S1 E41: Defense Metals: Mark Tory on the Future of Rare Earth Mining

Dustin Olsen (00:40)
Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Rare Earth Exchanges podcast. You're joined by me, Dustin, my cohost Daniel, and we got a special guest yet again, Mark Tory who is the managing director over at Defense Metals. Mark, thanks for being on the show today. How are you?

Mark Tory (00:56)
Yeah, good thanks Dustin. It's really nice to be here.

Dustin Olsen (00:58)
Great. So you're out of Vancouver, Canada, right? And for the listeners who are unfamiliar with Defense Metals could you describe what the company does in a couple of sentences? And then after that, give us some of your background on how you got started with the company.

Mark Tory (01:13)
So Defence Metals has a light rare earth project being Neodymium and Praseodymium up near Prince George in British Columbia. They've been around for about five or six years. The deposit's been there for over 40 years. Been looked at and explored over 40 years. But it's really Defence that has brought it through a whole drilling phase into

into resources, reserves and a completed PFS that we did this year. My background, I've been in resources for well over 30 years. Worked in some large companies like Home State Gold and Anglo-American before going into the junior sector into gold before then joining Northern Minerals in ⁓ Western Australia and Rare Earths. So was there with them for 10 years.

So I've been in the rare earth industry for nearly 11 years now, which includes a lot of time going through China, having a look at the industry in China, as well as analysing many projects globally. So I got a tap on the shoulder late last year to see whether I was interested in the role as president and CEO of Defence. I had a look at the project, did my DD.

realised what a world class asset it was and I just wanted to be part of it and wanted to be here to try and bring it into production. So up my wife and dog moved from Perth in Western Australia and moved to Vancouver in January and here I am.

Dustin Olsen (02:36)
that that's quite the journey. Was there anything in particular that that drew you to this role with reverse Defense? What was appealing?

Mark Tory (02:44)
Absolutely. It's one of the things that anyone who's ever wanted to listen to me, whether it be government, ⁓ analysts, journalists, whoever it might be, I've always told them that when you're looking at rare earth companies, don't have a look at what the grade is in the ground, have a look at what it can concentrate up to in that first initial beneficiation process. If it can get above 30 % for lights, you're looking at a company that should be able to be economic.

The reason for that is that the higher the concentrate grade, the smaller the hydromet plant needs to be to get the same output. The hydromet is where the costs are in relation to capital and operating. So the smaller that can be, the more likely you are to be economic. So when I looked at Wachita and had a look at that and see that it goes from its 2.4 % in the ground to a 50 % concentrate grade, went, yep, this is again…

a world-class deposit and something I want to be part of.

Dustin Olsen (03:39)
awesome. And so really quick, we were chatting before we started the show, something that's unique about Defense Metals. And we'll kind of set you guys apart from some of other competitors. You want to talk about that really quick?

Mark Tory (03:49)
Yeah, so it is this whole issue around being able to go from 2.4 % in the ground to a 50 % concentrate grade. There's not a lot of projects globally that are able to do that. And what's that meant to us is we completed our PFS in February, had some good robust economics from that. We've obviously done a lot of drilling. We've done over 16,000 metres of drilling at site. And what that means

in the end is that we're able to have a reserve rather than just a resource in relation to the company and the project itself. That means that we're the only company in North America, a rare earth company in North America outside of MP Materials who's in operation to actually have a reserve. And that just demonstrates the economic ability to get

Daniel O'Connor (04:16)
you

Mark Tory (04:42)
those rare earths out of the ground.

Daniel O'Connor (04:44)
And I would just chime in for a second, Mark, that we have you in our proprietary algorithm. You're ⁓ ranked 12th worldwide. for the light heavy, light, it's pretty high. That's worldwide. I mean, that includes all the Chinese ones. So if you take away the Chinese ones, you're significantly higher. So.

Mark Tory (04:54)
That low.

Okay, yep.

