 We have a very distinguished group and what I was going to do is lead off with one question. We'll start at Dave Dreisinger on the left where everybody can answer the same question and then we'll start with Cameron on the right and work back with the second question. Then Paul will take over the second half. So Dave, I guess if you can lead off is what is unique about your process? Thanks Alistair. Our process is the search minerals direct extraction process. What we've tried to do with this technology is dramatically simplify the extraction of rareth from our ore. We have the Foxtrot deposit in Labrador which is about a 1% grade of rareth with about a 20% heavy component to it. It's a nice little ore body. Multiple ore bodies actually on the same site as well. Randy Miller our geologist has been discovering. We went through the sort of the standard method of beneficiation, leaching, purification and recovery of a rareth product to begin with. We found that of course with the beneficiation process there's flotation, magnetic separation, gravity, all sorts of technologies to bring to bear. But a lot of complexity and a lot of challenges to make that work effectively. We went back and decided to do something much simpler which was just to make the material into basically coarse sand and directly treat it with acid in a very mild temperature making process about 200 degrees Celsius and found that instead of having to go through all that beneficiation work we could directly extract the ore with very low range in consumption with about a 70% recovery just by direct acid treatment. We found that that has given us a real advantage in terms of simple low risk technology and something that's very scalable so you don't have to build a large beneficiation plant to make it economic. We can actually do it at a much smaller scale because it's so simple. So we think we can have a small efficient plant with a very simple technology. Jay? We're developing the Bear Launch Project, good and bad in the U.S. A tough place to have a mine environmentally. So we've designed our process similar to Dave's. We've got a bastard side ore, very fine minerals, 20 to 30 microns. So we also concentrate into a sand. We do a relatively warm 45 degrees centigrade ass of each. The mare goes to a precipitation step to pull out the rare earths and the thorium as an oxalate. And then as of last night we announced or this morning should say our zero discharge solvent extraction process. It's important that we have environmentally sound process, zero discharges, recycles of all the reagents. And that's probably one of the biggest benefits of our process is that we are able to recycle every one of our reagents and have a zero discharge. We're from Joe Vega Resources. We are developing a rare earth project in Quebec. It's a carbonatide. The main focus is on neodymium and percedinium, the magnetic rare earth that we've been discussing here. We do have as well a niobium component. So just looking at the neodymium, percedinium, niobium and europium, we are looking at around 85% of the value being just in those four elements. The main focus over the last year, something that we just published in May of this year was the hydrometeological process that we developed in-house. That was a hydromete process that now allows us to treat our ore with 58 kilograms of HCl, which is a very interesting low value. That helps us reduce the electrical consumption on site to below 60 megawatts, so it allows us to connect to the power line. That's on the project side now in terms of suppression technology. We started developing a suppression technology a couple of years ago. It's based on electrophoresis. Electrophoresis is something not that we imagined. It exists in the biochem industry and we are working on the scale up of applying it into the mining industry. The advantages of this technology so far, what we were able to demonstrate was it's a simultaneous suppression of all the rare earth elements, including the impurities. It does not have the same issues dealing with the impurities as solvent extraction does. In addition, heavies are actually easier to separate than the lights, something that we don't usually hear in this industry. We are working on the modular design, so we don't have to start working right away with a huge scale where it requires very high cash to get into production. Those are the three main points of electrophoresis. Thank you. Neil? Yes, I'm Neil Eisen from IBC Advanced Technologies. I would say that the main advantage that we have is selectivity. To explain that, I may be going to just a short history. IBC is a leader in the development and commercialization of molecular recognition technology, which was originally developed back in the late 60s, 70s by three chemists who won the Nobel Prize in 1987. Francis Lane, Donald Cram, and Charles Pedersen. IBC has taken that technology, which is based on super molecular chemistry. It's a very selective type of chemistry and been able to commercialize that in the metals industry. We have a rich history of developing and commercializing this separations technology in metals, in platinum group metals, in base metals, in the copper industry, in the cobalt industry, for acid mine drainage recovery. The key advantage is selectivity. We use super molecular chemistry, which is functionalized beads, which go into resin columns. It looks much like an exchange column, but it has beads that have been functionalized by this molecular recognition chemistry. What that allows us to do is come in and actually design the chemistry so that it can recognize and bind to particular metals that are of interest to capture. This is commercialized technology. It's being used by major metals companies throughout the world. The key advantage that selectivity gives is that you have very high capacity for the metal of interest. You're able to take it and recover it at high purity and high recovery rates. At IBC about a year ago, we formed an alliance with UCOR, Rare Metals, in the rare earth element space. Subsequent to that, we have demonstrated on the laboratory scale the separation of the complete suite of 16 rare earth elements. We've been able to, we took the PLS, which is from the Bokon Mountain facility in Alaska from the UCOR's mine. We took a PLS from that and used our molecular recognition process to separate those 16 rare earth elements out at greater than 99% purity and higher than 99% recovery. That was quite significant. We're now going into pilot. We expect to have that pilot completed up and running in the first quarter of next year. Okay, thank you. Patrick? I'm Patrick Wong from the Nationals. I guess what's unique about us is that there isn't much unique about us. We are a, we've been focused on rare earth separation. We do not own a mine, but we do have some interesting funders. Our technology and our research has been funded by the US Department of Defense. We're not a public company, so we haven't pressurized anything, but we have, we're the first in North America that we know of to produce