Neon is a schema stress-test for "elements with no USGS chapter". The industrial reality is that neon is a cryogenic-air-separation byproduct co-produced with bulk oxygen and nitrogen; only the largest ASUs have neon recovery equipment, and for much of the 2010s and early 2020s the majority of semiconductor-grade neon came from two Ukrainian companies (Ingas in Mariupol and Cryoin in Odesa) that took byproduct neon from Russian steel-industry-linked ASUs and purified it. The 2022 Russian invasion forced the semiconductor industry to diversify rapidly; by 2024 Chinese producers had taken substantial share, though precise current geographic breakdown is not published in freely-available sources.

This file is intentionally low-confidence: it demonstrates that the v0.2 schema can represent an element where the weakest source layer is the only option, and that such files should carry explicit confidence=low flags on quantitative claims and top_producers_only completeness on country share lists.