It's no secret that I am a big fan of Ucore Rare Metals (TSX-V:UCU). The first article I ever wrote for CEO.CA was about the company (here) and I followed it up with another five articles on the company (here, here, here, here, and here). I've been quietly following them since and relish the opportunity to present an extended interview with Mr. Jim McKenzie, CEO of Ucore, below.
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P: Thanks for sending some notes in response to Rick Rule's interview questions, Jim. There were three spots in the notes where I thought "Wow, we have to talk about that in depth." So, rather than go through the full list of questions, I wonder if we could do a deep dive on those three questions. For your information, the three questions were around how you first met IBC, something about how MRT competes with legacy systems, and a details on the "hub and spoke" model. I would be grateful if we could start with those -- please and thank you!
P: Again, the first question is quite broad. Seems to me that you have a tiger by the tail with this Molecular Recognition Technology, MRT, and I wonder if you would care to expand on the story of how you met the guys at IBC Advanced Technologies?
J: Well, that's a fairly interesting story. It starts with the Bokan project, which is the highest-grade formerly producing uranium site on US soil, and now additionally serves as our flagship Rare Earth Element, or REE, project. It’s in the Western world, which effectively means that we could not use historical technologies -- Solvent Extraction -- to separate the REE on site. Solvent extraction is a very messy technology. Its very environmentally invasive and the chances of us getting an SX plant approved and permitted in south-east Alaska would be slim to none. So, we recognised right away that we had to find a better mousetrap.
J: We started to shop the globe to see what technologies were out there and, I recall this quite well, we put a number of prospective companies on a white board. At one point, we had 20 or so different companies on the wall and it was sort of like a detective case -- which of these up and coming technologies were we going to zero in on and try to work with?
J: One of the technologies that we briefly toyed with but did not use in the long run was analogous to MRT in that it deals with bonding at a molecular level. However, it deployed covalent bonding, which is bonding within the molecule, whereas MRT, the technology that we eventually went with, is largely based on non-covalent bonding, or bonding at the surface of the molecule. This is a nuanced sort of difference, but it really matters. The non-covalent aspect of MRT means that the attachment is relatively weak, and can therefore be comparatively easy to elute, or detach, the valuable metal at the end of the process. That’s a big advantage, and not necessarily the case with non-MRT technologies. We spent a certain amount of money on alternative technologies at bench scale, but at the end of the day, we felt that we needed to keep looking.
J: I was at the Annual Conference of Metallurgists in Niagara Falls in 2012 and the fellow who made the presentation directly before ours was Steve Izatt of IBC Advanced Technologies.
P: Oh, wow. What luck!
J: I was waiting in the wings, listening to what he had to say, and I was thinking "Jeez, that technology seems to do exactly what we are trying to do -- and it does it in a huge way!"
J: I remember asking a couple of people at the conference if they knew anything about IBC and they said they didn't. IBC is not a well-advertised company. This is primarily because, I believe, they haven’t required promotion to attract business. Their technology is world-class. It speaks for itself. So, they've grown their business primarily by word of mouth and by reputation. They’re a privately-held concern, and they’re justifiably private with regards to their IP and their ways of doing things. When I approached Steve Izatt, I was blown away to find out exactly what they had; their separation platform had a 30-year pedigree based on Nobel Prize winning technology.
J: When we went to visit them in Utah -- again, I remember this so clearly -- there was no sign on their building. I remember saying to Steve that I found that intriguing and I asked if it was a new building, if they had just moved in. He said "No, we’re not compelled to advertise. Our reputation speaks for itself.” So, there was a sort of admirable humility to IBC that I found surprising, notwithstanding that they had already built a business with major customers on five continents.
J: The more I got to know them, the more I realised just how careful they are with their technology -- keeping it close to their vest. They have no wi-fi, for instance. They have incomparable security in their building; succinct protocols for the handling of data; the comings and goings of personnel; and so forth. A really low-key enterprise. But, when you peel back the layers, you understand that this is truly a incomparable technology, and that they are in fact the world leader in their field, which is the application of MRT to mining and resource applications.
J: So, in summary, how did we come across IBC? Well, part of it was an elaborate search for the best company in the world to give us a clean metal separation technology that could be readily permitted in North America. And part of it was just kismet, or luck, in the fact that we just bumped into each other and realised that we were made for each other. Ironically, IBC was already on the list of some 20 companies we were investigating, but we had not spoken to them as yet. Our chance meeting in Niagara Falls sped up the timeline, so fate played a part in the marriage.
