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China is now surpassing the U.S. on silicon carbide quality, says Penn State's Josh Robinson. Silicon carbide is the power chip material in EVs and AI data centers. U.S. universities led the research in the 1990s, then handed it to industry and stopped teaching it. Josh Robinson is director of Penn State's Materials Research Institute, which he says has about 77 staff and nearly 300 affiliated faculty, and he leads the university's Silicon Carbide Innovation Alliance. He joins Dustin Olsen and Daniel O'Connor to talk about the part of the critical minerals story that usually gets skipped: what happens after the ore is mined and separated. In this episode: Why a barrel of rare earth oxide isn't useful until someone can process it into a finished materialHow U.S. silicon carbide research faded after industry took it in-houseWhy losing gallium would hit America's power electronics, including AI data centersPenn State's work on rare earth separation, metallization, and neodymium magnetsWhy DOE wants universities to double the number of critical minerals graduatesGuest: Josh Robinson, Director, Materials Research Institute, Penn State Rare Earth Exchanges is accelerating transparency in the rare earth and critical minerals supply chain. New episodes weekly. 🌐 https://rareearthexchanges.com🎧 Also on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts Disclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.

E-waste is fifty to a hundred times more concentrated than the ore coming out of a new mine — and America still treats it as garbage, shipping nearly every circuit board overseas because, as Bedingfield puts it, the ability to handle difficult-to-process scrap left the country twenty-five years ago. Matt Bedingfield is Global CEO of Mint Innovation, a New Zealand-founded cleantech company that recovers copper, gold, silver, tin and palladium from scrapped printed circuit boards without a smelter. Mint produced what HP calls the first certified closed-loop copper — metal recovered from HP's own end-of-life boards and returned to new HP laptops. Before Mint, Bedingfield spent seventeen years in metals and recycling at Novelis, Tri-Arrows Aluminum and Wieland, where he built a $100 million-plus secondary copper refinery in Kentucky and won a $270 million federal grant for a copper smelter that never got built. In this episode: - How batch-continuous hydrometallurgy makes a batch of copper traceable from a dead laptop to a new one - Why Mint doesn't recover rare earths — and where they actually end up - What a non-smelting metals plant looks like: tanks, vats and pumps, or "a microbrewery on steroids" - Why 900 US e-waste recyclers still send every board overseas - Fifteen months and $45 million versus seven years and $1 billion - The framing that makes recycling fundable under either party Guest: Matt Bedingfield, Global CEO, Mint Innovation Rare Earth Exchanges is accelerating transparency in the rare earth and critical minerals supply chain. New episodes weekly. 🌐 https://rareearthexchanges.com 🎧 Also on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts Disclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.

Until now, every ton of Malaysian rare earth carbonate legally exported went to China. DTEC Mineral & Metal Technology says it now holds the first permit to send it to the United States: a 700-metric-ton allocation for R&D, with the first 30 tons scheduled to leave Penang on October 31, 2026. Milan Perlly, CEO of DTEC Mineral & Metal Technology, joins Dustin Olsen and Daniel O'Connor to explain how a year-old, majority U.S.-owned Malaysian startup got the permit, why Malaysia's ionic clays matter for heavy rare earths, and what Malaysia expects in return. In this episode: • How DTEC secured the first export permit for Malaysian rare earth carbonate to the U.S. • Why the ministry required DTEC to buy the carbonate before it would consider the permit • How Malaysia's states control mining rights while the federal government controls exports • Why the Lynas plant in Malaysia doesn't process Malaysian rare earths • DTEC's plan for licensed separation technology and a midstream plant in Malaysia Guest: Milan Perlly, CEO, DTEC Mineral & Metal Technology Sdn Bhd Rare Earth Exchanges is accelerating transparency in the rare earth and critical minerals supply chain. New episodes weekly. 🌐 https://rareearthexchanges.com 🎧 Also on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts Disclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.