Daniel O'Connor (05:04)
So with that in mind, what are we talking about here, Mark? Like what kind of volume, tonnage, what's in the ground there, up there? And how long, give us a sense of what that looks like once you're actually in production. And how far can this mind go?

Mark Tory (05:19)
Absolutely. So the PFS showed that we'd have a 15 year mine life. Excuse me. And the production that we're talking about is roughly 6 to 7 % of world production. So, you know, it's in the same ballpark of the linus and the MP materials of the world. So as you say, it's got the capability to be one of those leading rare earth companies in the Western world outside of China.

Daniel O'Connor (05:44)
Yes, that's our understanding. That's why you're ranked so high. obviously, it's there. It's high quality. Walk us through sort of the timeline to get from where we're at today to production. And what does that high level project plan look like just for viewers?

Mark Tory (06:04)
So we finished our PFS, we're in the middle of doing optimisation studies at the moment of the flow sheet to find areas that we can save on operating costs and capital costs and we're looking to finish that sort of by the end of the year, early next year and given the fact that we've gone out and done a recent capital raise which we announced last week which we'll be completing hopefully end of this week, next week.

We're looking to start our full feasibility study in the first quarter of next year. That's likely to be done by Hatch and SRK and that will probably take around 12 months to complete that. We're already doing a lot of our baseline studies around the environment. So we're hoping that the permitting timeline, which should probably be the one that will be the one that will hold us up if anything else does hold us up.

We're hoping there'll be somewhere between two and three years from the initial stages of when we put in our application, which will again be probably second quarter next year, for us to then be able to get into construction as soon as that permit's applied. So if you're a couple of years, we're talking 2028, 2029 construction, sort of 30, 31 for production.

Daniel O'Connor (07:15)
Right, right. And in terms of the permitting in Canada, are there differences between Australia and Canada? Can you sort of educate the audience about that, the permitting process and rare earth mining specifically?

Mark Tory (07:30)
Look, they're pretty similar. I had this discussion last week at a parliamentary committee that I was a witness at and I've got to ask the exact same question. They're very similar. They're not a lot different and you've got some national level, so federal level ⁓ interest in relation to the project and you've got provincial or state level interest.

In Australia and here, we'd prefer to see the states and the provinces do that whole environmental process because they've got the knowledge and they've got the ability to make sure they know who the stakeholders are and to make sure you get through the process as quick as possible. So that's where we're heading towards in relation to our project. Because of the size of it, it probably falls under federal. But in talking to the federal government, it's more likely to be

handballed back to the to province to do all the all the work in relation to the permitting process.

Daniel O'Connor (08:26)
Okay, so basically it sounds like you've got a couple years left before you can go into construction, thereabouts, a couple years. yeah, so Dustin, I want to Mark it your perspective. So we're in a crunch right now. is step away from Defense for a second and just talk about where we're at in terms of China, the US. I mean, right now there's a refinery bottleneck with China.

Mark Tory (08:33)
Yep. Yeah, at least.

Daniel O'Connor (08:51)
Can you talk about, mean, what's your take on where the West is? How can it accelerate sort of the bind it's in this moment? Because obviously in a few years, when you come online, it's gonna be a big thing, right? MP can only go so far, Eric, what's your take on that? Just out of curiosity, you've been in this business for ⁓ a while now.

Mark Tory (09:12)
I've, again, for anyone who's wanted to listen for 10 years, I've been saying this time is coming for a long, long time. China's done a great job in relation to getting the whole industry, and it's not just rare earths, it's a whole lot of the critical minerals, where they've attracted them to China, they've taken the technologies, they've advanced them.

⁓ They're doing all of the downstream processing and that's the big thing. It's the downstream processing, not just the mining and initial processing of the ore. It's the metal making, it's the magnet making, it's the automotive manufacturing. It's all of those things that they're doing and that's what the Western world needs to wake up and start building the whole downstream as well.

