THE GEOPOLITICS OF RARE EARTHS 🇨🇳
They're in batteries, they're in satellites, they're in jet fighters, they're in tail fins, they're in missiles. Every phone has an element of rare Earth in it. They're incredibly, incredibly important bits of minerals. But the supply chain for them has become quite problematic effectively back in the 60s, 60s and 70s, every country, whether it be the US, whether it be Russia, whether it be China was digging their own rare out of the ground and refining them
Ryan Cartier
@Cartier · 1:56
Second question, with respect to MP materials, who has alleges based on their financial and earnings reports, they have enough cash that they've raised to set up processing facilities as part of their Phase two expansion and plans to go into production in their Phase three expansion, can you comment and verify that?
B it is highly energy intensive to the point where you would need to build out near Mountain Pass, almost dedicated power stations just to get it off the ground and see it creates excess thorium, which environmentally is a terrible thing. The US for years had problems just storing their nuclear waste, let alone thorium waste as well. And effectively, there was a facility built in Nevada to take care of this. But now the Nevada, the state government, Nevada has effectively said no
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15
Ryan Cartier
@Cartier · 1:34
The second question you definitely answered the third question on subsidizing. In that case, both countries would be losing money. You'd have the initial country that wanted to play a game that would incur their own loss
In fact, in the past piece I said that I don't think war is likely. Neither side really wants it. But when you write defense papers and when you plan for defense, you always go with a hope for the best. But plan for the worst scenario. And we need to plan for the worst. We never know when there will be President Tom Cotton in 2024, who might accidentally stumble us into war or something like that
Ryan Cartier
@Cartier · 2:52
So as far as I know currently, MP Materials is profitable, and they do ship the raw material to China. And I guess what I'm curious about when you're talking about subsidizing is it the heavy refinery that would need to be subsidized, because right now, as they're profitable and they're already sitting on the financing for phase two, they don't actually require subsidizing at this point, and it's only if the competitor were to drop the price below market value
China loves this position because frankly, the longer that people rely on China for refining of the heavy Earth, the more you know, the more time they have to keep this war up. This leave. So even the phase three stuff would still largely rely on China to green heavy US. Sorry, refine the heavy US. And that's because it would be such an expensive process to refine the heavy US on US soil. You need to build the power grids. You need to build the actual refineries