high-purity dysprosium and terbium in a commercial process. We've taken technology that China uses today and we've simulated it, took us over a year to do it because we basically just built one circuit and we reused it over and over again for all, as you go down the SX circuits. We've also developed a new technology that is still used to solve an extraction as the basis and it's actually quite amazing. It reduces our capex by over 90%. Our OPEX is measured in like literally maybe $2 a kilo. The medium that we use is extremely cheap. It doesn't wear out, so our OPEX costs are really low. We're really excited about it. The tests are ongoing right now. It was just in the plant today. It's in Mississauga, so if anyone wants to drop by and see it, they can. But again, it uses solve an extraction, the overall basis for it. But yeah, we've achieved some really good results so far and we'll continue to go for it. Thank you, Wes. I'm Wes Berry with K-Tech Technologies. K-Tech was a company that's over 20 years old. We were formed primarily to focus on a core technology around continuous ion exchange and continuous chromatography. A lot of that work started in 1983 and the predecessor company, which was when continuous ion exchange was really first developed. Not simulated, but continuous. And back in the 80s, we did quite a bit of work on rarer separations up to and including a pilot plant operation. I continued in the mid-90s on rarer separations, but then as most of you remember in the mid-90s, the commodity markets all went down in the basement. So nothing really happened since then, but K-Tech had continued to focus on applications of continuous ion exchange and continuous ion chromatography. And there are several companies that are involved in it. And after 1983, the technology became more invested, I guess, or integrated into existing hydrometallurgical operations. It's used in food separations, hydrometallurgical separations, fertilizer production. There's a number of large-scale systems. So we got back into rarer separations recently, about a year and a half ago, with Texas Rare Earth. And the basic process approach that we have is we use a continuous ion exchange system to initially take a relatively impure PLS, remove the rare earths, and reject the impurities. We then take this rarer concentrate, or rarer mixture, and we go through successive continuous ion chromatography techniques, of which most of the chemistry was developed back in the mid-1940s by Oak Ridge and Ames for the nuclear program. But unfortunately, the only thing available at that time was fixed that ion exchange. So we've taken an adapted, well-established chemistry to a well-established equipment system, and have come up with the three-stage approach, which offers considerably lower capital and lower operating costs. Okay. Just before Kam speaks for a matter of full disclosure, I am a technical advisor to rare assaults, just so that there's no hidden agendas. And a great one. Thanks, Alistair. First off, I do want to thank Tracy for putting this event together today and providing the platform for all of us to speak. I think it's great to get the industry together with such important people. We operate in a very sort of different mindset. I mean, from the get-go, what we tried to do is, I guess, operate under the fundamental belief that if you can't compete economically with the Chinese in the way that they separate, you're not going to live, and you're not going to be around. And that has been the driving force behind everything that we have done in the mindset we have built. We have developed a new proprietary technology that has effectively separated all-16 rare earths that includes the Atrium and Scandium to high purity. We've done so at levels that are at least cost-competitive to Chinese solvent extraction that is environmentally friendly, and we have basically quantitative recovery. We're very excited with our progress. We are now currently testing a commercial-sized cell. We should manage expectations here. We should have final data within the next 60 days, at which point we believe that we'll fundamentally eliminate any scalability issues. Every time we've scaled up, we've seen better results, and there's no reason why we don't expect to see that with our final testing and our final results of our commercialized cell. Finally, I guess two couple of extra points. Our CAPEX is a fraction of that of solvent extraction, so we think we're using off-the-shelf equipment. It has significantly reduced the cost up front, and it's deposit agnostic. Essentially, we've worked with samples from more than 40 deposits around the world. We can essentially blend them together and separate them without any impact on results. I think that's a good initial summary. Thanks, Alister. Fair enough. Before we move on, are there any questions to any panel members about their specific project or process? I guess the question is, what's the principle of our technology? It is not solvent extraction. Our founder of the technology, Dr. Joseph Brewer, evaluated essentially every processing technique going back 70-plus years and landed on this proprietary technology. What I'll say is our highest cost is electricity. We're not willing to get into technological discussions today unless we're under NDA. However, I'm happy and welcoming of anybody to come visit our facility. There have been people here who have seen it, and we welcome anybody to come visit us under NDA. I think the other question I have for the panel, I'll work it backwards, is what's the biggest challenge to go to commercialization? Is it funding? Is it scale-up? Is it finding partners? It's a great question. For us, I think at this stage, it is finalizing our raise for a commercial demonstration facility. We do have a letter of intent, but we do need to close that off. It is certainly a difficult funding environment. We have secured feedstock. We believe, again, we will have eliminated scalability issues within 60 days. We have, as I said, feedstock. So it really does come down to financing, I think, from our perspective, and hopefully we will have eliminated that in the relatively near future. Yeah, I think from our standpoint, funding is probably the main issue. We have, as I indicated, we had done considerable pilot plant work in the past, and the scale-up of the equipment systems are well-established. All materials that we use are readily available. Our iron exchange residents and sorbents, again, are manufactured by multiple sources. So basically our next step is to move into a larger pilot program, and that's what everybody has is funding. That's right. I think funding it to a certain extent, I just actually received a quote, a revised quote for our pilot plant. It's actually going to cost us less than 100 grand to build one circuit. That's all that's needed to sort of prove it up. Solving extractions doesn't have issues in scaling. For us, waiting for feedstock, I guess, but we already have suppliers of feedstock. So we're hoping to actually get into production next