Daniel O'Connor (09:41)
Yeah. Right. Right.

Right.

Right, yes. Yeah, and we've been really pushing that hard, Mark, and it's difficult. It's hard for whatever reason to get it through to the mainstream media, especially down here in the United States. Mining has been outsourced for the most part for many years. And so now there's this reinvigorated interest, but there's a way to go. Dustin, do you want to ask a couple of questions? I have a few more I want to get into.

Dustin Olsen (10:17)
So just kind of talking about where things are at in the project status, what's the biggest hurdles you've had to overcome since you've taken on this role?

Mark Tory (10:28)
Yeah, hurdles of financing. know, trying to finance a junior rare earth company is obviously ⁓ not easy. You know, for defence, mean, and one of the other reasons that I moved over here was that we've got such a high quality board. And when you have a look at our board, you know, we've got Guy de Selye, you know, he's out of Belgium. He's highly connected with the EU and high levels of the EU, which gets us

into talking with the Germans and the French and the Italians who have got all these critical minerals funds. And yeah, no, it's a really high quality board. As I mentioned, you know, the thing that keeps me up at night is permitting. That's the number one thing here in Canada. It's the same in Australia. It's the number one thing in Australia. It's getting those permits in place. It's no different. And so, yeah.

We need those to move and you've got the federal government and you've got the provincial government both saying that they're trying to do the right thing by reducing those timelines and we've just got to help them do that.

Daniel O'Connor (11:27)
On that note, we are in a crisis right now in the West. The Chinese have shown that they will use rare earth elements as essentially economic weapons. Is there a sense that these permits could go faster? Are there things that governments could do to be more creative, to streamline even more? I think this is a big issue. I think we're dealing with that in the United States as well.

Mark Tory (11:51)
Look, it's a huge issue, but the problem is you've got to do things right at the same time. So you've got to make sure you're doing everything that you need to do in relation to studies and everything for the environment. You've got to make sure that you've got the support of the community and you're doing the right things by the communities. To me, they're your pillars of making sure that you do get your operation up and running. So, you know…

Daniel O'Connor (12:13)
Right. Yeah.

Mark Tory (12:16)
You do have to go down some path of time in relation to make sure those things are right and everyone's comfortable. The problem I have is a lot of things are done one after the other instead of potentially all being done concurrently.

Daniel O'Connor (12:27)
sequential versus in parallel.

Mark Tory (12:31)
Correct, correct. And that's what I'm trying to push. I was just in Victoria last week going to Ottawa in November. And, you know, they're the things that I'm pushing in relation to the permitting timeline and trying to make sure that we do this as quick as we can. Within the parameters of going, you know, community is very important and environment is extremely important.

Daniel O'Connor (12:46)
It

Of course, of course. is it, Mark, is it partially a project management discipline where, you know, there's a waterfall methodology, there's critical path, and then there is a parallel activity? Is part of this perhaps changing how the project management paradigm is, or am I simplifying that?

Mark Tory (13:08)
Yes.

Yes. It's exactly what we're pushing. It's internally our processes of what we're doing. So we're not waiting for the government to say, this is how we're going to improve things. We're actually putting together a pro forma timeframe for them to say, what if you did this, this, this, this, and this all together?

Daniel O'Connor (13:15)
Right.

Right, right, right,

right. So you have to sort of help them along in that process. Yes, yes. Now had another question, both ⁓ in Northern Minerals and now in Canada. Do you have a methodology that you bring to localization, to connecting with communities, connecting perhaps with indigenous populations, connecting with local employment? Do you have a?

Mark Tory (13:32)
We want to be proactive. Yeah, absolutely want to be proactive.

Daniel O'Connor (13:53)
an approach that you take or is it just sort of, it depends on the circumstances? I I just think that's a topic that people don't often talk about, but it's very important, as you mentioned.