If China cut off rare earths tomorrow, would the West cope? John Parkinson, who builds the REEx Rankings, says no: "if China was to switch off now, the world would stop." In this Q4 update, Dustin Olsen and Daniel O'Connor sit down with John Parkinson, Chief Business Officer at Rare Earth Exchanges, to walk through the October REEx Rankings. Miners are advancing into construction while processing has barely moved, and John says Neo's magnet plant in Estonia is now producing, which lifted Neo in the rankings. The update also adds a brand-new ranking of rare earth recyclers. John also takes on a market puzzle: why a fully funded project can reach its final investment decision and still see its share price fall. In this episode: - Why processing and separation are still the bottleneck, and why John thinks governments are funding the wrong end of the supply chain - Arafura reached FID and moved into construction, so why did the market punish it? (John discloses he holds Arafura shares) - Lynas's bid for Meteoric Resources and the push into Brazilian heavy rare earths - The heavy rare earths the REEx Rankings don't cover, and how John says China produces them once a year - The new REEx recycling rankings, and why John sees recycling supplying no more than about 5% of ex-China needs over the next five years - The milestones to watch next, from Pensana's financing to an ex-China pricing mechanism Guest: John Parkinson, Chief Business Officer, Rare Earth Exchanges Disclosure: John Parkinson stated on this episode that he is a shareholder of Arafura Rare Earths. Rare Earth Exchanges is accelerating transparency in the rare earth and critical minerals supply chain. New episodes weekly. 🌐 https://rareearthexchanges.com 🎧 Also on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts Disclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.

Anthony Hall says Osmond Resources will be the only project in the world that gets its rare earths for free. The zircon and titanium in the same rock pay for the mine, and the rare earths come out as a bonus. He also says the EU today extracts none of those minerals at all. Anthony Hall is Managing Director and CEO of Osmond Resources (ASX: OSM), a Spanish critical minerals company listed in Australia, developing the Orión project in Jaén province, Andalucía. He has run three listed mining companies and took the first two from IPO into the ASX 300. One deposit carries rare earths, zirconium and titanium at once. Hall explains why Brussels has moved slower than Washington, and what the Técnicas Reunidas partnership gives Osmond. He also makes the case that the endgame here is robots. In this episode: - Why Osmond calls its rare earths free, and what has to be true for that to hold - Hall's account of European extraction today, and the domestic-supply target the Critical Raw Materials Act sets for 2030 - Why 27 member states make EU subsidy support so hard, and why Spain and Andalucía matter more to him - The $16 billion that went into robotics in six months, and what it needs out of a mine - Why permitting is the one risk he names, and how an underground mine with no surface tailings changes his odds Guest: Anthony Hall, Managing Director and CEO, Osmond Resources Rare Earth Exchanges is accelerating transparency in the rare earth and critical minerals supply chain. New episodes weekly. 🌐 https://rareearthexchanges.com 🎧 Also on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts Disclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory just won a 2026 R&D 100 Award for a rare earth separation process that halves the number of stages a plant needs for the same throughput. The two ORNL chemists behind it explain why that has almost nothing to do with the molecule. Subho Pramanik is an R&D Associate Staff Scientist at ORNL, a radiochemist and synthetic physical-organic chemist who designs the ligands. Marcy Lamb is a radiochemist in ORNL's Chemical Separations Group who runs the analytical side and the scale-up. Both are named on NEAREST, the Neutral Extractant Advanced Rare Earth Separation Technology. We covered why all 15 lanthanides sit within 20 picometers of one another, how two ligands with opposite selectivity beat a single acidic extractant, what a separation stage actually costs at industrial scale, and why the analytical chemistry nobody sees decides whether any of it worked. In this episode: - Why less than 20 picometers of difference across the lanthanide series makes separation the supply chain's hardest chemistry - How NEAREST cuts required separation stages by roughly 50 percent for the same throughput, and why each stage means pumps, controls, solvent inventory, footprint and capital - Why neutral ligands mean no pH control, no neutralizing base, and a recyclable aqueous phase - What the Critical Materials Innovation Hub is, and how companies can join it under an NDA - The real difference between a critical mineral and a critical material, and why germanium is only one of them - Why separation chemistry is not a degree anyone can graduate with, and the eight kinds of expert it takes instead Guests: Subhamay "Subho" Pramanik, R&D Associate Staff Scientist, Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Marcy Lamb, Radiochemist, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Rare Earth Exchanges is accelerating transparency in the rare earth and critical minerals supply chain. New episodes weekly. 🌐 https://rareearthexchanges.com 🎧 Also on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts Disclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.

