The majority of world beryllium ore production takes place in the US. With the remaining output coming from China, Brazil and several nations in Africa , such as Nigeria, Madagascar and Mozambique. Commercial beryllium ore production in Russia stopped during the 1990s, as did beryllium mining in Argentina, Namibia and Zimbabwe. Materion Brush is the sole US producer of beryllium ore which it mines as bertrandite from a company owned mine in Utah. In China, the Xinjiang Non-ferrous Metal Industry mines beryllium ores.

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Materion Brush Resources Inc. of the USA, wholly-owned subsidiary of Materion Corporation,

is the only known fully-integrated beryllium company in world and the leading producer of all

forms of beryllium products. Bertrandite Ore from the company’s own mines is used at the

feedstock to produce beryllium hydroxide at the company’s Delta plant in Utah.

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The hydroxide is then used to produce beryllium metal and alloys at Elmore in Ohio, ceramic grade powder at Lorain in Ohio and strip and wire products at Reading in Pennsylvania. The Elmore plant produces finished goods for the Alloy Products and Beryllium Products businesses, as well as materials for further processing by these units and its Technical Materials Inc. subsidiary 

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                                                                   In the USA, NGK Metals Corporation, Starmet and Advanced Industries International

                                                                   produce beryllium products using raw materials supplied by other producers.   

                                                                   Starmet, formerly known as Nuclear Metals Inc, produces shapes from beryllium-

                                                                   aluminium (AlBe) alloys using the lost wax process.

 

NGK Metals Corp, part of NGK Insulators of Japan, is one of the leading producers of beryllium-copper (CuBe) alloy castings, strip, rod, bar and plate products in the world from its plants in Japan, the USA and France.

 

The Ulba Metallurgical Plant (UMP) in Kazakhstan is the largest beryllium product manufacturer in the former Soviet Union. The plant mainly uses beryllium concentrate from mines in Russia but stopped imports in the mid 1990s, with an accumulated stock of material held at the ULBA Plant in Kazakhstan. UMP holds sufficient stocks of

beryllium concentrate to allow production to continue  in the future. UMP set up distributions points

and is represented for decades in the EU and other countries by the Hamburg, Germany

based trading company TROPAG Oscar H. Ritter Nachf. GmbH and also entertaining a distribution

warehouse as Ulba-China in Shanghai to sell its beryllium and tantalum products in China and other Asian countries.