Thulium

Market Overview: The Second-Rarest Natural Rare Earth Has No Real Market at All

Thulium (Tm, atomic number 69) sits at the extreme tail of the heavy-rare-earth group, one of only seven elements — terbium, dysprosium, holmium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium, and lutetium — that the U.S. Geological Survey classifies separately as “heavy” rare earths in its Mineral Commodity Summaries, distinct from the far larger light-rare-earth market dominated by cerium, lanthanum, and neodymium-praseodymium (USGS MCS 2026, Rare Earths (Heavy)). USGS does not publish a standalone U.S. price series or import-source breakdown for thulium specifically — unlike terbium, dysprosium, holmium, erbium, ytterbium, and lutetium, all of which get their own price and import-source lines in the heavy-rare-earths chapter, thulium is folded into the generic “compounds and metals” import total of just 100 tonnes (REO equivalent) for all seven heavy rare earths combined in 2025 (USGS MCS 2026, Rare Earths (Heavy)). That omission is itself the clearest signal of thulium's market size: it is too small and too thinly traded for USGS analysts to justify a dedicated price line, even within an already-niche heavy-rare-earth chapter that covers just 100 tonnes of combined U.S. imports a year.

Net U.S. import reliance for the heavy-rare-earths basket as a whole was 100% in every year from 2021 through 2025, and the United States has zero heavy-rare-earth mine or separation output large enough to register in the salient statistics (USGS MCS 2026, Rare Earths (Heavy)). China's dominance of the broader rare-earths complex is total at the mine level too: China mined 270,000 tonnes of REO in 2025, roughly 69% of the estimated 390,000-tonne world total, with the next-largest producer, the United States (Mountain Pass), at just 51,000 tonnes — and Mountain Pass produces light rare earths from bastnaesite, not the ion-adsorption clay ore type that hosts thulium (USGS MCS 2026, Rare Earths).

Why it matters: unlike neodymium (magnets) or dysprosium (magnet coercivity), thulium has essentially no bulk industrial application. Its entire demand base is specialty and laboratory-scale — portable X-ray sources, 2-micron medical lasers, fiber-optic doping, and superconductivity research — which is precisely why no government stockpile, no LME contract, and no dedicated USGS price line exists for it. It is the thinnest of the thin heavy-rare-earth markets, several orders of magnitude smaller than dysprosium or terbium in tonnage terms even though it commands a comparable or higher price per kilogram.

Supply Chain: Byproduct of a Byproduct — Ion-Adsorption Clays and the Separation Cascade

1. Ion-adsorption clays: the only economically viable source

Thulium's principal historical source was monazite sand, where it occurs at only about 0.007% of contained rare earths — too dilute to matter commercially. Today virtually all separated thulium comes from the ion-adsorption clay deposits of southern China, where weak-acid leaching can cheaply strip the rare-earth-bearing clay minerals without the intensive acid-cracking or alkaline fusion required for hard-rock ores like bastnaesite or monazite (Wikipedia, thulium production). These clays run roughly two-thirds yttrium by contained rare-earth oxide content, with thulium tied with lutetium as the scarcest fraction, at about 0.5% of the total (Wikipedia, thulium production). A market-research profile of the thulium supply chain summarizes the dependency bluntly: thulium “is produced exclusively as a byproduct of heavy rare earth separation, primarily from Chinese ion-adsorption clays,” with China supplying an estimated 95% of world output and Myanmar accounting for most of the remainder (Critical and Strategic Metals Hub, Thulium Supply Chain).

2. Illegal and unregulated mining in the historical Chinese supply base

A significant share of the ion-adsorption clay ore that ultimately yields thulium has historically come from unlicensed operations. Industry compilations citing Chinese customs and enforcement data put the illegal-mining share of China's ion-adsorption clay output at 80.7% cumulatively between 2011 and 2020 (lanthanides.io, Thulium Price 2026). Beijing's own rare-earth industry consolidation policy — concentrating quota allocation among a small number of state-linked group companies and pushing repeated crackdowns on unlicensed ionic clay mines in Jiangxi, Guangdong, and Fujian — is aimed substantially at this problem, but because thulium is a trace byproduct of a byproduct stream, its supply is doubly exposed to any enforcement-driven swings in upstream ionic clay tonnage.