year. Okay. Okay, I'll kind of address that by saying that we have, we've already achieved commercialization in a number of metals areas. I mentioned platinum group metals. We have one of the largest companies in the world, in Palo Platinum in South Africa, who uses this technology to refine all of their palladium, which is quite significant. We've got customers in Japan, Tanaka Kikinzoka is another company, a major metals company who uses our technology in the copper industry. Asarco, they're refinery in Amarillo, Texas. They use the MRT system for recovering bismuth out of copper. I guess Jack would call that a technology metal. I'm not sure, but bismuth is pretty important, and it's important to get that out of the copper refinery, electrolyte. So for, to answer your question, I think we've overcome and we're commercial technology at this point. Now to address the rare earth space, we've put in place an agreement with and a partnership with UCorps. We have that. We've demonstrated on the lab scale that we've developed the ligands and been able to separate these metals, all 16 of them, to these high purities. So once we've, that's really the hard part is to develop the ligand technology or the chemistry, if you will, that can accomplish the selective binding. And so we've done that. We've shown on the lab scale that works. We're going to pilot. So I guess I would answer that we need to execute our strategy, which is to complete the pilot, demonstrate that, and then get to the commercial system. But having said that, we've done this over and over again in the metals industry. Once we've got the ligand, we've shown it works at lab scale. We've been able to scale that up to full-scale commercial application. Carol? Well, I guess when you start with the technology that was used in the biochem sector and the scale is not really mining appropriate. So taking it from that scale to our scale, that's the main challenge. And we identified the main challenges, the main boxes, and it's going one by one, answering all the questions, getting all the data in order to not make mistakes because if you make mistakes and you have to go back, it's just costing you extra money, extra time. And that takes us back to the funding question. So I guess it's really taking off all the boxes carefully one by one, answering all the questions that we asked ourselves. And so it's a question of time and really at the end of the day, getting to that commercialization scale. Okay, Jay? Yeah. Funding is everybody's issue in the junior market. Our plan is to de-risk. We just finished our separation pilot plan last week over at SGS. Where we were able to pull out cerium with one mixture settler, thorium with two mixture settlers. Stripping was done outside of the solvent extraction. So I think we're on a path where we've changed the Chinese technology for separation by using smaller equipment, less equipment, and found a way around the solvent extraction. Now we want to scale it up to a demonstration size plan. And our next step is to go into lanthanum and SIC and apply the same reagents and techniques and reviews for the cerium and thorium. So scalability, yes. But keep on proving what we can do with our technology. Okay, David? Yeah, I'll start. Our approach is, of course, we're working from the ore through to a mixed oxide currently. We're hoping to start another pilot plan program by the end of the year. So that'll be an integrated pilot plan right from ore to final mixed rareth oxide with all the purification steps in between. We're currently doing a scoping study with one of the engineering houses, engineering and mining houses, to make sure that we get our cost structure correct and then expect to go through the PFS and the BFS after that. I think for us it's a question to have size. The days of investing a billion dollars in a rareth plant is probably long gone. A hundred million might be above the right size, but a billion is not going to be available. So we have to have a technology and a project that fits in that sort of space that's financeable. And we think that scaling down or scaling the project to just the right size is an important part of our path to development. The last couple of challenges, of course, are off-take and finance. So where does the product go and who's going to finance us through to production? Okay, thank you. There's an observation. If we had had this conversation five, seven years ago, it would all have been about the rocks in the ground. And then it sort of moved to making concentrate. Now we have seven people up here talking about separation technology. So there's been a definite evolution in the industry. The question that I throw out to the panel is, Linus has been successful in establishing a profitable business outside. In my view, there's maybe room for two or three more outside of China. What makes you guys think that you can be one of those two or three? And we'll start. Well, or I can just throw it open. I'll speak first. I think it's the right size. If we can get a project that's in the couple hundred million dollar range to get through to production, I think we're in the right size. We're not market disruptive at that scale. We're probably about two to 3,000 tons per year of mixed wearers with the heavy weighting again. So I think that getting the right size and getting through it quickly is probably going to be the advantage that we would have at search. Yeah, I would think the days of building a single train plant of large scale is long gone. I agree with that too, Alistair. I think it's fundamentals of mining. Good deposit, location, rate, metallurgy, all those things that up and will cost. I mean, we have to compete with Amanda and her group and the Chinese and everybody else, and we have to do it, you know, get competitive, you know, better and cheap. So, and then everybody here with a wine isn't going to be here. It's something like you said, two or three will make it more or less. Krill, what makes you omega? Well, I'd say you have to look at it maybe from a little bit of a different perspective. I've been following that sector for quite a few years now in analyzing each one of the companies, each one of the feasibility studies and everything that's been published out there. And you're totally right that we used to talk about oh, it has to be the highest grade or it has to be the biggest or it has to be critical rares, the highest level of the critical rares or it's only the magnetics. But now we are totally in a different situation right now. Linus, it's great that they made it there and they're producing, but for the next guy to come in, he needs to probably figure it out how to start entering the market even before building the mine because no matter what's the scale of the mine, whether it's a couple of hundred million or who knows, maybe somebody can come up with the right scale of oh, it's just a hundred something. But is there a hundred something million right now today at this high risk environment where nobody wants to put CAPEX money to build? So you have to figure out a