P: Yes, that's great to hear. Thank you, Jim. Any additional comments on how closely you guys are working together at this point?
J: Well we had a major announcement on March 3rd, 2015, where we announced our joint venture. That's coming along fairly nicely -- we're right on the precipice of making significant advances there now.
P: Yes, sorry to interrupt you there. I've seen the press releases and seen the public disclosures around the joint venture, but I'm just wondering if there's any additional colour you want to provide there. Say, how big your team is and how big their team is? Or how much interaction there is going on back and forth between you?
J: The two companies articulate very well. Steve Izatt, who is my counterpart within IBC, and I complement each other on many fronts. I'm more of a finance, management and scalability specialist. He's more of a scientist, obviously; a conceptual theoretician, and an operations specialist. We complement each other extremely well.
J: We're also a pretty good match, size wise. IBC has upwards of a couple dozen personnel and Ucore has close to that depending on the time of year. We’ve had times when we've had over 50 personnel in Alaska when completing our resource programmes. IBC similarly has a long history of temporarily accessing ancillary personnel as required, especially at their Houston fabrication facility.
J: Ucore has a long history of investing in technology related assets. Certainly, this is the basis of my own career, dealing with advanced technologies for the past 30 years. We’ve made it our mission to locate world class technology, and transcend the complexities of that technology for investors; developing a road map for the unlocking of value potential. And in the case of IBC, there’s so much to unlock. There are over 60 fully-developed ligands in the existing IBC catalogue. That’s an enormous store house of intellectual property ready for use. Ucore is pursuing the deployment of that catalogue in the tailings, REE and PGM sectors. The SuperLig® tools are already developed and on the shelf, and they’re significantly better than anything else we’ve seen. So, its our job is to get out there and start getting those tools into the hands of industry.
J: The challenge in growing the SuperLig® platform has less to do with the science. The science is bulletproof, in terms of being vetted by industry, the world-over, for decades. It's been used by mining majors and the pedigree of the science, which we've already talked about, is unassailable. The challenge lies in scaling the organization to meet rapidly growing demand. Ucore has brought an aggressive model for growth and our ambition for SuperLig® technology is to transform it into a licensing machine.
J: They've never really had a front-end sales office, if you will. That's what we're bringing to the table. It's like we complete each other. We'll be more clear about this as we head into the New Year.
J: We've made it clear that we can grow as quickly as they can, and vice-versa. It's one of those situations where the demand is enormous and it's a question of how much we want to bite off and chew at any one time. We're getting requests from all over the world for applications such as industrial process flow, fly-ash, nickel tailings, red mud tailings, the oil sands, and a litany of other applications. Ucore and IBC are challenging each other in a very good way. IBC has proven itself to be very elastic in terms of acquiring and training new personnel. I think the opportunity is enormous.
P: Great, thanks very much. If I can shift to my next question here, which is around Rick's question: "How will you make me money on this deal?" That one. You identified license fees, plant-build fees, and the tolling royalty. That ties in well with what you were just saying about Ucore being a sort of sales, licensing and development arm, so to speak, of IBC. I wonder -- is the downstream industry in the USA ready for you, specifically in terms of the rare earths? It's a very broad question, I'm afraid. And I'll make it worse by tacking on another one -- any comment around competition within your horizontal industry segment and competing with legacy systems?
J: Well, there's a lot there. Let me answer the second part of that first -- the legacy systems. Our immediate priority is not to go after industry that is already heavily dependant on legacy technology. Let me clarify what I mean by that.
J: A great deal of IBC’s existing business has been based on the conversion of majors to the SuperLig® platform. This is a legitimate business approach. It has served the company well, and it will remain a solid strategy for acquiring new business. However, majors are already fully-invested in legacy technologies, however inefficient they may be. The problem that you run up against, obviously, is inertia.
J: In order to disrupt a sector, its advantageous to approach from the outside. The direction we're opted for is to go after industries that are creating new players that can compete against the old guard. A good example of that would be in the lithium space. We already have a highly efficient SuperLig® product for lithium. We’re talking to some of the world’s largest lithium producers and we’re exploring the retro-fitting of our technology. This will happen, and its certainly happened before, with a prime case being the adoption of SuperLig® by the copper industry, replacing legacy ion exchange facilities at Asarco and elsewhere.
