Obviously, our typical safe harbor, you know, we may make forward-looking statements. You can look at our SEC filings for reconciliations on our non-GAAP measures, as well as our risk factors. And then I'm sure Martin probably may have already covered this as I was fumbling with IT, that, you know, we're coming up on our quarterly results here soon, so we'll avoid any discussion of our Q3 results. With that out of the way, for those of you that are new to MP, I think the opening comments were spot on in terms of just the criticality, you know, to the automotive supply chain of rare earth magnets. MP is the North American leader in this space. We own the Mountain Pass rare earth Mining and Processing facility in Mountain Pass, California.
We have brought that operation, you know, back from what was a cold idle status in 2017 to the second largest producer of rare earth products globally. We have also embarked on an initiative to bring not just the production of the raw materials, but the refining of those raw materials back to the site, which we are in the process of ramping up and have successfully made in the LTM period over 600 metric tons of NdPr oxide, which is the fundamental building block of rare earth permanent magnets. And then, you know, the next step in bringing the totality of the supply chain back to the United States is the downstream portion of our business, which is production of finished rare earth permanent magnets. Our foundational customer in this initiative is General Motors, and we will be providing them with finished magnets at the end of 2025.
Go to the next slide. You know, I think this is all probably, you know, obvious to you guys that cover this space, but it's just fascinating to see sort of the scale of change that electrification brings to the automotive supply chain in particular. You know, this sort of framework is relevant, frankly, not just for automobiles, but for things like robotics, industrial automation, and things like that as well, where, you know, those growth factors drive a pretty significant portion of our business as well. But I think the one that gets the biggest focus and has, for sure, the biggest growth potential is, you know, what we are confronting in the electrification of autos. Looking at just mineral content per vehicle, I think that's pretty well understood, certainly as we go from, you know, ICE powertrains to electric.
I think the important thing to consider as it relates to, you know, where we sit in this supply chain is plug-in hybrids, you know, EVs that have become particularly popular in China and I think are making their way here. All of those continue to generally have rare earth permanent magnets in the traction motor. It's something like, you know, 94% of current, you know, kilowatt-hours deployed are being powered by a rare earth permanent magnet in one way, shape, or form. Certainly, you know, that could, you know, diversify over time into other solutions.
But just given the significant advantages of permanent magnet machines, you know, we feel very strongly that, you know, what you're looking at here from an NdPr demand perspective, you know, is something that the industry and the supply chain is going to have to confront over the next several decades and something that we're well positioned to support. This slide kind of gives you, you know, exactly what I was just trying to articulate in a bit better of a graphical form here. You know, you look at where we sit over on the left-hand side of the page, you know, electric vehicles and wind turbines are the areas of, you know, significant focus for those that are looking at the growth factors of this space. And certainly, you know, as you can see, going from 2025 out to 2040, there's a very significant amount of growth assumed here.
This is sort of taking, you know, the middle-of-the-road approach. This is not assuming we get to, you know, total BEV penetration in North America or anything like that. There are other pretty important growth factors for the business. You know, one of the most exciting emerging portions of that would be the robotics use case. But, you know, certainly, I think we'll talk a bit about, you know, given all this potential growth and current growth and excitement, you know, we've seen some pretty volatile pricing over the last, you know, several years, and, you know, not necessarily driven by the same drivers that you've seen in lithium, for example, where, you know, that's much more of a supply story. But I think the thing that's interesting that I'm sure we'll talk about in Q&A is, you know, this gray box of other is pretty significant still.
You know, the growth is not nearly as significant, but you know, when you look at 2024, it represents a pretty significant portion of the total pie as we stand today, getting smaller, but you know, I think that's where a lot of the drivers are, that's explaining some of the pricing action that we've seen in our commodity, which we can get to in a bit. Go to the next slide. You know, I always struggle presenting a slide like this because it looks just so terrifying, and you know, the reality is that there will be a combination of different ways that this supply-demand imbalance gets closed.
I think the fundamental understanding of, you know, what are the demand drivers and how durable are they versus, you know, how easy is it to add supply in our particular market, you know, with comparing that to some of the other critical minerals that get lumped in when we look at electrification of the automotive supply chain, you know, this gap is tremendously difficult to solve. The ability to add supply in our space is, you know, many billions of dollars, many, many, many, many years. That's assuming you can find an ore body that can support that type of investment economically over the medium and long term. There just are not a lot of options out there.
I think the exciting thing for us as a business is, you know, we have plenty of opportunity for our ore body and our assets to continue to grow with the market. But it is something that certainly is, you know, a pretty significant imbalance as we move to the outer years here. The security of supply is something also that, you know, is critically important as we think about, you know, what did the automotive supply chain in particular confront through, you know, for example, the COVID chip nightmare. You know, we equate a lot of the way some of the procurement for some of these things have been done is sort of, you know, tripping over dollars to pick up pennies.