different way. I really think with GeoMega, but the suppression technology that we have, we are developing something that can be applied from a modular point of view and modular I think is quite important. I think a few guys here mentioned the same thing. You want to start small and you want to be flexible. You don't want to be able to treat only your concentrate coming out from your mine. It has to be adjustable to other feeds. Can it be a concentrate coming out of China or at least to be able to demonstrate the opposite on a regular basis? Or can it be some other concentrate coming out of somewhere else? The more flexibility that you offer, the more access, the more penetration you'll have into the market. So I think that's something that GeoMega, with our technology, we see that we can offer that flexibility. And by adjusting to what's available there on the market, you can probably enter the market. Okay. Yeah, in our case, I think we have the key pieces in place to be successful. Our partner, UCorps, has a world-class mine of deposit in Bocan Mountain in Alaska. It's in a really great location. It's right on the ocean, on the Pacific Rim, and it is a U.S. owned, you know, it's a U.S. territory deposit. They have done a lot of work on the beneficiation and on the leaching part of the process. IBC has done the work on the recovery of the metals. So we know all those technologies work. We know they can be scaled up because we've done that throughout the mining industry. And we can recover those metals at high purity and high recoveries. Also, we have the... UCorps has a large part of the financing in place as they have partnered with the state of Alaska, which is a wonderful partner. And they've committed several hundred million dollars to the project. So that is in place. And so I do think we have a lot of the key success factors that are in place to go ahead and be successful. Okay. Well, I think it's important to distinguish, though, you know, the difference between the light and heavy rare mines. I think one of the problems that lionists and molly corp fail into is the fact that they don't have the element composition that can keep them afloat or make them wildly profitable. For us, it's important that we're not a mine. We're an independent processing company. So our customers are the mines and the end users. Our job is to help mines get financed through long-term off-take contracts. We have reserved a lot of our capacity for our own purchases. We make way more money purchasing off our own processing and selling it. But we are willing to enter into total agreements with mines. That should help a number of these mines, especially some of the private ones and some of the ones with smaller footprints and much lower capex stuff just right off the top. Fair enough, what? I think a key part of our technology while we're tied in with Texas Rare Earth, so the ore source is there and it has that high percentage of heavies. So we with the process technique that we're using we isolate, we get the impurities away from the rare earths quickly. But then in the next step we isolate the heavies away from the lights. So we have very little processing costs associated with the materials that we don't want. And then so by focusing on the heavies looking at high purity we're able to process it because of system sizing and economics we can process relatively small volumes or amounts of material and still be very profitable. And then through TRER with the heavy side the marketing network is being put in place. Okay, Cameron? Thanks. We spent a lot of time this last year talking to end users and getting their feedback as we're going along. And one of the I guess the overwhelming message that we've heard is that everyone is looking for an alternative to China. We've talked about that today. They want to ensure that the value chain does not touch China at any point and they don't want to pay more. And so that is a critical, critical piece. So what we are trying to do and sort of along the lines of what Jack mentioned earlier is trying to bring the value chain together. We are not tied to any particular asset. We do have guaranteed feedstock at this stage but we're in a position where if we're able to provide the lowest cost and most efficient separation technology we believe we'll be able to partner with different organizations and those who move along in order to provide the end solution that the market needs. Yeah, I think in general the market is US but the question is can you compete against Chinese and Angus? We're less than 4, 3, 2. Fair enough. Well then the question is it's a horse race. Well that's the point. Right now we're doing internal assessments. Our numbers are confidential but based on our assessments we are highly competitive with Chinese material at the low selling prices. Okay, so at today's domestic price in China in US dollars so we're all talking the same dollars everybody can compete can survive? Well I'd say from coming from an analyst background unfortunately there's only one producing right now and that's Linus and they have a number that they see on a regular basis and here we only have studies that say one thing it comes out differently and I'm sure Linus was estimating a different price as well when thinking of going into production. So unfortunately it's a little bit premature to say and as well there is the whole question of well some of these only want to be doing the processing versus Linus does the entire thing from A to Z. So how can we really compare? I've done the softball questions with the baseball analogy now he gets to play hardball. So my first question will be to Patrick. So you said your production cost is 4 dollars. Probably less. Currently today worldwide we're talking here from mine or to finished product. The cheapest producer in China would be around 7 dollars and yeah it's always a moving target let's say slightly below 10. If I take just the high one the 10 in the 10 dollars from mine to your side you have 3 to 3.5 dollar from what we call concentrate or sorry mixtures carbonate to finished product. That's basically what you're doing because your business is to take mixtures carbonate and separate and produce. So if you are 4 you are really not completely versus what is in place. No it's less than that. I mean I was just trying to give a number. Some people didn't want to disclose what their actual numbers were and the number was put out as 9 and I said 5, 4, 3. Actually I think the original number that I said was 2 in the beginning in the tropes. Let me come back to all the wow you put so many papers here. So we tried to avoid going back right and left so feel free to comment. But for those on this side it's all about separation. On this side it's extraction direct and same here and then you do everything. In terms of separation there is today in the world around 230,000 ton capacity for separation production. So my big question is that is a number of you said my number one concern is funding. Funding is never a problem as Natasha said. Have you seen this