 Hello everyone, this is Byron King with Investor Intel coming to you from Toronto, Ontario and PDAC, the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada, the Big Mining Conference. I'm with Pat Ryan of UCOR, UCOR is in the rare earth business and not just in the rare earth business, they are moving towards the ability to produce at commercial and industrial scale rare earth elements and not some melange or not some goop that has to go to China. I'm talking producing elements in the United States. Pat, thank you for being here. It's great to, great to speak with you. Yeah, Byron, pleasure to be here and thank you very much. Okay, well in another interview we have talked about UCOR itself and you've done a lot with UCOR but you are at the point now, UCOR, you and your team, your team which is fabulous who I've met, is at the point where you are ramping up on about a year, about a 21 month schedule by the end of 2024 to be actually producing rare earth elements and specifically the heavies, the magnet metals here in the United States or well we're in Canada but in North America let's say. Yes, yeah that's correct. Yeah we're working with our engineering groups right now. We built a commercial demo plant which we talked about and that commercial demo plant, the metrics and running thousands of hours from that particular plant are gathered up now to plug into the engineering plans on a go forward to have construction completed by the end of 24 and producing with US friendly concentrates from around the world that are ex-China processing with a technology that's quite superior as far as we have measured and had independently evaluated by experts in the field and automotive companies who have looked at the tech and said wow this is ready for commercial let's do it. There are a lot of misconceptions out there in viewer land and certainly in the general public about these rare earth things that it's somehow or another there's some magical mining solution to it. We're going to mine them here in America. Is it fair to say that there are about zero rare earth metals, heavy rare earth metals produced outside of China these days? You know that's correct there are zero produced outside of China and the thing about mining Byron the only solution right now for the most part anyone that mines a concentrate they get to send it back to China have it separated and it never leaves China and sending your concentrate back to China for separation is not independence it's not an ex-China supply chain and it won't get done when needs to get done. So in the sense that if somebody needs magnetic materials for electric traction motors in an EV or in a windmill or they need some other exotic element in a solar panel or anything whether it's you know in your iPhone whatever they are buying that product from a Chinese supplier ultimately is that the way it is? Ultimately there are there are magnet manufacturers that exist in Japan but the vulnerability is that 90% of the separation to get the oxide which goes into the metal which makes the magnet that is controlled by China and so it's a very very well security risk situation and and you've got to get around that you've got to break that or you will not do what needs to be done for independence here in North America. Well now you have a commercial scale project in Kingston Ontario which is about a two and a half three hour drive east of Toronto along northern lake Ontario there. I visited it just the other day I've met your team. What have you done there? What are you doing in that commercial scale project? So in the commercial scale project we've taken the the principle of Rapid SXR technology which is based on the same chemistry of solvent extraction and we first started with a research apparatus a couple years ago taking all the data that had been collected and and gathered from the the company we acquired the tech from and on a research apparatus we started to test everything we started to test time to equilibrium we started to test the pumps and valves and and you know in a solvent extraction plant you have something known as a mixer settler and we've replaced that with a column-based tech and the column-based tech has a contactor which is proprietary and a contactor allows for mixing of organic and aqueous so much more efficiently and then it goes into a phase separator and between the contactor and phase separator in a vertical footprint you're replacing football fields of solvent extraction mixer settler tanks and so we have built a plant in Kingston 52 stages you saw it 52 stages that run through the you know extract and the scrub and every phase you can run through and we can run light-rare earth through and do the sx12 and 3 and we've run heavy-rare earth through and go all the way up to sx6 and produce heavy-rare earth in North America in in the tens of tons in the tens of tons so we can then take that metric and plug it into the bigger commercial plant down the road now one of the things that is frustrating to somebody like me I follow this a lot and and there is just such a disconnect between the grand strategy of the politicians of we're going to electrify the world by 2030 or 35 or 50 whatever and then the whole industrial policy that has to come out of that in terms of you know we have to build factories we have to have minds we have to turn the minds into something that will connect with the factories at the end you've got people who are not married up with with the permitting side the EPA side the core of engineer side but are you seem to be a bridge that's that's cutting through all of this red tape between users like an automobile an automobile company for example and the miner who is producing a mineral sand or a hard rock out of a out of a mine in the mine in the hillside somewhere yeah you know I think the the government's playing an important role because it's it's a new market and therefore they can at least level the playing field a little bit and things like the inflation reduction act in the US they give the consumer an opportunity to have a discounted rate on electric vehicle when they buy it but the real issue is that the companies real companies that are building with their plans and investing billions of dollars like like Ford Motor Company and GE were renewable and whatnot they're out here but the critical metals industry that has to supply them are behind and there's no alignment they're not aligned with where they need to be and so there needs to be a real push to get the actual job done for us we looked at many opportunities we can take our tech anything used with solvent extraction can be used rapid sx can be used with it we looked at the battery metals we looked at nickel and cobalt and we looked at the potentials to you know for lithium and whatnot but we said you know what rare earth and the focus on rare earth mid-market separation is an absolute need and as much as we hear about batteries that are going up you know costing ten thousand dollars per ev that that four hundred dollar value of rare earth oxide that goes into an electric motor the magnets that make that motor work and the battery allowing it to go as far as it can possibly go if you don't have that four hundred dollars of rare earth oxide you don't have a vehicle that's going to work and in the conversations we've had with automotive companies and other wind energy manufacturers and whatnot they've indicated that one of their biggest constraints right now is that particular rare earth side they don't know where they're going to get it the separated oxide to build it out so governments to your point you know they're there they can level the playing field we're not making our decisions based on political landscape we're making our decisions based on sound robust economics and and business let's get the job done for real customers and that is a point that you've made before and it's a brilliant point you don't sell things to markets you sell them to customers pat you have a background in the automobile industry as a tier one supplier to you know household name automobile companies and so so you know you know what they're looking for I take it yeah absolutely I mean you know at the end of the day they want to make sure they have a continuous supply of product they want to make sure that the price doesn't fluctuate all over the price through the life of the vehicle and when a vehicle comes out there's typically a five-year window on a platform they don't want to fluctuate from price all over the place and they want to have quality and spec on you know where it needs to be all the way through so deliver it on time get the spec right don't flexor it with your price all over the place be a good tier one supplier and and that's what that's what the customer wants at the end of the day so go find the customers build your plant to feed the customers build your plant number one and then look the plant number two but that's exactly what we're doing and that's where you are right now is you're focused on taking the commercial site in Kingston and and upscaling it to the to whatever it's going to be in Louisiana you know a larger facility wherever it's going to be we don't know that yet and and and take it from there yeah i think you know it's fair to say too that we have identified a building we started with 20 buildings in Louisiana and the team went out and they narrowed down to 10 and then narrowed to three and now they've narrowed it to one and so negotiations are ongoing with one particular building in Louisiana and that will be the home and that will be the home to take it up to a 5,000 ton rare earth oxide that the market needs and customers need well we could talk all day but you know we're limited by our time but thank you so much for speaking with with myself spent and speaking with the audience out there it's you core people take a look they are them they are the leader right now they are on the pathway to producing rare earth metals for the automotive industry among others thank you for watching thank you pat thank you byer