J: That said, we think the low-hanging fruit for us is to partner with the start-ups -- those who are looking for new sources of lithium that no one else is availing themselves of at present. For instance, there is the possibility of extracting lithium from the brines of hydrothermal plants and desalinization plants in the US. Nobody is doing that right now. That's an enormous resource to be tapped into. We’d basically be creating new supply sources based on the revolutionary capabilities of MRT. Such an approach is a great deal more disruptive than dealing with historical supply channels. To be clear, SuperLig® is certainly a tool that can be used by legacy lithium producers. However, my point is that we may well be looking at new sources of supply to obtain the fastest growth, not unlike the disruption that occurred in the petroleum space with the recent fracking revolution.
J: When it comes to rare earths, heavy rare earths in particular, there is really no significant processing of heavy rare earths now occurring outside of China. By definition, when we install our recently announced rare earth refinery in the USA, it is not replacing old infrastructure. It’s taking on new horizons and it's getting into a sector that is not being served on US soil right now.
P: If I can interrupt you there. Thanks for addressing the legacy systems point in regards to some of the other metals. As you are saying, there is no production of heavy rare earths in the USA, so the capacity of the downstream industry for the rare earths in the USA is unclear to me.
J: I see what you're asking about there. This is not a difficulty. The markets are very robust for material that is refined to high-quality salts of REEs like europium, terbium, dysprosium, and so forth. There are markets outside of China that are pretty much begging for material that is not from China. Not just the US, but Japan, Korea, the EU, and many more jurisdictions that are highly motivated to source these materials without Chinese dependency.
J: It's one of those situations where "if you build it, they will come". We have downstream demand -- a number of prospective offtake partners in the US and elsewhere who have made it very clear to us -- if we can produce material, then they will consume almost all that we can cook.
P: For me, as a simple equities analyst, it strikes me that the REE markets are not commodity markets in the same way as other metals -- they are not traded on exchanges. The REEs are much more of a contract-based market, which makes them more opaque and obscure. So, it's good to hear that there is that demand globally for the salts. I expected that to be the case, but still encouraging to hear it. Any comments on whether the salts that you may produce from Bokan will be used in products in America?
J: Absolutely. One of the biggest drivers of our target market is vehicle electrification. I think it was John Hykaway who called the rare earths "electric metals" and that class of metals goes well beyond rare earths into other special metals that are used in electric vehicles and the carbon-free-footprint technologies. That would include scandium, lithium, cobalt and others. The electrification revolution is here and it is actually being driven to a large extent on US soil. Tesla is at the vanguard of that movement, but General Motors and Ford and others are part of it too. Truth be told, even the Japanese have manufacturing plants in Tennessee and various other places on US soil.
J: An excellent overview of the Electrification Revolution, and the need for disruptive technologies to feed that phenomenon, is Tony Seba’s presentation on Clean Disruption, available on YouTube here. The rate of change toward a purely electric transportation paradigm is accelerating unbelievably. Electric vehicles depend heavily on the availability a select class of rare metals that include REE, Li and Co. And the fact that this revolution is being driven largely in the US speaks broadly to the need for disruptive technologies in order to access these materials domestically, without delay.
J: MRT is the foundation of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. I can’t think of a more advanced and disruptive technology in materials science at present, and IBC is the de facto world leader in MRT for the resource sector. We have a once in a lifetime confluence of events at work here, and SuperLig® is very much poised to capitalize on that phenomenon. We’re in the right place at the right time, with the right solution. As Tony Seba might say, it’s an exciting time to be alive.
P: It sounds like you're on the right side of the supposed ‘big trend’ of the re-birth of high tech manufacturing in the USA that some people talk about.
J: Well, there's huge demand in the US. What's driving that, again, is an emerging revolution in the transportation field. A good example of that is legislation that's been tabled recently in the European markets. They're saying that, by the year 2030, they intend to eliminate almost all of the consumption of traditional carbon-emissions vehicles. I think the US is following suit fairly heavily, as well. So, we’re at a huge nexus in terms of the way industry is going and it's driving all kinds of new technology. Add to that the recent ruminations of the Trump administration to extract a possible 45% tariff of the import of goods and strategic metals out of China, and you see a perfect storm of sorts, all on US soil.
J: And those are forward looking plans for Europe, but in China they've already started to restrict registration of combustion vehicles in favour of electric vehicles. The reason is the environment crisis in China. By some calculations, 80% of the shallow ground water in mainland China is now poisoned largely because of unrestricted mining and industrial practices in their recent past. We’ve seen figures stating that as many as 4000 children and elderly people are dying each day in Chinese urban population centers from air pollution. The Chinese government is already restricting internal combustion vehicle registration so that the use of electrified vehicles will grow immediately. They forecast a tenfold increase in electric vehicle sales to 3 million vehicles a year by 2025. There are over 4000 new electric vehicle models currently under development in China and subsidies of up to 60% of vehicle costs are under consideration. So, the need for electric metals is not solely an American phenomenon.