America's entire strategic minerals stockpile is worth about $600 million. Ashley Zumwalt-Forbes ran the Department of Energy's multi-billion-dollar battery and critical-minerals grant program — and she says the real bottleneck isn't geology, it's price. Ashley Zumwalt-Forbes spent years as the DOE's Deputy Director for Batteries and Critical Materials, deciding which companies got a share of roughly $6 billion in grants and $10 billion in tax credits. She's since founded the family office Smoketree Resources and become COO of M Evo Global Acquisition Corp II (NASDAQ: MEVO), a critical-minerals SPAC, while publishing policy research as a Nonresident Fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute. In this conversation with Dustin Olsen and Daniel O'Connor, she breaks down why Chinese-controlled reference pricing makes it nearly impossible for Western critical-minerals projects to pencil out — and the market fix she's proposing to change that. In this episode: - How the DOE actually decided who got a share of $6B in critical-minerals grants and $10B in tax credits - Why China's "Molycorp playbook" can bankrupt Western competitors without China ever needing to turn a profit - Whether accounting rules could ever reward long-term supply-chain resilience over quarterly returns - Ashley's Baker Institute proposal for a bifurcated reference price — and why "buyer beware" applies to every mining investment - The unrelated Admiral Zumwalt story that turns out to be a pretty good Cold War parallel Guest: Ashley Zumwalt-Forbes, Nonresident Fellow, Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University (former U.S. Deputy Director for Batteries & Critical Materials, Department of Energy) Rare Earth Exchanges is accelerating transparency in the rare earth and critical minerals supply chain. New episodes weekly. 🌐 https://rareearthexchanges.com 🎧 Also on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts Disclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.

Rhodium fetches $9,500 to $12,000 an ounce, the highest price of any element on the periodic table. Taylor Ford says his Colorado claim assays at six to seven ounces of it per ton. Taylor Ford has spent nearly fifty years in exploration. He worked in Exxon's refineries, built and ran his own refinery in South Texas, and built one of the first horizontal drills. Thirty years ago a book about a platinum producer pulled him toward the mining side, and he has been testing rock ever since. He joins Dustin Olsen and Daniel O'Connor to talk about what he has found, why he believes the United States is two decades behind on critical minerals, and why the people most likely to find the next domestic deposit are the least likely to get funded. In this episode: • Why rhodium, not gold or platinum, is the metal he is chasing • The alumina find that appeared on his last test after nine years of testing • What prospecting actually costs: labs, a 150-element spectrum, thousands of dollars before you know anything • Why he says the industry is scared — administration versus administration, with no consistent minerals policy • Where he would start today if he were new: silver, uranium, aluminum Guest: Taylor Ford, Explorationist, Ark Energy Grades, assay results and production claims in this episode are the guest's own and have not been independently verified by Rare Earth Exchanges. Rare Earth Exchanges is accelerating transparency in the rare earth and critical minerals supply chain. New episodes weekly. 🌐 https://rareearthexchanges.com 🎧 Also on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts Disclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.

Rare Earths Americas CEO Don Swartz says there hasn't been a novel rare earth discovery in the US in about 40 years — and his company thinks it just found one, in the coastal sands of Georgia. Four months after taking Rare Earths Americas (NYSE American: REA) public in the first traditional-listing US rare earths IPO since 2010, Don Swartz joins Dustin and Daniel to walk through the Shiloh and Liberty Peak discoveries in Georgia, the Alpha ionic clay project in Brazil, and how the company is running eight drill rigs across two continents at once. In this episode: - How a decades-old uranium survey led to a possible new US rare earth district - Why heavy rare earths trade at roughly a 5x premium in Europe compared to China - Inside Rare Earths Americas' balance sheet and parallel Georgia/Brazil drill programs - Why the US graduates roughly 200 mining engineers a year versus 10,000+ in China - Don's advice for anyone considering a career in critical minerals Guest: Don Swartz, President & CEO, Rare Earths Americas, Inc. Rare Earth Exchanges is accelerating transparency in the rare earth and critical minerals supply chain. New episodes weekly. 🌐 https://rareearthexchanges.com 🎧 Also on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts Investor Deck: https://ir.rareearthsamericas.com/news-events/presentations Disclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.