Mark Tory (14:03)
it's extremely important and it's not really an approach. I guess it's just my DNA and where I come from and how important that I see these things is that I make them a priority. And it's not just saying things, it's actually doing things. It's not being in the media or being at conferences, et cetera, going, you know, this is what I do for communities.

You've got to go out there and do things. You've got to be willing to talk to everyone out there in the communities. And that's the beauty, again, of what we have here at Defence is we've got a really good relationship with our local community, the McLeod Lake Indian Band. And like I've met the Chief a number of times. You know, we took some Koreans up to site about two months ago. And one of the things after doing the site visit was

Daniel O'Connor (14:50)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Tory (14:54)
We came back to Prince George and I made sure that they met with the local MLA as well as the chief so that they could ask questions of them directly rather than just me, you know, be talking and saying we've got a great relationship with the government, we've got a great relationship with the community. Here you go, talk to them, ask them the questions. ⁓ You know, the chief is coming with me to Ottawa to meet the federal politicians. So to demonstrate the fact that they want this thing

Daniel O'Connor (14:58)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yes.

Mark Tory (15:20)
and this project push forward. So, you know, those things are very, very important.

Daniel O'Connor (15:25)
Yes, no, that's really great wisdom, Mark. Really, really very much so. Now, talk about business. When you're developing a rare earth element mind like you are now, and of course, don't reveal anything that you shouldn't, but are you talking business already, like off-take agreements? Are you doing that business development or are you waiting a little bit longer until things are a little closer, generally?

Just generally, you don't need to go into details.

Mark Tory (15:51)
Generally,

we've got, well, no, in the public domain, we've got an MOU with an offtake partner in relation to a significant portion of our PFS production. You know, we need to be talking to strategic partners and offtakers as early as now. I mean, you know, these discussions take time, ⁓ especially given the opaqueness of the market for Rare Earths.

Daniel O'Connor (16:07)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mark Tory (16:14)
You know, you've got to work out which partners are going to work with you the right way. ⁓ You know, and when I was at Northern Minerals, I ended up doing a deal with Aluka and did the majority of that before I left in relation to selling our concentrate down to them because we knew that there was no way that we should be building a full scale hydromet plant. We just needed it too big.

Daniel O'Connor (16:19)
Yeah.

Right, interesting.

Yeah, yeah.

Mark Tory (16:39)
And I must admit, I'll give you my Mark Tory version of the world in relation to hydromet plants, but they need to be large to be economically viable. So when I say large, they've got to be the size of at least your, know, your Lynases or your MP materials. You're not going to have a lot of small rare earth mining companies building hydromet plants. My view is there probably needs to be about six globally, know, a couple in North America, one in Europe is a

Daniel O'Connor (17:01)
Right.

Mark Tory (17:06)
you've obviously been built in Australia, got Malaysia. So there needs to be one more hydromet plant I think in North America that needs to be built and I think given the size of what we're talking about, ours would be the large hydromet plant but you know again talking with government, it's around well should we build that a little bit more so that we could get feed from some other rare earth companies that can come in and actually you know make sure that their rare earths are being processed.

Daniel O'Connor (17:34)
Right. Now, on that topic, again, rare earth exchanges, we're trying to bring transparency to this very opaque, not clear market. And so that's upstream, that's midstream, that's downstream. Midstream is where there's a major choke point bottleneck, as you know. Canada, I believe there's one or two initiatives for actual refining in Canada, correct? mean, can you maybe just…

high level educate the audience about refining in Canada and where it stands today.

Mark Tory (18:03)
There's still not a lot of refining that's happening in rare earths in the Western world. So the Saskatchewan Research Council obviously has been given a bit of money by the federal government and the provincial government to look at building sort of pilot plant scale, hydromet plants and separation plants in relation to rare earths. So that's part of it.

Daniel O'Connor (18:08)
Yeah, understood. Yeah. Yeah.

