Highlights From The Video:
Mark Smith, NioCorp CEO and Executive Chairman: “We’re working really hard on one area in particular, which is the rare earth extraction and recovery. We hope to have some information out on that in the very near future. But this is exciting for the United States. We haven’t produced rare earth oxides in the United States for years. And I don’t know if we’ll be the first, that’s not really the important point. The point of the matter is that we are going to be making magnetic rare earth oxides in the United States. And that that is something that this country needs, the EV world is going to need, the major automobile manufacturers of the world are going to need. And that’s why we’re having so many meetings with potential offtake partners. This is critical to the United States.”
Scott Honan, NioCorp Chief Operating Officer: “I think certainly all of us at NioCorp would hope that the progress on the plant would have gone a little bit faster. But we have to keep in mind what the objective is here. We want a high-quality product from our demonstration plant work. And, at the same time, there are some things, some aspirational goals that I’ve given the team, that we really want to make sure we do a good job, because there are some pretty good economic benefits that come with them. As an example, when we look at our optimized flow sheet, there’s the potential for success to increase the recovery of niobium, and to increase the recovery of titanium over and above what we have in our existing flow sheet. We need to establish what we can do in terms of rare earth recovery and the purity of the products that we want to make. And certainly, there’s enough economics there to really make us take a hard look at this and make sure we’re doing a very good job at it before we say we’re it’s all over and done with.”
Rick Sixberry, NioCorp’s Director of Process Development and a veteran of more than 40 years in the rare earth separation and purification industry: “Even back in the Mountain Pass (rare earth mine and processing facility) days, we tried so hard to get people to understand why rare earth was so important to have mined and processed in this country. And they’d get it for a little while and it would die off and it would come back and they’d get it again. I think with EVs and the direction that the world is trying to head right now, I think maybe they get it now. And niobium is the same thing — for strengthening steel, for our infrastructure that we’re looking at doing a big revamp on, infrastructure in those countries is many years old. There’s a lot of bridges out there that are right now they’re looking at them because they need to be replaced. That’s niobium steel, right? Titanium, same thing. It’s been going up and down. You get supplies from Russia, it affects everything, China affects everything. These materials need to be mined in this country and processed in this country. We need to quit relying on other countries for it. We’re finding out that’s not such a good idea.”