Brian Busse has hand-dug what may be the largest single mine in 80 years of American history — and the biggest lesson from three decades underground has nothing to do with luck. Brian Busse is a 30-year veteran miner, jewelry designer, and star of the Weather Channel's reality series Prospectors. He owns the Thank You Lord Mine on Colorado's Mount Antero — one of the largest aquamarine deposits ever discovered — and runs American Gem Trackers. He joins hosts Dustin Olsen and Daniel O'Connor to talk about what three decades of hand-digging taught him about rare earth elements, gold, and gemstones, why American mining culture collapsed after World War II, and what it will take to bring natural-resource development back home. In this episode: - Why rare earth elements aren't actually rare — and what "saturation" really means for finding a mineable deposit - How the Weather Channel's Prospectors doubled the U.S. rock, mineral, and jewelry industries in four years - The beryllium test results behind Busse's Thank You Lord Mine on Mount Antero - Why America imports up to $100 million a year in aquamarine alone — and could mine 20% of it at home - What it's like to hand-dig at 12,000+ feet, raise a family on the mountain, and deal with claim jumpers Guest: Brian Busse, Miner, Jewelry Designer & Founder, American Gem Trackers Rare Earth Exchanges is accelerating transparency in the rare earth and critical minerals supply chain. New episodes weekly. 🌐 https://rareearthexchanges.com 🎧 Also on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts Disclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.

Brazilian Rare Earths (ASX: BRE) says its Monte Alto deposit just posted grades more than twice MP Materials' and almost three times Lynas's — making it one of the highest-grade rare earth deposits ever measured. Founder, Managing Director & CEO Bernardo da Veiga returns to the show (his first appearance was Episode 17, back in the exploration days) to walk through BRE's new scoping study: a deliberately split strategy that keeps mining simple and low-impact at Monte Alto while routing concentrate 200km to a downstream separation plant inside the Camaçari petrochemical complex, backed by a 10-year offtake and partnership with French rare earth separator Carester. In this episode: - Why Monte Alto's grade is nearly 3x Lynas's published grade — and what that means for cost - The geology: chevkinite, apatite-britholite, and billions of years of uranium radiation that did the leaching for them - Why processing happens 200km away at Camaçari, not at the mine site - The upside the scoping study didn't price in: ~1 million lbs/year of uranium byproduct - Concentrate sales targeted as early as 2030, full downstream by 2031 - Why Bernardo thinks business people — not geologists — should run mining companies Guest: Bernardo da Veiga, Founder, Managing Director & CEO, Brazilian Rare Earths Limited Rare Earth Exchanges is accelerating transparency in the rare earth and critical minerals supply chain. New episodes weekly. 🌐 https://rareearthexchanges.com 🎧 Also on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts Disclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.

Europe imports nickel from Indonesia, refines it, uses it - and then throws half of it into a landfill without it ever doing a single day of work. Marco Bersani's company gets paid to take that metal back out of the water. Marco Bersani is CEO and Co-Founder of Circular Materials, an Italian company recovering critical metals from industrial wastewater using SWaP (Supercritical Water Precipitation), a metal-agnostic process that precipitates better than 99.9% of dissolved metals into a fine powder. The European Commission named it a Strategic Project under the Critical Raw Materials Act. Hosts Dustin Olsen and Daniel O'Connor dig into the grade of the resource, why nobody else has gone after it, the dual-revenue model that makes metal prices almost irrelevant, and the plan to bring three or four sites to the United States. In this episode: - Why industrial wastewater carries 1-10% metal content (10,000-100,000 ppm) when miners dream of a fraction of a percent - How Circular Materials gets paid hundreds of euros to take 100 kg of dissolved nickel, instead of buying feedstock like every other recycler - Europe loses an estimated 12,000-15,000 tonnes of mixed critical metals a year this way, and the US market looks three to four times larger - Recovery rates today: roughly 70% for non-gold precious metals, and well below 5% for non-precious metals - Copper, nickel and chromium are the triad, plus a large position in the very small ruthenium market - Why the major wastewater engineering firms reclaim water but not metal, and why customers asked for this as a service rather than a licensed technology - What it actually took to earn EU Strategic Project status under the Critical Raw Materials Act Guest: Marco Bersani, CEO & Co-Founder, Circular Materials s.r.l. Rare Earth Exchanges is accelerating transparency in the rare earth and critical minerals supply chain. New episodes weekly. 🌐 https://rareearthexchanges.com 🎧 Also on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts Disclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.