market? Have you seen this market? No but if your case is good I listen very carefully this morning. If really you are the best and that's what we shouldn't say etc. then you have money easily. So if you have difficulties to get funding it means that something is wrong and I think one thing that is wrong or difficulties that there is twice more capacity than there is demand today. So how do you adjust that in your business case to have your funding at the end of the day? It's a critical piece and it's a great question thank you for asking that. We received a lot of feedback again we do have an LOI in place right now where we are finalizing our due diligence so hopefully we will have that wrapped up. But for us a lot of the feedback from broader groups in terms of funding was how do you demonstrate that you can reduce the scalability issue? How can you give us confidence that your technology will scale? So these results are fantastic but we need data points to prove that and I think that's a difference that what we see today than we would a few years ago. So that is why we have aggressively moved forward with our scalability at successive levels and we are now testing a commercial size cell and we believe we will have full data points within 60 days. That is very very clearly the feedback we received in terms of the concern with a new technology. How do you see today that it scales? You are my boss. We cannot have a public argument. You are a brave man if you say no. I just want to follow up Paul's question and I'm coming at this not as someone who is in rare earth suppressant but also I spent most of my life as a marketer so when I was a brand new baby product manager at Nestle I was taught about analysing the market working out which markets we might like to go in and there we had the rule that you know you didn't launch a product unless you legitimately were going to be number one or number two with a legitimate claim to be number one at some stage. Why do you want to enter a market which has got two and a half times the capacity of the demand at present? You know I mean that's what I don't understand. Is that directed at in particular? Well most of you are spending money on it. I think one comment on that is about there may be all this capacity but where is that capacity located? And the second aspect is but the second aspect then is okay for a miner for somebody mining and producing say a concentrate if they are able to work with somebody who has capacity on solving extraction you have to get into the issues of consistency of supply flexibility to adapt to it in the SX circuit so there's just a number of issues like that that we've seen that says well if the capacity was right next to the plant it might be something to consider and then looking at that thing about the funding is that the way the world has gotten and we've seen is not just in rare earths but every new technology even though we have continuous ion exchange and chromatography systems in large commercial operations the question is always well I know it works over here I want to see it work with exactly what I want to do you know so it's not so there is that issue of getting that final pilot plant step to show okay it's going to work at full scale. Our model is a little bit different we believe in a centralized refinery process and going back 5, 6, 7 years when I first started talking about this people thought that you couldn't mix concentrates together and things like that I had to explain myself a lot but I think everyone has come around to the point where yes they agree that things can be done that way it's done that way in China. I'm Chinese but I'll tell you I would not trust the Chinese to toll for you and you don't necessarily want to go I'm speaking on behalf of miners now you don't necessarily want to go with the technology with another competing mine that's why I still think that an independent centralized refiner is the way to go you've got scale you've got concentration of engineering and quality control which is extremely important to end users some of these end users it'll take you years to get in it's not a great product but it'll take you years just to go through their approval process I think there are two schools if I understand well the big size school which is the one of Patrick and the modular school that is yours and obviously the modular aspect carries less risk and maybe less benefit if it's there because the size goes together with investments so it's a big risk yeah but our size actually our first one is only 2500 tons but it's actually a 2500 ton per year heaviest plant it's a heaviest plant which is a good size no more size and ours is modular too it's easy to expand like I said CapEx is extremely long the other point is and Alastair said that I'm a bit corrosive sometimes so I tried to control myself but I read the very few all send not all can run the send because the process of camera is confidential but if we enter a market with twice more capacity than demand okay we can be modular or make sure that the effectiveness is here etc but obviously listening to my boss always the kind of messy for me the first thing to do is to grow the market so the question is more specifically you have very different technologies for separation compared to existing technologies therefore we can expect a very different outcome in terms of product quality can we expect this quality to be so different that they would trigger some market growth a new demand from the brief you all say it's high purity higher than 99% being in the business for a number of years can tell you that in Linus we are very proud to do 99 3.5N on Serium 4N or 4.5 on London but basically to the best Chinese you say that they say well this is standard so just take your high purity statement and you need to adjust the numbers but do you have in your process ideas to have products that are different and that can trigger new applications and new demand and therefore more market and let's go left first I'll partially to answer your first question and then what you just mentioned we see that a lot of industries just because the nameplate capacity is much larger than where it stands today doesn't mean that more won't build so for example if you look at Podash there are two major cartels in the world well the nameplate capacity is much more than where they are producing today but it doesn't stop the majors from building more mines and they are building them and they are private equity groups that keep piling money into those sectors and they keep building more mines and that question gets asked there but the majors just keep building more mines and they keep increasing the nameplate capacity and the actual production so I don't think that always stands as the main goal no goal in terms of building a mine or building an extra capacity in terms of separation but at the same time I mean if we look at I think one of the comments came that most of that capacity today is in China which is true but what does it mean it's in China we don't know if it's green we