You know, when you've got such a significant concentration in a market and a product as important as rare earth permanent magnets, it really speaks to, you know, the irreplaceable nature of our assets and the importance of us succeeding in this mission and what we're building. You know, and again, this is important for automotive. It's important for a whole host of applications. You know, in many ways, it's not an anti-China sentiment whatsoever. It's more that having the concentration of something so important in any one country is something that, you know, we believe is not tenable and shouldn't be tolerated by those that are building supply chains for the long term. So that's certainly a big part of our mission and, you know, what we are aiming to address.
And, you know, so in terms of how we're addressing it, I gave a very quick preview at the beginning, but our three stages of our business in terms of how we refer to them, stage one, our upstream business, stage two, our midstream business, and stage three, the downstream, you know, altogether are what encompass what we view as really the only, you know, raw material all the way to finished product solution, you know, for this industry. The, you know, interesting thing about our upstream asset is, you know, we've been in production, you know, at significant commercial scale since 2018. We've continued to make great strides in that business and continue to solidify ourselves as a low-cost producer globally in the rare earth concentrate business, what we produce from our upstream initiatives.
And on the midstream side of things, we've brought a state-of-the-art refinery where there was over $2 billion of invested capital. We have brought that online and are ramping that rapidly to a place where once we are through this ramp stage and we've moved into more significant production volumes where we can more spread our fixed costs and all of that good stuff, we feel confident that we will be one of the lowest-cost producers of separated refined rare earth products in the world as well. And there are a tremendous number of advantages that I can speak to in a moment as to why and how we're able to compete from a cost perspective, even with such a significantly concentrated environment and market in China. On the downstream side of things, you know, we are building this initiative completely from scratch.
It's something that has not been done in the Western world in many decades, and in some ways, in terms of our origin story and how we started with our upstream and midstream, which we can certainly get into, you know, we're walking before we run on the downstream side of things and building, you know, a 1,000 metric ton NdFeB magnet facility that, you know, certainly we are not coming out of the gate aiming to compete with the Chinese on prices in our magnetics business.
We are aiming to restore a capability, continue to learn and iterate and bring American innovation to that space, bring security of supply to our foundational customer and our other customers, and then continue to move down the cost curve as we drive scale in that business over time and, you know, automation and all of those things that will enable us to be, you know, a full suite of products, you know, both from upstream all the way to downstream for our customers. Go to the next slide. In terms of, you know, the specific advantages that, you know, we can bring to bear in our mining and beneficiation operation, you know, there's a tremendous amount of history at this site. Mountain Pass was discovered actually in the late 1940s and is one of the world's richest rare earth ore bodies, north of a 6% head grade.
And, you know, interestingly, you think about comparing Mountain Pass, where, you know, you'll see headlines all the time about some rare earth discovery in Turkey or in Greenland or, you know, here or there. And the reality is that it's not just about head grade, but the reality is that our head grade is many, many multiples of, you know, most of the potential hopeful projects and, frankly, many of the producing projects in China. So we start with a tremendous advantage there. But in addition, one of the most critical elements to a successful upstream operation is the makeup of the ore and how easy it is to create salable products and refined products from that ore.
And so we benefit from what is a bastnaesite host rock where the rare earth mineralization is found, which allows us to be one of the world's lowest-cost producers of our concentrate product and forms a tremendous basis for us to build our refining operation on top of. We've talked about the fact that, you know, over the course of the last several years, we've produced just over 40,000 metric tons of REO and concentrate. For those where this is, you know, this is new and some of these metrics don't mean much, it's, you know, it's a very significant, you know, player in the market. But what we have said is our target is in our Upstream 60K initiative that we've called it, we aim to increase that production level by 50% over the next four years.
And frankly, that initiative will take a very modest investment to actualize given all of the scale of the existing asset and, you know, some of the amazing talent that we've built to drive success in this business. Going to the midstream operation, which for context, you know, we had been investing in upgrading some of the facilities on site for several years and completed that and launched production really just about a year ago. And so this is a relatively new set of assets for us, but it is absolutely not a new set of operations for Mountain Pass and for many of the folks that are, you know, that are running the business for us at site.
You know, this is a portion of the operation that actually worked very well under the predecessor operator, but required some investment to bring back some of the refining assets that are able to leverage best some of the advantages I mentioned about the ore itself just a minute ago. And so we spent several hundred million dollars on this initiative. As I mentioned, we launched about a year ago. We've produced in that period of time over 600 tons of on-spec NdPr oxide. You know, importantly, through all of the stages of our business and primarily with, you know, the NdPr oxide production, three of the top five global automakers are our customers at this point. And we are continuing on our plan to continue to grow production over time here and continue to be able to broaden our geographic base.