J: The big underpinning of Ucore’s mission statement and our business plan is to feed the electric metals revolution. The big cornerstone of that is the electric vehicle and the fact that this is the century of the electric vehicle. All of the metals that we’re after are tied in with that theme. The Rare Earths are going to be increasingly in demand because of electrification. REE’s are really miniaturization metals. They can make magnets a great deal smaller, more utile, and stronger than they ever were by virtue of Rare Earth doping. It's all about miniaturization, which translates to increased fuel economy. For electric vehicles, the range of use is that much more effective if the vehicle is that much lighter.
J: Our mission is to follow the electrification and clean energy trend. We think its one that's here to stay, and is likely to gain exponential momentum over the next decade. Rare Earths are our launch pad of sorts, but we're immediately going to follow the breadcrumb trail, which is leading us into all of the electric metals. The electric metals are very important to us and we have SuperLig® products ready to access those from a broad range of feedstocks.
P: Alright, thank you very much. If I can move us on to another question. This one ties in with Rick's question: "How much money do you have? How much money do you need? And how are you going to get it?". You mentioned that your funding will come from project partner's licensing agreements, and I wonder if you could elaborate on that.
J: Our most recent financials filed on SEDAR show $6.7M million in the treasury and since the completion of our pilot plant the burn rate has dropped substantially. How much money do we need? Well, the final scoping and budgeting is in process, but I can tell you that when we talk about our strategic metals complex, announced earlier this week, MRT is a great deal less expensive than any other technology out there that does a comparable service.
J: When it comes to SX technology, an MRT based plant can easily cost a third, a quarter, or even less of what a traditional SX plant would cost. I can say that our plant will prospectively be a great deal less expensive than other plants in the same industry. I can also say that we have very strong investors who have been with the story for a long time. You know, 30% of our company is held between two investment funds that are going long with the company, and they want to maintain their proportionate positions. That's a huge advantage to us, and part of the reason why Ucore has continued to capitalize well after other players in the REE space have thrown in the towel. So, we anticipate that new funds will typically come from prior investors and, to a certain extent, new investment funds that want to partner with us.
P: The point that really spoke to me was that you have the potential for self-financing, or bootstrapping, with your project partners.
J: Exactly right. I'm glad you mentioned that. We've recently announced the development of a strategic metals complex. That is an exercise that we're going through because we have the technology, and we feel that it's prime time to build the plant. Beyond REE’s and PGMs however, our growth model is going to be largely based on a licensing platform. Licensing depends heavily on strong and proven IP -- intellectual property -- and developing your business on an OPM basis. Our partners will shoulder the majority of cost for infrastructure -- bricks and mortar facilities -- in exchange for access to an IP that is indisputably faster, more efficient, and more cost effective than alternative separation technologies.
J: For example, a qualified partner seeking to access SuperLig® technology for the lithium space would be offered a license arrangement not unlike those offered by Hitachi, Dow, or DuPont, or other leaders in the chemical licensing sector. There is a licence fee up front, in order to access the lithium technology. That fee could be in the form of an equity payment or a cash payment. When it comes to the building of plants and facilities, the licensee will undertake that expense under their own steam, using design services offered by us. So, plant facilities will be a revenue center for us, much rather than a cost center. Finally, a standard feature of licensing is the payment of royalties based on the economic value of materials liberated by the process. In the case of lithium, that revenue flow promises to be substantial. But the same applies to all of the electric metals, especially those driving the revolution in transportation, each of which will be a product channel in our hub and spoke growth model.
P: My sense is that we could do a two-hour chat just about the hub and spoke model. I was familiar, or thought that I was familiar, with some of the operational side of things from prior news releases and communications that you have put out, but that aspect of the financing side seemed like new-news to me, at least. It kind of reminded me of the prospect generator or project generator model that is popular in some exploration circles. In other words, you dilute at the project level, rather than the company level.
J: I think that’s a great analogy. You could also say that the hub is an incubator. Our intellectual property already exists. The technology is fully vetted and ready to go. But IBC has not been particularly aggressive on the licensing front -- they have always done direct deals where they have consulted on a one-off basis. In other words, they’ve been using a direct customer relationship model, and that’s worked very well for them. However, we intend to amplify and ramp-up the use of the SuperLig® IP through the use of an licensees, using the power of intermediate partnerships and group-sourcing.