don't know if it's properly managed we want all the end users to be more responsible in terms of where they are getting their material from so I think we saw that as an example when Siemens signed the deal with MoloCorp for a more sustainable more environmentally sustainable supply so I think that's one of those things if you increase the supply and it actually is a cleaner supply I think the market will observe it if it's just another polluting supply and you're building another plant in China let's say somebody comes up with that idea then I definitely agree with you I'm not sure if there is a point of increasing it but I think that goes back to the same point as I was saying before if you enter the market not at a huge capacity where you're suddenly flooding the market and you probably won't survive because of that so if you slowly enter the market you grow the market that you just mentioned by growing the market you guarantee that your scale now works you demonstrate that it's feasible and you guarantee most likely that you will be able to build your mind to the full capacity I'm going to add something to what Patrick said is that four years ago we were all selling a car concentrate to who who's going to buy a concentrate we all went out and looked at the Chinese and they realized we couldn't make any money so that spurred this technology advancement we all went out and developed technologies because that's the only way to make a buck I agree with you the market's going to grow and that's what the future is if there's more rare earths available in the market I'm saying my job is easy it's very easy I guess my question today is that part of the moderators not exceptionally I guess coming from the marketing background what challenges or how do you plan to market a material before you go into production that's the point to Kirill Kirill said he will sign contract before starting production which I believe is great because then after production believe me we are very busy but that's a big challenge so I think it's great look I don't think anything is easy in this industry you definitely have to figure out how to do it probably do it in a creative way I don't think we can I'm not there I definitely would have liked to answer that question with something more concrete but sure I can fully answer that I think it's probably proof of the samples of our products to potential customers and say this is what we can produce from a pilot plan scaling up as its own challenges but sending samples out to customers and saying hey this is what we can produce what do you think we've got a lot of feedback, good and bad but that's where you start you start that relationship as early as you possibly can to see if they like your products or what they don't like about your products yeah we've got some pretty strong people in our company with experience with magnets Furcat is obviously a trader as well and most of you know Gareth whose background is in magnets magnets have shown magnet elements magnet again looks like a pretty elastic supply demand curves these are elements that as they go down in price demand grows uses of it the electrification or transportation we're just at the beginning I'm lucky enough to drive a hybrid car and if you can get into one of these things or an electric car it's a great feeling not to be dependent on filling up, I fill up every couple months we are literally at the beginning stages of the end of the petrol economy I truly believe that I've also got contacts in China that have said this decentralized plan is going to focus on healthcare and air pollution but they're kind of related and their big plan is to electrify their entire transportation system they've grown their natural gas import facilities on their coast by 500% they will be in the next couple years natural gas cogent facilities are the simplest way to produce electricity which then feeds the transportation system that is based on electric engines which are 400% more efficient than gas combustion engines so I think that with when prices are low it encourages more demand and many people come up with more technologies to use magnets but for for the first while I think that it will be difficult for some of these new mines I don't really refer to them as rare earth mines anymore I actually call them new mines because the length in Syria aren't really worth that much and it's to be honest there's a ton of monazite out there that's up for grabs and it's so simple to crack you don't need to be a rocket size we'll even give them the technology if anyone wants to start a monazite finding plant so I think you've got to chew through a lot of that inventory first the only question with monazite obviously is what do you undo with thorium but the thorium goes back into their feet so I mean for where they took it out you just put it back in tailings so you're going to ship it? no don't ship it you have monazite facilities and treatment facilities at the mine sites it's easy to scale it's not difficult so just going off of that I think if you combine that the growth in these new technologies these new energy sources some of the latent demand in this conference you combine that with what I term in real estate is location, location, location you've got a you know a deposit that's here in the US for example and you have a green technology to process that and so you've got a green low cost technology combined with some of this latent demand and I think it can be very attractive to to develop some of these resources that we're talking about here with some of the new separation technologies well yeah I think too one of the things like in our case and you're talking about demand expanding and new applications and things is that one of the areas we're focusing on heavily is making very high purity heavy rares 4, 9s, 5, 9s, possibly 6, 9s so while some of those markets may be small you know they become more niche like markets and once material is available then what happens for further application of that high purity material to replace whatever to add strength to something so other applications will happen once you have a material available it's like the comment I think it was this morning about the Scandium you know the availability of it and how come the demand and how come things haven't expanded well it's kind of like in 1968 there was no demand for PCs or laptops or tablets reason being they hadn't been invented yet so there was nothing available to look at so I think a lot of it has to do with that and that's where I'll call it the risk aspect is of saying will the high purity materials open up new markets can I comment? I just wanted to actually circle back to Amanda's question about why enter this market specifically and I think you know the founders of our technology are two PhDs who have focused their entire career on rare earths and they've got a number of patents in the area so that's an area of certainly a passion but I think beyond that you have to again have this business sense and I think we can probably all agree that separating