You know, with our upstream product, the preponderance of refining capacity is all in China, as we talked about. With this refined product, we open up the market for ourselves and are able to sell into Japanese, Korean magnet makers and others in the space where there is, you know, no real refining capacity for them to be able to take an upstream product. And so that's a problem that we are solving for them rapidly. I think in terms of how you do this, given particularly the reputation that mining and materials, you know, gets in terms of, you know, the certain difficult environmental signatures, you know, of these types of operations, we are incredibly proud of where we operate and how we operate. We get a lot of questions from investors, you know, what's it like to run a big mining operation in California?
I'll tell you, it forced a lot of creative thinking at the beginning. A perfect example of that is our water recycling facility and tailings management plant where we are one of very, very few mining operations globally that has a dry stack tailings process. We're effectively, you know, nothing that touches the process ever touches the ground again. We extract or pull out the products that we need from it, dewater, you know, the slurries that are created in the process and return effectively a dry product back to ground. You know, that is something that is very rarely employed, but we found a solution that, you know, allows us to continue to be very, very cost competitive while also meeting, you know, some of the most strict environmental standards. We actually recently published an update to our environmental report.
And so we encourage folks to take a look at that. You know, it's something that certainly for a lot of companies, particularly companies like ours where, you know, we are a relatively young business, it's certainly a journey, but it is something that we get a lot of engagement from customers and investors on. And it's something that we're proud of, of the journey that we've been on and results we've been able to drive and certainly more to do there over time. In terms of the downstream operation that I mentioned, our initial metal alloy and magnet manufacturing facility, which we call Independence. The thing that is often not really well appreciated in a business like ours that's relatively niche is, you know, in order to get a full solution, to get to a finished magnet, you need the upstream. You need the midstream.
But then there are many process steps going from NdPr oxide, which we sell, you know, for context of scale. Our midstream operation when at full tilt would make enough NdPr oxide for 10 of these total facilities approximately, and so this initial, you know, entrance into the downstream part of the business is, you know, much smaller scale for us in terms of overall volumes, but I think absolutely critical in demonstrating the ability to do all of the requisite process steps at commercial scale in the United States in order to solve what is a really significant supply chain challenge, and so within this facility, within Independence, we will go from oxide produced at Mountain Pass, California, ship that to our facility in Texas where we will turn that oxide into a metal product.
We will turn that metal into a strip cast alloy, which forms the basis of taking that alloy, pressing, sintering, finishing, slicing, grinding, coating into a highly engineered final finished magnet product where, you know, we often, frankly, hesitate to talk about this in tonnage terms even at this point because this is, you know, discrete manufacturing, not process. You know, it's not like our upstream and midstream business. These are, you know, critical individual, highly engineered magnetic parts that form, you know, the basis of, you know, the rotor and stator and how those move within a traction motor and an electric vehicle, and so it's something that is absolutely critical. And being able to do all of the process steps in one facility, frankly, is groundbreaking and something that we're very excited about, so this facility is a 250,000 sq ft state-of-the-art purpose-built plant.
We broke ground on this in, for context, in April of 2022, so not that much more than two years ago. You know, we are in the building. It houses not just the factory, but our magnetics headquarters where we have nearly 100 employees at this point, you know, working feverishly to meet the demands of our customers. What our current targets are is to be in commercial production of NdPr metal at the end of this year. We demonstrated our ability to make NdPr metal in North America at a commercial pilot at another facility, you know, a couple of quarters ago. We are deploying that capital and those assets into the facility that you see here. We're working to ensure that we've got prototype magnets available for our customer for validation. And then we are targeting serial magnet production at the end of 2025.
So not too far away from now. You know, it's something that we are incredibly proud of the progress that this team has made. It's something that when we took the company public in 2020 was, frankly, an idea on a piece of paper. And so going from an idea to breaking ground in, you know, less than two years and then breaking ground to, you know, a facility that's going to start generating revenue here pretty soon is, you know, a pretty feverish pace, particularly for, you know, something in this industry and something that we're very, very proud of. With that, I will, I guess, Brian, we can turn it back to you and anything you want to cover.
That's great, Ryan. And I greatly appreciate that. You know, I think you touched on it a little bit.
The China dynamics are one that we're going to talk about a lot over the course of the next couple of days. You know, potentially any benefits or challenges that come from a higher tariff market that MP may face in the event that's where geo or geopolitics goes.