3. Separation and purification: chromatography and solvent extraction at the end of the cascade

Because thulium sits between erbium and ytterbium in the lanthanide series, with an ionic radius differing from its neighbors by only fractions of a picometer, separating it to high purity requires many hundreds of solvent-extraction stages or dedicated ion-exchange chromatography columns. Academic process-engineering work modeling preparative chromatographic separation of heavy rare earths reports thulium purification yields of only 0.2–0.5 kg of thulium per cubic meter of stationary phase, achieving 99% purity with yields ranging from 74% to 99% depending on process conditions (Advances in Materials Physics and Chemistry, chromatographic thulium purification modeling). Reaching the higher 99.99% (4N) purity grade required for laser crystals and superconductor research requires an additional vacuum-sublimation purification step beyond standard 99.9% (3N) metal, which is why 4N thulium metal trades at roughly a 30-times premium over 3N material in Western specialty-metal listings (lanthanides.io, Thulium Price 2026). Metallic thulium itself is produced either by reducing thulium oxide with lanthanum metal or by calcium reduction in a sealed container — none of thulium's naturally occurring compounds have any commercial importance in their own right (Wikipedia, thulium production).

4. Non-Chinese processing: real progress on dysprosium and terbium, none yet on thulium

The clearest sign of how far outside the mainstream thulium sits is what the leading non-Chinese heavy-rare-earth separator, Lynas Rare Earths, is not doing with it. Lynas Malaysia's Kuantan advanced materials plant became the first commercial producer of separated heavy rare earths outside China when it produced dysprosium oxide in May 2025 and terbium oxide in June 2025, followed by samarium oxide ahead of schedule in early 2026 (IOM3, 19 May 2025; IOM3, 25 Mar 2026). In October 2025, Lynas announced a new RM500 million (~US$118 million) heavy-rare-earth separation facility at Kuantan with 5,000 tonnes-per-year feedstock capacity, but the company's own disclosed product roadmap for that expansion lists only dysprosium, gadolinium, lutetium, samarium, terbium, and yttrium in its initial production suite, with europium, holmium, ytterbium, and erbium named only as possible future additions “depending on commercial agreements” (Mining Technology, 29 Oct 2025). Thulium does not appear on that list at all — not even as a contingent future product — underscoring that even the world's most advanced non-Chinese heavy-rare-earth separator sees insufficient near-term commercial case to build thulium-specific circuitry. Lynas's chief executive, Amanda Lacaze, has stated that Malaysia's own ionic clay deposits have “strong potential as future feedstock” for the Kuantan plant given their heavy-rare-earth enrichment, and Lynas has separately signed a non-binding memorandum with Kelantan's state investment arm to explore mixed rare-earth carbonate supply (Malay Mail, 30 May 2025) — but this remains exploratory and does not currently extend to thulium production.

End Uses: Portable X-Rays, 2-Micron Surgical Lasers, and a Handful of Physics Labs

1. Thulium-170 portable X-ray radiation sources

Natural thulium is essentially monoisotopic (100% thulium-169). Bombarding it with neutrons in a nuclear reactor converts it to the radioactive isotope thulium-170 via the ¹⁶⁹Tm(n,γ)¹⁷⁰Tm reaction, exploiting thulium's unusually high neutron capture cross-section of 103 barns (Wikipedia, Thulium-170). Thulium-170 has a half-life of 128.6 days and decays with five major gamma/X-ray emission lines of comparable intensity at 7.4, 51.354, 52.389, 59.4, and 84.253 keV (Wikipedia, thulium, X-ray sources). Because the emitted radiation is relatively low-energy, sealed Tm-170 sources require only modest shielding — “a small cup of lead” — making them, per Wikipedia's summary of the nuclear-physics literature, “among the most popular radiation sources for industrial radiography” with a useful operating life of about one year before the source must be replaced or re-irradiated (Wikipedia, thulium, X-ray sources). Interestingly, thulium's own history as an X-ray source dates to 1953, when the UK's Atomic Energy Research Establishment first evaluated Tm-170 for medical and steelmaking radiography but rejected it at the time because of “predominant high-energy bremsstrahlung radiation, poor results on thin specimens, and long exposure times” (Wikipedia, Thulium-170) — it took decades of source-design refinement before Tm-170 became the compact, self-shielded industrial and medical X-ray source in wide field use today.