In 1973, the oil embargo hit the West like a car crash — sudden, loud, impossible to miss. China's control of critical minerals is the opposite: it's cancer. It grew for thirty years, and most of the West only noticed once it started to hurt. Tomasz Nadrowski is a portfolio manager at Amvest Terraden, where he runs an equity strategy that starts with geopolitics, and the author of "Mineral War: China's Quest for Weapons of Mineral Destruction." He argues this is not a trade dispute and not a competition. It is a war in the strict Clausewitz sense: it became one the moment the West finally reacted. Dustin and Daniel dig into how the monopoly got built, why the West handed it over, and the one Chinese advantage he believes the West can actually beat. In this episode: - Why monopoly in commodities is normal — and weaponization is the line China crossed - The push factor nobody talks about: Western capital markets refused to fund the midstream for forty years, and the G7 flagged the risk back in 2003 - Lynas's Kuantan capex came in roughly a third higher for one reason — you can no longer buy Chinese equipment - Cost of capital is the one Chinese advantage the West can beat; cheap labor, cheap land, a managed currency and subsidies are not winnable - What a German carmaker's procurement chief told him in Frankfurt: "we will always buy from the cheapest source" - Why downstream OEMs out-lobby the mining industry, and how that already killed critical-minerals policy twice - It is not just magnets: inverters, capacitors, coating hardware, refining equipment, legacy chips, track-laying machines - The 14th Five-Year Plan's innovation centers, and why what gets invented in China now stays in China - DNA sequencing costs 500 to 1,000 dollars in the West; China subsidizes it to 50 - Externalizing the US tax code so American capital can fund Australian and Canadian projects, and harmonizing tariffs by HS code instead of blunt country-wide actions - Why China's decision to apply its restrictions worldwide, rather than only to the US, may have been its biggest strategic error Guest: Tomasz Nadrowski, CFA, Portfolio Manager, Amvest Terraden Rare Earth Exchanges is accelerating transparency in the rare earth and critical minerals supply chain. New episodes weekly. 🌐 https://rareearthexchanges.com 🎧 Also on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts Disclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.

For years the rule in rare earths was simple: nobody cracks allanite. American Rare Earths says it just did — at Halleck Creek, Wyoming, the largest known rare earth deposit in North America. Melissa Sanderson, director at American Rare Earths and co-chair of the Critical Minerals Institute, returns to Rare Earth Exchanges to catch Dustin Olsen and Daniel O'Connor up on a fast six months: a pilot plant with the Saskatchewan Research Council, a planned NASDAQ listing by year-end, a $456M EXIM Bank letter of interest, a $7.1M Wyoming state grant, and new heavy-rare-earth finds. Then the harder truth — the technical problems are largely solved, and the one risk that remains is capital. In this episode: Why hard-rock allanite was considered impossible — and what Wyoming's Red Mountain Pluton changedThe $456M EXIM letter of interest and the $7.1M Wyoming grant behind the push to productionWhy samarium and yttrium make Halleck Creek's deposit exceptionalWhy capital — not geology or permitting — is now the number-one riskThe hidden costs (insurance, supply cuts, China's November deadline) buyers still aren't countingGuest: Melissa Sanderson, Director, American Rare Earths; Co-Chair, Critical Minerals Institute Rare Earth Exchanges is accelerating transparency in the rare earth and critical minerals supply chain. New episodes weekly. 🌐 https://rareearthexchanges.com🎧 Also on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts Disclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.

Malaysia is sitting on an estimated 16.1 million tons of rare earths, but roughly 70% of it lies inside permanent forest reserves — and the country's own fragmented governance may keep it from capitalizing on the rest. Dr. Tricia Yeoh, Director of the Asian Institute for Policy and Engagement at the University of Nottingham Malaysia, joins Dustin Olsen and Daniel O'Connor to unpack her ISEAS paper, Ambition Without Alignment. She explains how land, licenses, and royalties sit with Malaysia's states while exports and security sit with the federal government — and why those two levels are increasingly pulling in different directions as foreign governments negotiate state by state. In this episode: Why an estimated 70% of Malaysia's rare earths sit inside protected forest reservesHow Malaysia's federal-state split divides control over land, royalties, and exportsThe three policy bottlenecks stalling the midstream and downstreamWhy the raw-rare-earth export ban both protects value and deters upstream explorersWhy the case for a dedicated national rare earth office keeps getting strongerWhy "pick the US or China" is the wrong question — and Malaysia's answer is "both" Guest: Dr. Tricia Yeoh, Director, Asian Institute for Policy and Engagement (AIPE), University of Nottingham Malaysia Rare Earth Exchanges is accelerating transparency in the rare earth and critical minerals supply chain. New episodes weekly. 🌐 https://rareearthexchanges.com🎧 Also on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts Disclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.