 Today, we have the pleasure of having world-renowned expert, Jack Lifton. Of course, she coined the term technology metals. And of course, Alistair Neal, you're one of the few people in the world that's actually done business with the Chinese, resided in Mongolia and has been doing, been a rare earth expert for two and a half decades. Is that correct? Yes. It sounds better than a quarter of a century. Right. So now we're going to get right to it. In part two, we're going to examine, what is the actual formula required to create a supply chain in North America? And Alistair, if you don't mind, I'm going to have you start with this one. Sure. Well, first of all, the key is to find a deposit that has reasonable cost structure and also reasonable content, particularly of the magnetic fork, neoprasial, terbium and dysprosium, because those would drive 85% to 90% of the revenue of any deposit. Then you have to be able to be sure that you can convert that deposit into a concentrate. And after that, you then have to be able to separate it into the oxides. And when you talk about magnets, you then have to go to the subsequent steps of conversion to metal and then into alloy before you can even get to the magnet manufacturing stage. So how many steps have you just mentioned there, Alistair? Six. Before you get to magnet manufacturing. And Jack, what would you like to add to that formula? Does Alistair have the formula correct or does he have too many steps? Well, no, I think I'm adding magnet manufacturing, we're getting seven. The reason is that in my business life, the first thing I did when I wanted to sell something was ask people what they wanted to buy. I noticed that a great many, especially miners, use the field of dreams theory. They say, we will mine it and they will buy it. My favorite phrase from the last Rarith Boom was mixed con. The con part was correct because everyone was going to produce mixed concentrate. I said, then what? Well, we'll sell it to the Chinese and I said, and what do you think they'll buy, they'll pay for it. And they said, oh, 70 or 80%, I said, try 30 or 40% if you're lucky and you've got the right mix. Oh, no, no, no. Everybody was going to produce a mixed con. Well, as you know, no one did. So that's all that problem. No, Alistair's absolutely right. There are the seven steps. But the first thing you do is ask the customer what he wants to buy. Then you can go downstream in the supply chain and upstream and find out what you need to do. Okay. Now it's going to get tricky though, gentlemen. I'm going to make you go through these seven stages and I'm going to ask you to actually name who in North America can provide these different stages. All right, Jack. We're going to put you on the spot first. The mining. I know Alistair, you want to say it's not a mining industry. I agree. There's seven stages. So, but one stage actually is exploration and mining. Who currently is, let's start with exploration. I guess that makes it eight stages. Yes, gentlemen. If we go exploration, then mining. All right, I suppose. Yes. Okay. So, who currently is exploring for rare earths in the United States or Canada, North America that you believe actually has rare earths? Jack. In the United States, we have one, the only producing rare earth mine at the moment in the Americas, I believe, at Mountain Pass, California. Then we have an excellent deposits at, belonging to rare earth resources, trying to think of any others. Give me a minute. I'm going to let Alistair talk about Canada because he's much more familiar with Canada. Canada has about 95% of all the rare earth deposits in North America, so that it's much easier to talk about Canada. In the United States, I would say it's possible in the near term that Texas mineral resources could be producing something. I don't really know of any other, let's say, hard rock deposits in the United States that are anywhere near our in development or certainly not in production. Alistair, do you know anything else in the US besides those? The only one would be a combination with a Canadian company called Medallion that is looking to take the monazite tailings from the heavy mineral sands in Florida and Georgia and taking them up to Saskatchewan to remove the uranium and thorium there. That would be the only cross-border one that is presently active. I'd like to add to that that most of the American companies are actually Canadian companies. They're Canadian companies which are operating in the United States. Of course, having been doing this for 10 years myself, I'm going to go ahead and throw some exploration plays into the mix. I'm going to start on the east coast and work my way across. There's not that. North America, North America, okay? I'm working North America. I'm dealing with North American markets here. So starting the east coast, of course, UCOR is based there, but their exploration property is in Alaska. We have in Labrador search minerals. We have Imperial, of course, in Quebec. We have the Kippewa Zeus project in Quebec. We have the Hoitus Lake project, formerly of Great Western in Saskatchewan. I think I'm, oh, I'm missing the big one, the mother load, the one that introduced me to the rare earth industry and to whom has a partnership with an Australian company. And that, of course, is Avalon, advanced materials. So I think we're actually missing Dawn from this conversation. And of course, you already mentioned rare element resources in the US. Jack, is there anything else that you guys can think of? I know, I think we're missing a big Texas property. The old quest minerals, which is now Torngat in Northern Quebec slash Labrador area. That would be the other one that's in exploration phase at this point in time. You have Wichita deposit in Northern BC that's also under exploration for defense metals, I believe is the name. And other people digging around, but nothing that I know that's moved in any direction. Okay, speaking of other people digging around, we have Searchlight and Apia. So on that note, let's just jump right in hardcore to extraction. All right, so correct me if I'm wrong, Alistair. When you're mining, you get ore, right? Right. Okay, we're moving into only process number two. So we may have five episodes in this series. So in the extraction, the ore must be turned into concentrate. Is that correct, Jack? Yes. Okay, so who are extraction plays in North America? If we're going to do a full supply chain for the military, who's going to do our extraction? Jack, I suspect you know the answer. First of all, I can tell you that the most interesting process I have seen in the last few years is at search minerals. And I was very impressed by the project developed by Dresinger, who's on their board and is a professor at University of British Columbia. And the other, let's say that rare element resources have developed a process, but I don't know what they're doing with it. I know they've been studying the next phase separation in Germany, but I don't know what they've been doing here. And of course, we don't know what MP, formerly Molycorp, is doing because they're sending ore concentrates. I don't think they're extracting anything. I think they're sending ore concentrates to China because they said in the last 12 months they'd moved 50,000 tons of concentrate with net 12,000 tons of rare earths, which means based on my knowledge of that deposit, they've improved the concentration in the ore concentrate by a factor two or three. So they're doing some work out there and a huge volume, but it's all going to China, so we don't count it. So Alistair, I am certain you have a couple of comments on this. There are some people who are looking at novel technologies to do extraction. One of them is Tussar, I think is the name, but actively everybody has to look at concentration slash extraction on site because you can't afford to ship one or two percent or very far at all. And most of the deposits, the rare earth concentration is less than five percent. So you have to do something, whether it's optical sorting, crushing some sort of treatment on site, that's necessary. And everybody has to look at that. It depends on the mineral because each mineral, and as we've said in the past, each deposit tends to be a little bit different. So you have to figure out how to tackle them. You know, globally, people know how to do bassinocyte, appetite, lopperite, monazite and ionic clay, which is sort of the easiest one to tackle on site with simple bucket chemistry. You can get to 92 percent concentration. But again, each of these deposits are going to have to look at their own metallurgy and figure out what's the most optimum to improve the recovery. So we're going to have to add something. Yukar did look at ore sorting years ago and they were able to improve the concentration of their concentrate. I recall that very well. As did the one at Hoidis Lake. They also tried that. So what we have determined in stage one and two of seven, number one, we only have one company that's actually mining in North America. Correct? Yes. And then we have approximately a dozen projects in various levels of exploration. And then we may have anywhere from four to six extraction processes, but a very critical point is that extraction where you take the ore to concentrate must happen on site. Is that correct? Yeah, or very close to site. You can't know that very far. Right. So on that note, I'd like to thank you both for part two of how to build a supply chain in North America. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me. You're welcome.