2. Thulium-170 in brachytherapy: sealed-source cancer radiotherapy

Beyond static radiography, Tm-170 is used in high-dose-rate brachytherapy, where a sealed radioactive source is placed directly inside or adjacent to a tumor for localized radiation delivery, and in radiosynovectomy — injecting a radioisotope into an inflamed joint to ablate the synovial lining — for medium-sized joints (PubChem, Thulium element summary). Peer-reviewed nuclear-medicine research has specifically modeled hypothetical Tm-170 brachytherapy sources and evaluated thulium-170-labeled microparticles for local radiotherapy, citing thulium's combination of a convenient half-life, low-energy emission spectrum for selective tissue irradiation, and ease of preparation into a biocompatible chemical form as the reasons for continued research interest (PubMed, modeling a hypothetical 170Tm source for brachytherapy; PubMed, thulium-170-labeled microparticles for local radiotherapy).

3. Tm:YAG and thulium fiber lasers: the 2-micron surgical wavelength

Thulium's most commercially active application today is as the active laser ion in solid-state (Tm:YAG) and fiber lasers operating near 2 microns — a wavelength strongly absorbed by water and only weakly absorbed by air, which gives it a combination of shallow, precise tissue ablation and inherent eye safety that competing 1-micron and 1.5-micron laser wavelengths lack (Exail, fiber lasers in the 2 µm range). Single-element Tm:YAG lasers operate at about 2010 nm, while the related triple-doped holmium-chromium-thulium:YAG (Ho,Cr,Tm:YAG) crystal lases at 2080 nm and is separately used across military rangefinding, medicine, and meteorology (Wikipedia, thulium lasers). In urology, continuous-wave 2-micron thulium lasers have become an established alternative to transurethral resection of the prostate (TURP) for treating benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH): clinical review literature describes thulium laser vaporesection and the “vapo-enucleation” or “tangerine technique” as providing clearer intraoperative vision, lower blood loss, and shorter catheterization and hospitalization times than standard TURP, “regardless of prostate size” (Two-micron (thulium) laser prostatectomy review, PMC; Two-micron laser resection of the prostate: the tangerine technique, PMC). Separately, in urolithiasis (kidney stone) treatment, thulium fiber lasers (TFL) operating at 1.9–2.0 microns have rapidly displaced holmium:YAG as the emerging clinical standard for endoscopic lithotripsy in leading centers over the past several years, with comparative studies finding thulium fiber lasers achieve higher ablation rates at lower pulse energies and a retropulsion threshold estimated at 2–4 times higher than holmium:YAG, reducing stone movement during fragmentation (Thulium fiber laser: the new kid on the block, PMC). A 2025 randomized clinical trial directly comparing thulium fiber laser and holmium:YAG for ureteroscopic lithotripsy, and multiple 2025 reviews of pulsed Tm:YAG lithotripsy, confirm this remains an area of active clinical research and adoption as of the current year (PubMed, comparison of TFL and Ho:YAG, 2025; PubMed, Pulsed Thulium:YAG Laser for Lithotripsy, Sep 2025).

4. Thulium-doped fiber lasers for telecom, LIDAR, and materials processing

Outside medicine, thulium-doped silicate glass fiber is the standard gain medium for 2-micron fiber lasers used in free-space optical communications, LIDAR and laser rangefinding, and processing of polymers and other water-absorbent or heat-sensitive materials (Coherent, thulium-doped fiber datasheet). The lower atmospheric absorption and eye-safety of the 2-micron band make thulium fiber lasers attractive for Doppler LIDAR wind sensing and differential-absorption LIDAR water-vapor profiling (University of Malaya thesis, thulium-doped fiber laser development). In February 2025, Germany's Fraunhofer IOF reported a new generation of thulium fiber lasers achieving what it called world-record performance, explicitly citing both medical procedures and optical data transmission as target application areas and noting the improved eye safety that comes from 2-micron scattered light being absorbed by the cornea rather than reaching the retina (Fraunhofer IOF, February 2025).

Why it matters: thulium's laser and radiation-source demand is a growth niche, not a bulk-tonnage driver. Even a rapid clinical shift from holmium:YAG to thulium fiber lasers across the global urology equipment base would add, at most, a marginal increase in grams-scale thulium consumption per laser system — nothing close to the tonnage swings that move dysprosium or neodymium markets. But because total supply is only a few hundred tonnes of oxide worldwide, even that marginal structural demand growth is, in the words of one market tracker, capable of “tightening the small global supply of high-purity thulium metal faster than supply projections anticipate” (lanthanides.io, Thulium Price 2026).