Sure. You know, certainly I think, you know, we're a global business. Our mission obviously is restoring this capability in the United States, but we're a global business. We sell a significant amount of product to China. We sell a significant amount of product to Japan, Korea, you know, domestically and are building out a domestic capability, and so, you know, anytime there's tariffs on either side, it always introduces uncertainty.
But I think the most important sort of fundamental thing to think about here is regardless of who's in the White House, this initiative that we are on, this space is, frankly, as we're talking about it this morning, it's as bipartisan as apple pie. You know, this is something that, you know, we have seen significant support from, you know, the Biden administration, the prior Trump administration. You know, we think that this is something that is important on both sides. And then when you think about, you know, what tariffs could mean either, you know, from the U.S., you know, from China, I think at the end of the day, what it brings us back to is what are the tariffs there to do? They're there for reshoring, right?
They're there to let our domestic industry develop in a way that allows us to compete economically, you know, on a global scale, and, you know, nothing could be more directly on message for us than, you know, reintroducing a domestic supply chain for something absolutely critical to electrification, to defense, you know, to, you know, green energy, you know, whatever it may be. This is something that really is a critical capability, and so, you know, I think an example would be we saw, you know, not too long ago, earlier this year, in conjunction with the announcement of the 100% tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles, we saw 25% tariffs on Chinese-made magnets coming into the United States, so products that, you know, essentially would be direct competitors to our magnet products being sold in the United States.
You know, look, from that perspective, is a 25% tariff a panacea? Absolutely not. But does it make buyers really think twice about, you know, the prices that I am being quoted for my magnet in China, you know, where if you do the math, sometimes it's less than what the required materials would be to make said magnets? Is that sustainable? Is that something that makes sense to buy 100% of our magnets from? You know, very likely not. And so again, I think we are a global business and we want to be globally competitive. And we will continue to work to sort of, you know, compete on a global scale.
But I think these are the sorts of things that sort of draw attention to the criticality of our mission and just make customers think about the susceptibility of a supply chain that has such a heavy concentration, you know, in any non-U.S. country and certainly in a country like China.
That's greatly appreciated. You know, I think if we're looking at your financials, I think it can be misleading because a couple of years ago, we were nearly $400 million in EBITDA. And, you know, this year it's going to be a little more, you know, considerably more challenged. Part of that is due to stranded capacity for the investments that you're putting in, but also some of it's due to the volatility that we've seen in the NdPr market. So maybe you can just talk about the levers within your P&L that are really driving this.
Yeah, look, I think it's absolutely right, you know, that we view sort of, you know, what has been a challenging year to date, you know, through Q2, you know, and certainly a challenging 2023 coming off of, you know, what was a peak in NdPr pricing and, you know, our commodity pricing in 2022. You know, we can't control prices, obviously, you know, despite my best efforts. You know, these products sell in a global market, like I said. And, you know, as much as you often hear people talk about it, and it's kind of wild to hear where, you know, you'll hear, you know, some hopeful projects out there that say, oh, you know, this project pencils at $90 NdPr $150 NdPr, whatever it is.
And that's with them coming up with a, you know, frankly, you know, plus or minus 25% estimate on CapEx that really is, you know, + 150%, - 15% is generally how these things go. And so, you know, it really speaks to, you know, the difficulty in building something of scale in this industry. And so, you know, I think the volatility in pricing in some ways underscores the strategic nature of our asset that we can compete. Look, this is not, you know, it has not been a beautiful P&L over the last couple of quarters, as you can see. But I think it also, to your point, doesn't tell the whole story.
If we were making the same product that we had been making over the last four years only, and that was sort of coming through the P&L, it would be a totally different story where not only have we been in that business for many, many years, have scaled that business, but we're actually taking that product that normally flows through the P&L as significant revenue and capturing it, running it through a refinery, and then filling the sales channel for our refined product. So, you know, we're actually, it's not just about cost structure, and that is part of it, which we can talk about in a moment, but it's really that we're self-cannibalizing. And oftentimes, you know, it's sort of misunderstood when you think about some of these new projects coming online. Oftentimes, they're going from nothing to a refined product.
We have, frankly, what is the benefit over the medium and long term, but in this very short term ramp of our midstream asset, we're cannibalizing our own sales. And that is a temporary impact that we will roll through over time.
Yep. No, it's, there's so much here. As I mentioned before, this is a conference looking at issues for the next four years, and you're clearly a stock for the next four years. We are bumping up into time, unfortunately, but I want to thank you both for joining us and greatly appreciated the insights that you provided. So thank you very much, Ryan.
Thank you so much, Brian. Appreciate the time, Brian. Thank you.
With that, we have about eight minutes of buffer time. Lunch is in Brahms One.
If you all could please and quickly grab what you'd like and then come back in, and we'll have Gentex here in about eight minutes. Thanks.