Mark Tory (18:30)
There's some interesting technologies out there in relation to separation of rare earths that a few companies are moving down.

not sure that any of them are at the stage of really being ready for full-scale production. But yeah, the traditional methodology of separation that's used in China, that's used sort of everywhere else at the moment, I call them a whole lot of washing machines, tanks all in a row that just have various…

various amounts of rare earths in all of the tanks and specific chemicals that are put into them to be able to drop out the rare earth elements as they go through. you know, it's a matter of having the right people, the right place to be able to do it.

Daniel O'Connor (19:12)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And that's a, it's an important point you bring up. And what a lot of folks don't truly understand is that there's very little refining outside of China.

the stage that you're in, it's a sizable project. What's the sort of standard size of FTEs and contractors for this stage?

Mark Tory (19:33)
Yeah, well for this stage, mean as I said, we're moving into a full-scale feasibility study. So we'd be mainly relying on external contractors to be doing the feasibility study. My view is I want to keep corporate costs as low as possible. So for me, like a company where we are, you know…

Daniel O'Connor (19:49)
Yes, of course.

Mark Tory (19:56)
no more than seven to ten at this particular time for FTEs. When we get to the stage of, know, finishing, getting to the end of a feasibility study, then we'll be looking to ramp up.

Daniel O'Connor (19:58)
Okay.

Yeah.

Makes sense and we have a lot of retail investors Mark that come to rare earth exchanges So a lot of people are still learning right? So, know, what are best practices standards, you know, these are all things that You know people like to hear about Dustin I Yes, of course, of course, course from your perspective the the more Careful you can manage it the cost structure

Mark Tory (20:25)
And everyone's different.

Daniel O'Connor (20:33)
get productivity the better for the shareholders. Dustin, do you have a couple more questions? I have a few more as well.

Dustin Olsen (20:39)
Yeah, so we talked kind of briefly about just ⁓ different relationships you have, how you work with, you know, the government and the community. But what's the approach to inside the business? How do you keep people interested, engaged, what's company culture look like? Because it's still quite a bit of runway before you guys are in production and things are really cranking.

Mark Tory (20:57)
No, absolutely. And

I guess before my time, know, Defence was brought into a group called the Discovery Group in Vancouver. So it's a group of mining companies that are all together, we're all on the same floor, we all use the same marketing team, you know, to look after.

know, websites and conferences and, you know, things like that. So as I said, you know, there's only two of us in the office full time. So when you're talking about culture, you know, I've got a CFO who swears he's Canadian, but he's got a very Australian accent because he's originally from Australia, but he's been in Vancouver for 20 years. So let's call it an Aussie culture.

Dustin Olsen (21:37)
There you go. There you go. That's great. So only two people full time in the office, but about how large is the company in terms of employees? Three, okay.

Mark Tory (21:45)
That's right.

Daniel O'Connor (21:47)
Yo!

Mark Tory (21:47)
Three

at the moment, one part time through a company. But we've obviously used a lot of consultants. through the PFS and that we used Hatch and SRK. We use a lot of consultants that are doing all of our baseline environmental work up on site for water and air quality and all.

sort of things that we're doing. So yeah, even though we're full-time staff, we use a lot of consultants.

Daniel O'Connor (22:13)
It's an interesting, I was just going to say Mark, it's an interesting ⁓ challenge because I mean, it's a very powerful investment thesis that you have, right? I mean, the value is there, you can see it, right? You can touch it. There's still this duration that you have to wait, right? And that's a, it's a certain type of investor, I imagine. You know, it's a little, in a way, more patient capital in a way, you know?

Dustin Olsen (22:13)
Fantastic.

Daniel O'Connor (22:38)
It's interesting because mining capital, mining investors, compared to maybe like drug development is much more compressed. Yet, if you really think about it, it requires a lot of patience. And just from an investor relations standpoint, that must be something that CEOs like you contemplate, talk about. It must be a lot of education. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Mark Tory (23:04)
Yeah, very much so.