Advanced Materials Research: TmBa₂Cu₃O₄ Superconductors and Beyond

Not a commercial-volume driver, but a persistent basic-research and niche-technology use. Thulium substitutes for yttrium in the crystal structure of high-temperature copper-oxide superconductors, and separately shows up in ferrites, dosimetry materials, and anti-counterfeiting applications — all specialty, gram-to-kilogram-scale uses.

1. TmBa₂Cu₃O₇ (TmBCO) as a rare-earth analog to YBCO superconductors

Yttrium barium copper oxide (YBa₂Cu₃O₇, “YBCO”) is the archetypal high-temperature superconductor, and because thulium's ionic radius and chemistry closely track yttrium's, researchers have substituted thulium for yttrium to produce TmBa₂Cu₃O₇ (“TmBCO”) as a comparative research material (Wikipedia, thulium, superconductors). Thermodynamic and calorimetric studies of TmBa₂Cu₃O₇ report a superconducting phase transition (critical temperature, T_c) around 90.9–91.3 K, essentially matching bulk YBCO's roughly 91 K transition temperature, with a heat-capacity jump of 5.1 J K⁻¹ mol⁻¹ at the transition (Thermochimica Acta, thermodynamic studies of Ba2TmCu3O7; arXiv, large-grain 1-2-3 compound synthesis using TmBa2Cu3O7-δ precursor).

2. Coated-conductor research: TmBCO's smaller ionic radius as an engineering advantage

Korean superconductivity research specifically exploits thulium's smaller ionic radius — the smallest among the rare-earth ions commonly used in REBCO (rare-earth barium copper oxide) coated conductors — to engineer thin-film superconducting tapes for electric power applications. A 2009 study on TmBCO coated conductors fabricated by pulsed laser deposition on buffered metal substrates reported critical current densities (J_c) of up to 2.3 MA/cm² at 77 K (liquid-nitrogen temperature) in self-field, describing this as “high enough to be utilized for application in electric power devices”, with the bulk TmBCO transition temperature around 91 K, comparable to YBCO (Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers, TmBCO coated conductor research, 2009). Follow-on process optimization work pushed critical current density to roughly double that figure under similar test conditions, illustrating TmBCO's continued relevance as a research vehicle for improving REBCO coated-conductor performance for high-field magnets and power-grid superconducting cable applications (Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers, TmBCO coated conductor research, 2009).

3. Ferrites, dosimetry, and anti-counterfeiting: the smaller specialty niches

USGS's heavy-rare-earths chapter lists “industrial and medical lasers” and “medical and scientific equipment” among heavy-REE end uses without breaking out thulium's smaller niches individually, but the broader element literature documents several: thulium has potential use in ferrites, the ceramic magnetic materials used in microwave equipment (PubChem, Thulium element summary); thulium-doped calcium sulfate's blue fluorescence under radiation exposure has been used in personal radiation dosimeters for visual monitoring; and thulium is incorporated into euro banknotes specifically as an anti-counterfeiting measure, because it fluoresces blue under ultraviolet light in a way that is difficult to replicate with common pigments (Wikipedia, thulium, other applications). Thulium-doped halides where thulium sits in its less-common 2+ oxidation state have also been proposed as luminescent materials for luminescent solar concentrator windows, an experimental approach to building semi-transparent, electricity-generating glazing (Wikipedia, thulium, other applications).

Prices & Benchmarks: No Exchange, No USGS Line, a 300× Spread Between Bulk and Lab-Grade

1. The historical price record: $4,600–$13,300/kg for four decades

Thulium has commanded extraordinary per-kilogram prices for as long as market data exists. Wikipedia's compiled price history shows 99.9%-purity thulium metal oscillating between US$4,600 and US$13,300 per kilogram from 1959 to 1998, a range that made it the second-most-expensive lanthanide after lutetium throughout that period (Wikipedia, thulium, price history). Separate compilations covering the same era (sourced to Institute of Rare Earths and Metals, IMAR) list a thulium metal price around $28,000/kg as of 2003, alongside oxide around $3,000/kg (Wikipedia, Prices of chemical elements). By 1996, thulium oxide was priced at roughly US$20/gram (US$20,000/kg); by 2005, 99%-pure metal powder was quoted around US$70/gram (US$70,000/kg) (Wikipedia, thulium, production) — figures broadly consistent with the extreme small-lot premiums still seen in 2026 quotes.