rare earths are probably the most difficult and if you can demonstrate the applicability in rare earths there are a number of other markets that can open up and be further down the road you need to stay focused on what's ahead of you but at the end of the day you know look at what makes the most sense in growing a business and understand the markets and what's there so that's sort of our philosophy around that you know in terms of you know new market applications you know again if there's more out there is more going to be used and what that implies is that the prices of rare earths are going to be lower and if you can demonstrate profitability at lower prices then I think you will see additional applications but it really it requires everybody to be profitable at lower prices and from our perspective that requires technological innovation if you can knock off a few dollars a kilogram in separation that's a big deal on the bottom line on this one I think it's great for me I didn't know there were so many people working on new technologies and rare earths extraction that's fantastic, seven I just hope it will continue nevertheless okay if it's seven to ten dollars and you bring down to five to eight dollars okay it's good it's a lot of achievements but it's just two dollars today if you compare we say magnet is everything and Chinese will sell a standard magnet at rare metal plus 15 dollars this is a very expensive Chinese the next one would be the best Japanese would be 25 dollars premium and others 35, 14 and a gap of 10 to 20 dollars per kilogram of magnet cannot be compensated by savings on rare earths extraction because you have only 30% of rare earths in there when the guy said my manufacturing of magnet is 20 bucks more expensive but now on stream you can compensate if I take market price and discount by 60 because I have only 30% of rare earths then I'm giving you money for each kilogram of an EPR and I just wonder in the US are there as many people as youth seven on improving or catching up the gap on metal making, alloy making, magnet making because this is really big handicap I'm sure you have ideas the US part of our funding actually went towards some technologies that we that are looking at metal making the economics are a little bit different when you talk about the heavier elements like the sprosion the refining costs for the heavies like the alloy even into the fosters like the TBE the atrium are a little bit more than a couple bucks but we've started to look at other technologies that are in metal making but it's hard to compete against some there are some plants down in relatively known safe countries that will toll metal making for less than 13% so that's a pretty good deal especially when it costs you a lot of electricity but there are certainly a number of US companies that are working on metal making alloy metal is a small piece alloy is where there is already 3 to 5 years and magnet and we've heard a lot about magnet making the US today there's no question that there's a gap there and I think again what Jack was saying I don't I guess our philosophy is it doesn't have to be US centric I think it has to be outside of China and it doesn't touch China and that's the feedback we've received we're looking for alternatives to China and it has to be similar pricing and it can't touch it anywhere in the value chain so if we can find partners and bring that value chain together that's outside China I think it's going to be a win for everybody like there is the magnetic alloys and strip casters I mean the strip casters themselves you can buy for a couple million bucks and the technology that goes with them it's again it's known out there it's already out there the strip casters still need a good source of supply of feedstock of rare earth elements so I think if you we already know about one strip caster that's a bankruptcy now and there's a reason why that those companies are a bankruptcy so the business for strip casting isn't all that great but you combine it with a good source of cheap rare earth elements and you might have a business I might add that the CMI the critical middle school institute in the U.S it's a political agency but they are funding research in some of the universities so that's going right now so we hope that someone come out of that in the next few years I'm checking for the time Tracy we have a question 20 more minutes okay so I can ask a question I don't know who but I know a few of you proposed scheme where cerium is separated up from because cerium is this rears that I actually personally love a lot I think it's the most interesting rears among all of them but which is abundant of a supply today now I would like to I could challenge this system but like those who do separate cerium up from to justify economically why it doesn't make sense to produce to eliminate cerium into a product that is not sellable rather than separating and getting some money for it how much we save versus how much sage we lose with this that's the economics cerium comes out last in our process and we think capturing in our economic models we give it zero value so anything above that is a win to our shareholders we have pretty much the same situation although cerium we're rejecting it early and the basic thought at present is stockpilot not throw it away stockpilot and if there is zero income do you have a warehouse cost how much do you save it doesn't save some, not a lot but the thinking being at least at present is that if we sold cerium the amount we would get is kind of one of those things of saying let's focus on the ones that have the most value and save the other ones for later that's essentially the philosophy right now if there's a market, I mean if somebody says look we'll pay a couple of bucks a kilo for cerium oxide then certainly we look at it but you would store it as an oxide or what form will probably be in Florida we pull out cerium first as well wow I don't have a cost yet we pulled out first in the extraction and we precipitated out in the stripping outside of SX our goal was to make a, we made a 99.7 cerium product, cerium oxide I haven't found a market for it so we're still on that pilot stage but we do pull cerium out first it reduces our mass by 40% going downstream so that will reduce the capex, optics for the other elements I don't know why to be honest I don't know why people decided to separate cerium out I mean for our business we charge like a la carte, you go to a restaurant you say you want this, this, this the separator would give you the cost for that and the cerium most likely we'll get you more for that cerium than it probably would cost to separate it out and we will have customers that can give long term contracts for those so even though it is a low price commodity I still think it's worthwhile I like cerium actually as well, especially at $2 a kilo and it doesn't really save all that much maybe it saves you some of the material but shipping material isn't all that expensive we're talking a couple hundred tons a year for any particular mine