J: There’s a graphic on our website setting out the hub and spoke configuration. In its basic incarnation, it looks like a clock, with 12 or so spokes encircling a hub. But this is an over simplification, since each spoke will have the ability to mushroom into multiple subordinate spokes. In other words, any one product channel (such as SuperLig® PGM products for example) can produce multiple licensees at a world level, and may be sub-divided by industry or geographic territory. These channels, in turn, can have sub-licensees, front-line sales representatives, and so forth. As I’ve said, the clock analogy is a gross understatement of potential, given that we have over 60 ligands in the catalogue covering most of the naturally occurring metals on the periodic table. So, the hub and spoke network, at the end of the day, should look more like a constellation than the face of a timepiece.
J: In any event, 2017, in our estimation, is going to be the launch year of our licensing program. We're developing our licensing model right now. We have some of the best minds in the industry helping with that. We’re now laying the foundation of our licensing agreements. The objective is ultimately analogous to a franchising exercise. People ask what's the difference between licensing and franchising? Well, licensing companies typically have a limited number of licensees, with customized license agreements that often differ from customer to customer. A franchise model is a licensing configuration that has managed to standardize its licensing agreements and propagate them far and wide. In other words, locking in a somewhat standardized broad-form license agreement, one that can be replicated time and again, is the first step in churning out licenses on a large scale. Of course, our centralized SuperLig® production facility, which manufactures ligands for shipment to refineries and separation plants around the world, will have to keep up. But that facility is already in existence in Utah, and simply needs careful scaling to meet demand.
P: You’ve mentioned that IBC has an enormous archive of intellectual property. Some 60 plus ligands overall. How did that come to be, and why do you think the opportunity is so large at this point in time?
J: In the past, IBC has solved problems in a consultant's environment. A customer like Impala Platinum in South Africa, for example, would bring in IBC to purify their PGMs. IBC would go in, they'd solve the problem, and they'd have another consulting gig lined up to focus on after that. They might focus on Asarco to remove bismuth from their copper operations in Texas. That kept them busy on individual operations. But once the customer had the system installed and it worked better than their previous system, they were happy to have an advantage over their competitors and kept quiet about it. Meanwhile, IBC moved on to successive projects, because that's what they want to do -- they want to work on new projects, solve new problems, and establish the scientific results in the chemistry community. They’ve been extremely prolific on this front. Witness the hundreds of academic papers authored by Reed M. Izatt. He’s a giant in the field of supramolecular chemistry.
J: For the most part, IBC has done business as a world-class problem solver. People come to them and say "Can you remove bismuth from copper? Can you remove arsenic from tailings? Can you remove radioactive nuclides from waste water? Can you attract valuable metals in this situation? ..." They've been fairly reactive in that way.
J: In other words, someone asks for a service, they perform it, and then they move on to solve yet another problem. The irony of that is that IBC has left, in their wake, solutions that can be propagated and replicated on a massive scale. They've made the ultimate sandwich, served it somebody, and the customer has said "wow, that's the best sandwich I've ever tasted." Then they put the recipe in the drawer and moved along. When, in actuality, that recipe for the best sandwich ever is still in the drawer! The recipe is already there. That's an excellent way to look at the fact that they have this massive pre-existing store house of IP -- the problems that they have already solved.
J: All we want to do is say, "Here you have a ligand for lithium that was developed ten years ago for a specific application. Can that be deployed on a world level?" It turns out, yes, it can be. In a massive way! That's why it's such a unique opportunity here -- to have access to decades’ worth of development work, done on a one-off basis, with no view to replication or economies of scale thereafter.
J: It actually reminds me of a man I know who used to run a website-development company. I knew him in the early 2000s. He would develop websites for people -- phenomenal websites for world-class companies. One-off, each one was a masterpiece. I remember saying to him, "you could take this business and grow it ten-fold if you just start developing templates, based on some of your designs. Lock in these templates and offer them to others." I'm not pretending that I had this phenomenal insight; perhaps it was just obvious. But, ten years later, the web site pro-forma template is a big business. You can buy best-of-class templates off the shelf. Someone who had developed a beautiful and elegant website architecture had they figured out how to use it three-thousand times instead of once!