2. Current benchmark and retail pricing, March 2026

Source: lanthanides.io, Thulium Price 2026 (Mar 2026 survey of 19 retailers). The spread across this table — from $180/kg for 25-kilogram bulk FOB China oxide to over $71,000/kg-equivalent for a single certified gram of 4N metal — illustrates why a single headline “thulium price” is close to meaningless. The retail-to-bulk premium runs roughly 10× even at matched 99.9% purity (1 kg Western retail metal versus 25 kg Chinese bulk oxide), and the 4N-over-3N purity premium runs roughly 30×, driven almost entirely by the additional vacuum-sublimation purification step needed to reach 99.99% (lanthanides.io, Thulium Price 2026).

3. Why the $1,000–$3,000/kg range is the most representative commercial benchmark

For genuine commercial-quantity (kilogram-lot) transactions rather than gram-scale laboratory reagent sales, the most representative range sits between roughly $1,000 and $3,200 per kilogram for 99.9%-purity oxide or metal, spanning the Chinese bulk FOB benchmark at the low end and Western distributor kilogram-lot quotes at the high end (lanthanides.io, Thulium Price 2026; Rare Earth Mining News, Thulium Price Today). Separately reported wholesale contract prices, privately negotiated rather than publicly quoted, have ranged from $4,600 to $13,300/kg — essentially the same nominal band thulium occupied throughout 1959–1998, adjusted for inflation this represents a real-terms decline, but the persistence of that same nominal range across six decades underscores how little genuine price discovery or liquidity exists in this market (Rare Earth Mining News, Thulium Price Today).

4. No futures market, no PRA-style physical assessment

Not applicable — market too thin for exchange listing or formal price assessment. Argus Media's Rare Earths Analytics service does track and forecast thulium as one of its covered elements alongside cerium, dysprosium, europium, erbium, gadolinium, holmium, lanthanum, lutetium, neodymium, neodymium-praseodymium, praseodymium, samarium, terbium, yttrium, and ytterbium (Argus Media, Rare Earths Analytics Service), but this is a subscription forecast product rather than a physical-market price assessment published from verified trade data, and no public futures contract, LME listing, or Fastmarkets/Argus daily physical assessment exists for thulium the way one does for neodymium-praseodymium oxide or dysprosium oxide. Rare Earth Mining News states this explicitly: “Thulium has no active public price benchmark — the Shanghai Metals Market and other major commodity exchanges do not publish a thulium contract” (Rare Earth Mining News, Thulium Price Today).

Trade Policy: Thulium's Brief Star Turn in China's October 2025 Rare-Earth Escalation

1. Announcement No. 57 of 2025: what exactly is controlled

MOFCOM and the General Administration of Customs' joint Announcement No. 57 of 2025, issued 9 October 2025, implemented export controls on “certain medium and heavy rare earth-related items,” adding five elements not previously covered by China's April 2025 controls: holmium, erbium, thulium, europium, and ytterbium (Global Trade Alert, China export controls intervention record). The thulium-specific control classification, 1C911, is granular: it covers thulium metal and thulium-containing alloys and products under 1C911.a (cross-referenced to tariff code 28053019), thulium-containing sputtering targets (including sheet and tube forms) under 1C911.a.2, thulium-containing crystalline materials under 1C911.a.3, thulium-containing luminescent materials under 1C911.a.4, thulium oxide and its mixtures under 1C911.b, and thulium-containing compounds and their mixtures — including powders and other forms — under 1C911.c (CTIA, MOFCOM Announcement No. 57 of 2025). This granularity — explicitly naming crystalline materials and luminescent materials as separate controlled categories — directly targets thulium's two largest actual application areas: laser crystals (Tm:YAG) and phosphor/luminescent compounds, rather than treating thulium as a generic raw metal.

2. Context: the escalating 2025 China rare-earth control sequence

Thulium's October 2025 listing was the second of three escalating waves of Chinese rare-earth export controls during 2025. In April 2025, MOFCOM first tightened controls on seven elements — samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium — under Announcement No. 18 (Taylor Wessing, Key Changes in China's Export Control Landscape for Rare Earths, Apr 2026). USGS's own rare-earths chapter confirms this timeline: “In April 2025, China tightened its export controls on rare-earth elements…In October, China expanded its rare-earths export controls to include europium, holmium, erbium, thulium, and ytterbium. In November, China suspended the October export controls for 1 year” (USGS MCS 2026, Rare Earths). The October 2025 package additionally introduced extraterritorial reach: products manufactured entirely outside China could require a MOFCOM export license if they contain Chinese-origin rare-earth content above a minimal value threshold, or were produced using Chinese-origin rare-earth processing technology (China Briefing, China's Rare Earth Export Controls, Nov 2025).

