Arafura Brand Guidelines: The Perth Company Behind the Nolans Rare-Earths Project

A Perth company and a Central Australian deposit.

Arafura Rare Earths is a Perth-based mining company built around one project: Nolans, a rare-earths deposit 135 kilometres north of Alice Springs in Australia’s Northern Territory. English Wikipedia records that it was listed on the Australian Securities Exchange in 2003 as Arafura Resources, and that it took its present name, Arafura Rare Earths Ltd, in October 2022. Its exchange code, ARU, also forms the address of its website.

The deposit is called Nolans Bore. The company describes it as a rare earths–phosphate–uranium–thorium deposit, “one of the largest and most intensively explored deposits of its kind in the world,” and says the project will combine a mine, a process plant — covering beneficiation, extraction and separation — and related infrastructure on the same site. The Porter GeoConsultancy deposit database places it in the Reynolds Range and describes a hydrothermal stockwork of veins carrying rare earths, phosphate and uranium in minerals including apatite, monazite and allanite.

Turning that geology into a project took a long time. When the company announced its decision to build in May 2026, ABC News reported that Nolans was going ahead “decades after it was first flagged as a prospect,” and quoted managing director Darryl Cuzzubbo as saying the wait reflected the difficulty of building a processing plant, as well as a mine, in a market dominated by China.

From a deposit to a final investment decision.

Arafura’s plan is to go further than most rare-earth miners. Almost all rare earths produced globally are processed only to a concentrate or a carbonate, Cuzzubbo told the ABC, “whereas we take it one step further to an oxide.” The company’s flagship intended product is neodymium-praseodymium (NdPr) oxide, the input for neodymium-iron-boron permanent magnets used in electric-vehicle motors and wind turbines. It also plans a mixed middle-heavy rare-earth oxide and, as a by-product, phosphoric acid for granular fertilisers. Mining Technology reported in May 2026 that the project aims to produce 4,440 tonnes of NdPr oxide a year.

Public money has been central to the plan. In January 2025 ABC Rural reported that the National Reconstruction Fund Corporation had committed an equity investment in Nolans, on top of a federal loans and grants package announced in March 2024; the corporation’s chair called it “the nation’s first ore-to-oxide rare earths processing operation.” The company’s project page lists debt from Export Finance Australia and the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility, with Canadian, Korean and German export credit agencies and commercial lenders including KfW IPEX-Bank, ING and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. The ABC has also reported that Gina Rinehart is a key investor in the project.

On 21 May 2026 Arafura announced a final investment decision on Nolans. A joint media release from Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Resources Minister Madeleine King, published by Export Finance Australia the same day, said the government had given a non-binding commitment to secure 500 tonnes of rare earths from the project through its new Critical Minerals Strategic Reserve, and that Arafura would “now move to commence construction.” The ABC reported the commitment as up to 500 tonnes of NdPr oxide a year, and King said it was the first time the reserve had been used. The government release projected 600 construction jobs and 350 ongoing jobs; Mining Technology reported that the company planned to begin construction in September 2026. Cuzzubbo called the decision “the starting line,” with production several years away.

Design and documentation.

Rare-earth and magnet companies sell materials most people never see, so their pictures do a lot of the explaining. The usual opening image is the mine: an open pit cut in benches into red or ochre desert ground, haul trucks small against the terraces, and a wide sky above. It tells a viewer that the story starts with rock and with a particular place, which matters in a business where origin is part of the product.

The next scenes are inside the plant. Separation is slow chemistry, and companies often show it as long rows of mixer-settler tanks, pipework and walkways, or a rotating kiln seen from its end. The finished goods then appear as oxide powders in small dishes or heaps, often in soft pastel shades of pink, green, grey and cream, a quiet way to show that one ore becomes many separate elements.

Magnets bring the story to the customer. Silver blocks, rings and arcs stacked on a bench, or set into a cutaway of an electric motor or a wind-turbine generator, link the material to the products people know. Investor presentations add the periodic table, usually with the lanthanides picked out in a highlight colour, along with maps that trace the route from mine to separation plant to magnet factory.

The same visual vocabulary appears at trade gatherings, from the events of the Rare Earth Industry Association to the Magnetics conference, where stands and slides lean on the same few motifs: the pit, the plant, the powder and the magnet. For a designer, the category shows how a technical, slow-moving industry can be made legible through a short, repeated sequence of images rather than through slogans.

Customers before the first tonne.

Arafura has signed supply agreements well ahead of production. The ABC listed the South Korean carmakers Hyundai and Kia, the German wind-turbine maker Siemens Gamesa and the US commodity trader Traxys among them, and the government release said Arafura would work with it to direct the reserve’s offtake to “strategic partners and allies.” The government expects Nolans to supply about 4 to 5 per cent of global rare-earth demand at full capacity, the ABC reported; the company’s own website puts the figure at about 4 per cent of world NdPr oxide demand.

The company’s products page explains where that oxide is meant to go. NdPr is the main rare-earth input for neodymium-iron-boron magnets, which Arafura says are used in vehicle traction and power-steering motors, wind-turbine generators, robotics and speakers; it names magnet producers in Japan, Korea and China, and car and wind-turbine makers in Europe, Japan, Korea and the USA, as the customers it has in mind. The ABC reported that the processing plant at Nolans is planned to include its own sulphuric acid plant.

Work on the ground began before the decision. In January 2025 ABC Rural reported that Arafura had started minor civil works at Nolans and had built an accommodation village for workers on the site. The plant itself is still to be built: Nolans is a project in development rather than an operating mine, and at the May 2026 decision its managing director put production several years away.

For a design guide, Arafura shows a company whose identity is still a plan: one deposit, a long road to approval and a product defined years before it is made. Compare Lynas and Iluka, two other Australian companies in rare earths. For this guide we use a red-earth tone and a deep slate with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Arafura’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.