or maybe even over a thousand so we will be able to get you a marginal revenue for our technology because it's selective we're similar we can pick and choose which rare earth elements we do want to take to the full separation of high purity stage and so we can leave the others together as a group and keep those or we can separate them out and then keep them to the side but we can focus on the high value rare earth elements and separate those I've got a question I've got a postgraduate in mineral economics from the School of Mines in Western Australia and Baylor in the market where there's double the capacity that worries me somewhat someone once described rare earths because I asked them about it and he goes well it's a black box unless you're Chinese or French you probably can't operate the black box I say that's different I say there's some really good smart guys here concentrating on the process and I'm just thinking well Canada's got Australian Canada have got probably 90% of the hard rock lithium deposits in the world other than mine and probably the next best one is geese and I know four or five they've given the opportunity of buying why is everyone concentrating on this you've got a market like lithium that's growing at 20% it's in way under supply there's a market going from 200 to 500,000 tonnes in 10 years you can selectively pull stuff out at chloride mediums I'm just sticking around with this part of it is just a function of the opportunity and we haven't focused on a partner with four lithium but I can tell you we're working together with UCOR to look at resource companies including lithium resource companies and applying our technology to recovering lithium for example entering I think there's a challenge entering a new market with a new technology if you're looking at a massive billion dollar multi-billion industry far beyond that of rare earth they're less accepting of new technologies when you are an environment like this that is struggling to compete and be economically viable technology advancement is the key profitability so if you can prove it out in a challenging environment that is a smaller market that is looking to new technologies I think it becomes incrementally easier to demonstrate say hey come look at this facility what we did we did with the hardest separation that was required let's move into this bigger market that's our philosophy Paul we have a question back here can we take this from Judy Baker from Damascus lithium oh yes hi gentlemen Patrick Wong you mentioned you believe this is the beginning of the end of the Petro industry so I have actually kind of a three part question my first part question and I'm going to A, B and C together and you can answer them as a whole do you think Volkswagen's diesel gate situation is going to impact the rate of change of the decline of the Petro industry what are the key drivers of ending the Petro industry and are there any risks with Tesla's gigafactory diesel gate yeah it's pretty shameful yeah it could cast a different light on it I'm going to look kind of foolish because this has just been something that I've been hitting my head over for like years and anyone that's seen any of my presentations like six, seven years ago I was kind of talking about this and it's still creeping along I used to be in the in a pretty lucrative career and I left it because I saw this massive arbitrage and it's the world's largest arbitrage in human history is the difference between natural gas and oil and when I looked at that it's literally worth trillions I went and testified I went and spoke with the U.S. Senate committee and I went through some of the numbers this is long this is like six years ago and on a BTU dollars per BTU basis natural gas trading at less than $20 a barrel oil now where it is maybe not such a big deal when the oil was over 100 you had a big big deal and when you start to look at that arbitrage oil and natural gas aren't fungible so you try to connect the dots and when I started doing that it pointed towards a number of different industries of which I left my career and I actually started going into these different industries the first one being natural gas distribution because my belief is that the way that these two energy types become fungible is through electrification or transportation yeah there's a lot of interesting technologies out there with hydrogen refuel cells and all that stuff but we've seen case in case again where new technologies go by the wayside because of either consumer adoption or just it's difficult to build infrastructure well we've got a plug in almost every single home out there and anywhere in between so when you connect the dots it's natural gas, cogent facilities electricity is now over 90% of the US power grid growth rate it's not in nukes, it's not in coal and then that goes towards finding this electric based transportation system that then buys less gasoline so long story short you can't get around if you follow the money you can't get around that it's literally I'm a good example, ever since I bought my hybrid car my electricity costs have hardly gone up at all but my gas consumption costs have gone down by over 80% and it's cleaner for the environment and all that stuff but without being a tree hugger comes down to money and I actually save money by owning a hybrid car programs like this and incentive programs that governments put out to help encourage people buy electric and hybrid cars will help as well Pan Am Games, I had a green license plate everyone else on the 403 was stuck I was flying by, I would go on the 403 just to get off one exit just so I can go on that HOV line so I think it's inevitable and it's going to happen I've heard that the big three auto companies have a thousand kilometer battery and they just haven't put it out yet because they don't know what it's going to do to their gas combustion inventory I don't know if that's true or not that comes from a company that actually makes charging stations so I think it's it's going to happen what was your third question I think Elon Musk is one of my heroes and the decision to go and build something like a giga plant for battery production is great because you're using, you're getting scalability and you're driving, your goal is to drive down unicosts I think that if the Tesla didn't use induction motors then he might have actually built something else and if they do have a plan on using permanent magnets for a decent size his focus might shift to something else but I don't think it's disruptive I think it's going to be a great developer of technology and it's something that is almost strategic now to a point, especially in North America Just a small one I'm very sorry to inform you that Linus should have been part of this panel because we are developing a technology and we're going to publish a video on sirium in 20PR at this moment we haven't published anything about it because we have to publish first turning lead into gold but as soon as it's done so then you are all dead guys I'm sorry this is being videotaped