3. The November 2025 suspension and its fragile, reversible status

On 7 November 2025, MOFCOM issued Announcement No. 70 of 2025, suspending implementation of six of the October directives — Announcements 55, 56, 57, 58, 61, and 62 — “effective immediately until November 10, 2026,” as part of the broader US-China trade de-escalation following the Trump-Xi Busan summit (ChemRadar, China suspends export controls, 7 Nov 2025). Legal analysis of the suspension is unambiguous that this is a pause, not a repeal: the underlying regulation “is legally intact and can reactivate without new legislation” (lanthanides.io, Thulium Price 2026). A May 2026 analysis of the state of play ten days after the Beijing summit noted that despite President Trump's declaration that rare earths were “settled,” the earlier April 2025 licensing requirements on seven heavy rare earths “have never been suspended,” and Chinese customs data showed exports of yttrium, dysprosium, and terbium running roughly 50% below their pre-restriction baseline, with the broader suspension covering the October measures “set to expire in November 2026” (MOFCOM — China Ministry of Commerce (rare earth export controls, April 2025 curbs)).

4. General licenses and the practical trickle of thulium exports

Even where controls technically apply, MOFCOM has been issuing general export licenses to selected qualified exporters to keep some legitimate trade flowing, a mechanism China's commerce ministry confirmed applies to rare-earth-related commodities broadly (Yeni Safak, China approves rare earth export licenses). Because thulium volumes are already so small — a few hundred tonnes of oxide globally per year, spread across many buyers — the practical trade impact of a licensing regime, whether active or suspended, is best understood through price and availability signals from specialty distributors rather than through customs statistics, which do not break thulium out from the broader heavy-rare-earths reporting category (USGS MCS 2026, Rare Earths (Heavy)).

ESG, Standards & Sourcing: Ionic Clay Mining's Environmental Footprint and the Absence of Recycling

1. Ionic-clay leaching: a low-energy but ecologically invasive extraction method

Ion-adsorption clay mining — the source of essentially all thulium — uses in-situ or heap-leaching with ammonium sulfate or similar weak-acid leaching agents to strip rare earths directly from clay without conventional hard-rock mining and crushing. While less energy-intensive than bastnaesite or monazite processing, this method has historically caused significant environmental damage in southern China, including soil acidification, deforestation from vegetation clearance, and ammonia-nitrogen contamination of local waterways from leachate runoff, issues well documented in the academic literature on ion-adsorption clay extraction more broadly (RWTH Aachen, Extraction of Rare Earth Elements from Ion Adsorption Clays).

2. Illegal mining as a structural governance problem specific to thulium's source ore

Because so much of the world's thulium-bearing ionic clay ore has historically come from unlicensed operations — industry data cited at 80.7% of cumulative 2011–2020 Chinese ion-adsorption clay output (lanthanides.io, Thulium Price 2026) — standard responsible-sourcing frameworks such as the OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Supply Chains, designed around traceable mine-to-smelter documentation, are structurally difficult to apply to thulium's supply base. There is no equivalent of the LBMA's Good Delivery chain-of-custody framework or a thulium-specific responsible-sourcing standard; thulium simply inherits whatever governance quality exists (or does not) in the upstream ionic clay and mixed-rare-earth-carbonate trade, which China's own quota and licensing consolidation policy has targeted with repeated enforcement crackdowns.

3. Recycling: structurally absent, exactly as in bismuth and other trace heavy REEs

There is no dedicated thulium recycling stream. USGS's recycling note for the entire heavy-REE basket states only that “small quantities of heavy rare earths were recovered from permanent magnets” (USGS MCS 2026, Rare Earths (Heavy)), and that recovery stream is overwhelmingly weighted toward neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium content in end-of-life NdFeB magnets — thulium is not a magnet-alloy constituent and has essentially no comparable end-of-life collection pathway. Because thulium's applications (laser crystals, X-ray sources, superconductor research samples, luminescent materials) are dispersed across small, specialized devices rather than concentrated in a high-volume consumer product category, no economically viable collection-and-refining loop exists or is likely to emerge at current market scale.

