What you will see here is that we went from being a mining company ten years ago to focusing today on the refining and recycling of rare earths. Why that’s very important is because going and building a mine is not so easy. We are not that far from the only US mine that was built, which cost $1.7 billion dollars and then went bankrupt. How do we avoid that risk of putting hundreds of millions dollars into the ground and then being fully dependent on the Chinese government not influencing the pricing. Since we only have ten minutes — oh, and now it’s down to nine — I’ll quickly go through some of the slides. Forward-looking statement as usual. What you see on the left is one thing we produce: neodymium oxide. That’s the main oxide of rare earth elements that go into building magnets.
KIRIL MUGERMAN, 2019-11 SPEECH
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b4FZbpDZxg “Rare Earths, Refining, Recycling” Kiril Mugerman at Cambridge House in San Francisco, November 2019. Going from figuring out what gold is doing next, we’ll go to rare earth elements. We’ve been hearing a lot from the US government, Canadian government, and others all over the world what is happening in this sector.
The objective is to sell it all into the European market. After this, we’d love to sell into the US but the US abandoned any kind of production of magnets in the ’90s. Now they’re slowly trying to attract it back. Here’s a quick summary of our model. What we are going to be processing is 1.5 tons per day of magnet waste. What is magnet waste? It gets produced from grinding down the magnets down to final shape and, as well, the end of life material. It’s all running at 30% rare earth elements. It doesn’t matter if I’m getting a magnet from China, from the US, from Canada or from wherever — it’s always going to be running at approximately 30%. It always has those four elements: NdPrDyTb. I don’t have to deal with any of the cheap elements, like lanthanum and ceriums.