You know, when you're at the exploration phase, you you get a lot of short-term investors that are coming in because they want to, you know, they're hoping for that short-term spike in your share price if you announce a good drill result or, you know, you announce your maiden resource or, you know, whatever else happens. So, yeah, when you get to the stage where we're at, which where we finished a PFS and we're about to go into feasibility study, you're right. And you hit the nail on the head. You know, you're really looking at attracting

longer term investors who understand the thematics around what you're doing and you're really getting investors coming in who are, you know,

banking on rare earths, what they're doing, they're investing in the rare earth industry and wanting to see the Western world, rare earth industry, get up and running and compete against China with their downstream processing of 90 plus percent of what they do over there. So you're right and we've seen it. We see that change when we go through the capital raises about who wants to invest and the type of investors we're getting.

and we are, we're getting these longer term investors that are coming in now that have belief in the rare earth industry and belief in the fact that the western world will solve the issues that we're seeing today.

Daniel O'Connor (24:23)
And that's very exciting, Mark. And I'm very happy that you're seeing that, because this is a major reason why we launched rare earth exchanges, was to help accelerate that. And, you know, a lot of things are happening. You know, I had another kind of nuanced question, Australia versus Canadian investors in mining and rare earths. Are there differences? Because take a step back. We did an article, Educating Americans, that if you want to get people that understand

mine financing. Don't go to New York. Go to London, go to Toronto, go to Vancouver, go to Perth, maybe Sydney. That's interesting, isn't it? Usually you think, go to New York City, right? what are their differences? You know, you're from Australia, you're over in Canada now. Are they similar to the finance culture, the investor culture?

Mark Tory (25:09)
Well, I can only tell you my history and what we found over in Australia when we were trying to raise money for Northern Minerals and we found it very difficult. was extremely, extremely difficult to try and find investors in Australia who wanted to do investment. So, at the end of day, the people that understood the industry were the Chinese, so when we needed money, we were…

we ended up having to get some Chinese investment. again, whether that was Chinese Australian, so a lot of people, when they look at the register, and the thing that always frustrated me when I was at Northern Minerals was everyone called us Chinese, but there was a lot of Australian Chinese that were in there, right? Because they had seen the rare earth industry, understand the rare earth industry, et cetera.

Daniel O'Connor (25:54)
Right, right, right.

Mark Tory (25:57)
Whereas here in Canada, it still has been difficult. We had a very difficult rise in April, May. But where the world's gone politically over the last four weeks or so, and following the announcement of the agreement between DOD or DOW with…

MP materials, it's just meant that we've progressed significantly since then and being able to attract more investors because of it.

Daniel O'Connor (26:27)
Well, and just…

It's a little bit surprising to me because northern in Australia, I mean, that's a rich, rare earth deposit, is it not?

Mark Tory (26:40)
Correct. Yep, DYTB.

Daniel O'Connor (26:43)
Yeah, I mean, that's interesting. So I think it's a very tough market. I think you have a very hard job. I think you're doing incredible. mean, it's so important for our future what you're doing right now. Are there ties into the American government right now that you can talk about? There's a lot of activity in Washington right now. We're told that there's hundreds of companies in and out of DC trying to position

what they're doing. Have you all had discussions with the US government?

Mark Tory (27:12)
Yes, so I mean we've had a submission into DOD for well over 12 months now in relation to an application for funding. Still live, still talking to them, still talking to them, Department of Commerce. One of our directors is based in Washington, Suzanne Fulsome, you know and that's her role down there is to make sure that you know we're talking to the right people and we're in the right levels.

So, yeah, that's the short answer. I'm not relying on US funding. I don't rely on any government funding. Obviously keep working towards it because I would love to grab it and I'd love to get it because A, it's money and then B, it has such a positive effect in relation to the market and you have the whole market looking at you going, you've got the US or Canada or whoever it is.

it might be showing support for your project.