4. Critical raw material classification

Thulium is not separately named on the U.S. Department of Energy's critical materials list or the EU's 2023 Critical Raw Materials Act Annex I in the way that neodymium, dysprosium, or gallium are individually flagged; it falls under the broader “heavy rare earths” and “rare earth elements” category designations used by both frameworks, reflecting its status as a market too small to warrant individual regulatory attention even within critical-minerals policy circles. A market-research profile nonetheless states plainly that thulium “is considered a critical raw material due to its extreme scarcity, specialized high-technology applications, and severe supply concentration in China” (Brian D. Colwell, Interesting Facts About Thulium, Jun 2025).

Forward Look 2026–2030: A Laser-Demand Niche Waiting on a Supply Base That Doesn't Yet Exist

1. Demand-side: thulium fiber laser adoption is the one real growth vector

The single most concrete demand catalyst for thulium through 2030 is continued clinical and industrial adoption of 2-micron thulium fiber and Tm:YAG lasers. Market tracking explicitly flags this: “TFL laser demand is described as a rapidly growing structural driver,” noting that thulium fiber lasers “have rapidly displaced Ho:YAG as the preferred modality for endoscopic urological surgery in leading centres” in a shift that is “recent (post-2020)” (lanthanides.io, Thulium Price 2026). Fraunhofer IOF's February 2025 announcement of record-performance thulium fiber lasers targeting both medical and optical-data-transmission markets signals continued technical investment on the supply-of-technology side, independent of raw-material supply constraints (Fraunhofer IOF, Feb 2025).

2. Supply-side: no dedicated thulium project exists, and none is likely soon

Unlike dysprosium, terbium, or even samarium, no announced project anywhere in the world targets thulium as a primary or even clearly identified secondary product. Lynas's expanded Kuantan heavy-rare-earth facility, Iluka's Eneabba refinery, and Energy Fuels' White Mesa circuit are all adding non-Chinese heavy-REE separation capacity through 2026–2028, but their disclosed product roadmaps stop at dysprosium, terbium, gadolinium, samarium, yttrium, and lutetium, with europium, holmium, ytterbium, and erbium named only as contingent future additions (Mining Technology, 29 Oct 2025). Thulium is not mentioned in any of these roadmaps at all. Given that thulium makes up only about 0.5% of contained rare-earth oxide even in the most heavy-REE-enriched ionic clays (Wikipedia, thulium production), any future non-Chinese thulium supply will most likely arrive only as an incidental byproduct once a producer has already built out separation circuits for the more commercially important dysprosium, terbium, and yttrium fractions — meaning genuine ex-China thulium supply is probably several years behind even the currently nascent non-Chinese dysprosium/terbium supply chain.

3. Key risk: reactivation of Chinese export controls before alternative supply exists

The most acute near-term risk is straightforward: China's Announcement No. 57 of 2025 control on thulium (1C911) remains legally valid and merely suspended until 10 November 2026. If US-China trade relations deteriorate before that date, or if the suspension is not renewed, formal export licensing on thulium metal, oxide, crystalline materials, and luminescent materials could resume with no advance warning and no alternative non-Chinese supply base in place to absorb the shock (lanthanides.io, Thulium Price 2026). Because Western laser-crystal and specialty-chemical buyers of thulium are typically small research institutions, medical device makers, and laser manufacturers rather than large industrial consumers with dedicated trade-compliance and stockpiling functions, this segment of the market is arguably less prepared for a supply shock than the larger dysprosium/terbium magnet-materials buyers who have spent 2025–2026 actively diversifying their sourcing.

4. Demand scenario: a small market that could still see outsized price moves

Because thulium's addressable market is only a few hundred tonnes of oxide-equivalent per year, even modest absolute increases in laser-crystal or X-ray-source demand could produce disproportionately large percentage price swings — the same dynamic seen in bismuth's 2025 price spike, but starting from a market roughly an order of magnitude smaller in tonnage and already priced two to three orders of magnitude higher per kilogram. There is, at present, no credible scenario in which thulium becomes a bulk-tonnage commodity: its entire addressable end-use base — portable X-ray sources, urological and industrial 2-micron lasers, fiber-optic doping, and superconductor research — is fundamentally a specialty-materials market that will continue to be measured in kilograms and single-digit tonnes per application, not the thousand-tonne scale of magnet or battery rare earths. The most likely trajectory through 2030 is continued slow, laser-driven demand growth against an unchanged, China-concentrated, byproduct-only supply base — a combination that argues for structurally firm-to-rising prices even without any single dramatic supply-shock event.