J: So, you have these solutions that have been developed -- why not try to replicate those solutions and transpose them into other environments and grow very quickly with that? The challenge with that has to do with scalability. As I said earlier in the conversation, we have enormous capacity for sales on the front end. Our challenge is to ramp up the provisioning and engineering part of the business, so that we can keep apace with all the demand that is coming our way. We’re looking to replicate the SuperLig® system, as much as possible. We don't want to be creating individual works of art. We want to be mass-producing a solution that can benefit multiple companies on a global level.
P: Now, I have followed your company for years now and just have to ask -- how has it been for you to be a survivor in this niche area of the resources markets? You, Jim -- you've been at the helm for years now while lots of others have fallen by the wayside or pivoted to other things. You guys have kind of followed your nose and stumbled onto something unique and exceptional there with the MRT.
J: Well, I think that the mark of a good rider is whether you can stay on the horse when it's bucking and the terrain is rough. As a rider, I think we're near the front of the field when it comes to the rare earth companies out there -- the juniors. We're proud of that and happy to be able to say that.
J: If your readers look at the trend, the underlying trend of where the USA is headed and where China is headed -- China is getting more protectionist in terms of the materials that they want to provide to the rest of the world. The US is also getting more protectionist and that may accelerate under the new administration. It's all going to be a matter of who can be self-sufficient. We offer source and supply of rare earths, not just raw rare earths, but fully separated high-purity rare earths in a fully-contained ecosystem on US soil. That's just a huge advantage that we don’t believe anyone else has.
J: Not only do we have raw materials supply with Bokan Mountain, we have an unsurpassed ability to separate these materials to near-quantitative levels of purity. Like 99.99% purity in the first pass through our system, which is amazing. Yeah, we have been resilient and I think that history is likely to repeat itself -- we have stuck around this long, chances are we are going to continue to stick around. If you look at the underlying trends in rare earths, they are very positive. They're getting better all the time. These things go in waves.
J: The power of this technology to extract REEs from the by-product of another mine changes the economics of the whole industry, as well. We have one of the top deposits in the world for heavy rare earths with Bokan. But, if you look at the oil sands, the coal-ash in West Virginia, the iron mines in northern New York, there are tremendous hidden assets in terms of their tailings. You need powerful, new technology to take advantage of those assets and that's what we have. Not only is the demand for REEs going to continue to grow, but our access to raw materials and the power of our technology is going to make new sources of supply economic. It's going to be a pretty exciting ride.
P: Wonderful. We're getting up to the end of our scheduled time here. There was a comment that I heard somewhere in one of your releases that you are positioned, or becoming positioned to be ready for the next big thing, in terms of metals. Ready for the next bull market, whatever it may be. That's a pretty unique and exciting thing for your business.
J: The fracking revolution is a useful analogy here. The USA has been sitting on one of the largest reserves of oil on the planet for eons, but it was never recognized as such because there was no technology to unlock those reserves. Now, the fracking revolution has changed the dynamics of world economics in the Middle East and beyond. That is analogous to what we think we have with SuperLig® technology. There are enormous reserves of strategic metals around the world, primarily in tailings environs. Those would include metals like titanium, rare earths, lithium, cobalt, and the whole range of technology metals. There are vast reserves, already mined and at surface in tens of thousands of tailing sites around the world. What our technology can do, similar to fracking, is unlock those reserves, whereas no other technology has been able to do that.
J: When you talk about lithium being available in hydrothermal brines, our technology can locate and appropriate lithium down to the parts per million and even parts per billion level. There's no other technology that can do that, that can actually go and find a needle in the haystack and pull it out without affecting anything else. It's very surgical. The implications are huge. We have tens of thousands of tailing sites around the world and you have this technology that can effectively go in and surgically remove whatever valuable materials are there. That is the low-hanging fruit for us, to be honest.
J: There are a number of massive tailing sites that contain rare earths in the Americas that can be tapped into in the near term with our technology. And it goes beyond the energy metals and the USA. We have the separation technology that can take input feedstock from anywhere in the world. That could be from mines, or production facilities, or process-flow, or so on. One of the areas of the lowest hanging fruit that we see is tailings monetization or waste monetization. We are pursuing that as quickly as we can and I would ask everyone to stay tuned on that front.
P: Jim, thanks very much for taking my call here today. I look forward to making public a transcript of our call.
J: Thanks, Peter. My pleasure.
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You can find more information on the wonders of MRT and how it ties into the recent Nobel Prize in Chemistry in this article written by Reed Izatt, Steve Izatt's father. The company has many engaging videos with Jim, Steve, and other influential people that you can watch here. And I encourage you to sign up for news from the company here.
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