Daniel O'Connor (28:04)
Absolutely, Dustin.

Dustin Olsen (28:06)
Yeah, so we're kind of coming to the end of our time here for the show, but just want to ask a question. If there are there any technologies that are emerging right now that gets you really excited about being in the rare earth space?

Mark Tory (28:18)
Robotics. I don't know if call that technology, but you know, was one of the things when, you know, we were at the Adamus conference recently and, you know, when you're talking about demand for permanent magnets and rare earths, know, robotics have really pushed out there towards EVs, whereas if you talked to me two or three years ago, I would have said it was just EVs.

Dustin Olsen (28:19)
Okay.

Mark Tory (28:42)
to where the demand was going to come from for the permanent magnets. So that's what really excites me. And what excites me as well is I actually can see for the first time in 11 years the Western world actually starting to wake up and realise what they need to do.

Because I was down in Washington in Trump's first administration saying exactly the same things as I'm saying today. But at least this time around, we're actually seeing things being done in relation to rare earths that need to be done, like the MP deal.

Dustin Olsen (29:14)
exciting. Yeah robotics is it's very fascinating. Do you do envision robotics being a part of Defense battles?

Mark Tory (29:22)
Look.

AI, robotics, mean, all of that you've got to have a look at in relation to all your processing. mean, when you think about the level of detail that you actually need in relation to separation and the ability to be able to ⁓ almost constantly review what you have in tanks, what amount of reagents to put in there. I mean, that's all the high level stuff. And if you use AI for it, it's all, you know,

with your robots, you're able to get it all done, why not? I mean, it takes out that human error.

Dustin Olsen (29:54)
That's And that also sounds very exciting. Just the potential that's there. So last question. With your tenured career in this space, is there any advice you would give young professionals who are looking to build their career in rare earths or critical minerals?

Mark Tory (30:08)
It would be just persevere. It's a difficult industry.

Daniel O'Connor (30:11)
haha

Mark Tory (30:15)
I've had people come to me since I took this job and said, why you got back into this? After 10 years of struggling at Northern Minerals, why go back into rare earths? the reality is it's because I love it. And it's because it's one of these industries that I see as a huge requirement in the rest of the world and want to be part of that.

I would just say to the young people, and it's the one thing we do need in the Western world and the Chinese have done very well that we haven't done is I want…

want some of these youngsters to go into chemical engineering. I want universities like in Canada, the US, Europe to be teaching these guys what they need to know about hydro-metallurgical plants, separation. There's going to be a lot of work to be done here because the Chinese are putting out 25,000 grads a year in relation to chemical engineering. We're getting very, very few. We actually need to build up that.

Kids, anyone out there, know, seriously, look at chemical engineering and get into looking at hydrometin separation. There'll be jobs for you and you'll be well paid.

Dustin Olsen (31:18)
There go. And that's great advice. We've heard that so much. We need the talent for sure. So, and then the technology will certainly follow.

Daniel O'Connor (31:19)
Amen.

Dustin, just want to say, Mark, think North America is lucky to have you. I think you did a wonderful job over at Northern Minerals and I think you're preparing this very ⁓ big valuable asset to be ready to help supply North America. So we're excited and blessed that you're here.

Mark Tory (31:45)
Well, thank you.

Dustin Olsen (31:46)
Absolutely. So with that, Mark, thank you so much for being on the show. And to those who are listening, if you like this episode, please give it a thumbs up so that it helps the algorithms expose the show just a little bit more to those who might also be interested in hearing this. And if you don't want to miss the future show, subscribe to wherever you listen to this podcast. Mark, we hope to have you get on the show in the future. And we would love to get an update on where things are at, definitely as we get closer to that 2031.

project completion there. So thanks again, Mark, and we'll talk to you soon.

Mark Tory (32:17)
Thanks, Dustin. Thanks, Daniel. Great to be here. Appreciate it.

Daniel O'Connor (32:20)
Thank you.