeywell’s current catalog lists coating services for components used in several major GE Aerospace and CFM engine families, including the GE90, GEnx, LEAP and CF34, as well as the military F110. Honeywell describes itself as a developer, supplier and repair and overhaul center whose thermal-barrier coatings are used by aircraft and industrial turbine-engine producers and operators.
“A permanent magnet and rare earth supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and nearly every stage today sits in the hands of a strategic adversary,” Abigail Hunter, executive director of SAFE’s Center for Critical Minerals Strategy, told DCNF.
Oerlikon, Honeywell, GE Vernova, GE Aerospace and Pratt & Whitney did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
China’s Stranglehold
America’s rare-earth vulnerability did not begin with a shortage of rocks in the ground. It developed as the capacity to turn those rocks into usable industrial materials became concentrated overseas.
The distinction, Ghildyal said, is between possessing rare-earth-bearing material and being able to process it. North America has mineral resources, but the United States allowed much of the infrastructure needed to separate, refine and convert those materials into usable products to develop elsewhere. Rare-earth processing is particularly difficult because producers must separate elements with similar chemical properties and, depending on the deposit, manage radioactive materials associated with the ore.
“China has a monopoly of rare earth minerals,” Ghildyal told the DCNF.
Over time, China came to dominate both ends of that supply chain. China accounted for more than 70% of global rare-earth extraction and 87% of processing, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). It also accounted for all reported production of dysprosium and terbium, two heavy rare earths tracked by the agency.
The United States was consequently left dependent not merely on foreign mines, but on foreign processing capacity. USGS found that the U.S. remained 67% net-import reliant for rare-earth compounds and metals in 2025. The agency also cautions that conventional trade statistics can obscure that dependence because minerals can pass through intermediary countries after being processed elsewhere before ultimately reaching American manufacturers.
Yttrium became a particularly stark example of that imbalance. The United States produced no commercial-scale primary yttrium in 2025 and remained 100% net-import reliant, according to USGS. China directly supplied 70% of U.S. yttrium imports between 2021 and 2024, followed by Germany at 11%, Austria at 8% and South Korea at 4%.
The restrictions turned America’s longstanding processing weakness into an immediate bottleneck for manufacturers that needed those materials. Suppliers serving U.S. aerospace and semiconductor companies were turning away some customers as shortages worsened earlier this year, Reuters reported. Yttrium prices climbed while some North American coating manufacturers rationed supplies or temporarily halted production.
Beijing maintains that the controls are intended to safeguard China’s national security and interests and fulfill international obligations, including nonproliferation. China’s Ministry of Commerce requires exporters of covered rare-earth products to obtain licenses before shipping them abroad, and the U.S. Geological Survey reported that China had begun issuing general export licenses to selected exporters by the end of 2025.
The episode underscored the underlying problem Ghildyal described: finding more rare earths does not by itself break America’s dependence on foreign processing. The United States also needs infrastructure capable of separating and refining those minerals at commercial scale. USGS reported that federal funding flowed to new U.S. heavy-rare-earth separation and recycling projects in 2025, including a $150 million loan for a heavy-rare-earth separation facility at Mountain Pass, California, as Washington sought to expand domestic processing capacity.
“We have a near-total dependence on China for these vital industrial inputs, and China still holds all the cards,” Hunter told the DCNF.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
