S1 E14 – This is not a China issue, this is a U.S. issue. (Guest: Pini Althaus)

In this episode of the Rare Earth Exchanges podcast, host Dustin Olsen interviews Pini Althaus, CEO of Cove Capital, discussing the critical minerals sector, the challenges of establishing a domestic supply chain in the U.S., and the global implications of tariffs and China’s dominance in the market. Althaus shares insights from his extensive experience in mining, the importance of ESG practices, and the need for a coordinated global approach to address the critical minerals crisis. The conversation highlights the urgency for governments and industries to collaborate in developing sustainable supply chains and reducing reliance on China.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Critical Minerals and Cove Capital
03:05 Pini Althaus’s Journey in the Mining Sector
06:01 The Challenges of Establishing a Domestic Supply Chain
09:00 Global Dependence on China for Critical Minerals
11:51 The Role of Government in Supporting Supply Chains
14:59 ESG Considerations in Mining and Processing
18:12 Future Vision and Strategic Partnerships
20:54 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

Dustin Olsen (00:00.965)
Hi everyone, welcome back to the Rare Earth Exchanges podcast. Today, it’s a special episode. We’ve got John Parkinson, who’s one of our co-founders here at Rare Earth Exchanges, and we’ve got a special guest, Penny Althaus, who is the CEO of Kof Capital. So we’re gonna interview him today. We got a lot of questions, a lot to discuss and unpack. So buckle up and let’s dive in. So I’m gonna kick it off. So Penny, I got some questions like, can you tell us what led you to…

Reversed the critical middle space, inspired you to found co-op?

Pini Althaus (00:35.887)
Yeah, so thanks for having me guys and glad you’re speaking about this very topical subject. So being originally from Australia, a lot of us from that country have a mining background or a familiarity with mining. I’ve been living in the US for a while now and have been in the sector for over 20 years. And my first foray into critical minerals was in 2018 when I was introduced to a very interesting polymetallic deposit in Texas, just outside of El Paso.

that has one of the largest resources of heavy rare earths in particular. It does have some of the light rare earths, but it does contain all the the full materials required for sintered magnets that go into our electric vehicles and other applications. And it’s got a lot of lithium as well. Importantly, it’s got the largest gallium resource in the US, so required for the manufacturing of chipsets and semiconductors. And to be quite honest with you, when I showing this project, I knew absolutely nothing about

about rare earths. So I reached out to some of my colleagues in Australia, some of them had a familiarity with what Linus was doing and they were able to guide us, give us some ideas of how to proceed. The challenge at the time also was that the rare earth prices were depressed, the lithium prices were depressed. When we went out to raise money for this project, which we acquired 80 % of from a US listed company, we couldn’t raise any funding pretty much in the US.

understanding of critical minerals. None of the institutions were investing at that stage so we had to look at Australia and other areas of the globe and eventually we were able to get the project up and running and in 2019 we put out a PEA which included the lithium for the first time on this particular project called Round Top and the company I founded is a company today that’s just gone public recently called USA Rare Earth and that company started to trade publicly in March.

And during the course of that time, we had many accomplishments. We opened up the first critical minerals processing pilot plant in the US in 2020. And I guess really importantly for where we are today, in 2020 we were very fortunate to acquire the only functional magnet manufacturing plant in the US, which was owned and operated by Hitachi. So we acquired that in 2020 and that’s just being now reestablished in a new facility in Stillwater Oakland.

Pini Althaus (03:05.457)
and the company has reported that it’s already started producing prototype magnets and they’re looking to enter into various offtake agreements with consumers. So I was the CEO of this company till 2022 and then I went into other parts of the critical mineral sector including doing some consulting work with the UN, doing some work with a number of other nations that were looking to establish their own critical mineral supply.

chains. And then in 2023, we became the first US company and we’re still the only US company actually to obtain critical minerals licences in Kazakhstan. And the thinking behind that was that we have to look outside the US. It’s going to take a very long time to establish a domestic supply chain. The permitting in the United States is horrible. If you’re an investor and developer, it’s among the longest lead times in the world, seven to 10 years on average. But I think

closer to 15 years and in some cases we know projects that have been looking for permitting closer to 20 years. So we were looking at where can we start to develop significant resources or deposits of various critical minerals not just rare earths but lithium, tantalum, niobium, cesium, rubidium, tin, beryllium etc. And Kazakhstan was an obvious choice for us given how resource rich the country is. Today we have 13 lines

We there, have tailings there that will go into production in next couple of years. We formed a 75-25 joint venture with a state-owned mining company to develop the largest rare-roof project in Kazakhstan called Akhbalak. And we’ve had significant support from the US government, from the administration. And recently we’ve also signed agreements with the government of Uzbekistan looking at developing some critical minerals projects there as well.

John Parkinson (05:03.053)
Yeah, wow. Sounds like you guys. When I look at companies that are investing, always look at, are you across the full value chain? And you guys seem to have a lot of that. One question that struck out at me, so you’re actually producing magnets right now.

Pini Althaus (05:20.889)
So USA Rear Earth has started producing prototype magnets to specification for its customers. And my understanding is that they are in discussions with various groups that will be looking to, I guess, enter into offtake agreements there.

John Parkinson (05:36.526)
Yeah, okay. That’s really interesting. And then one of the things that you alluded to there was that obviously Round Top is going to take a while till it’s actually producing and feeding your magnet factory. And I know you’ve been in discussions with Australian Strategic Materials, is that correct? For supply of NDPR oxide?

Pini Althaus (06:01.347)
That’s correct.

Yeah, so you’re quite right. My understanding is that Roundtop is scheduled to get into production probably sometime in 2027. So until then the company assigned an agreement with ASM to supply feedstock for Magnet. So it’s completely independent of any sort of Chinese parts of the supply chain. I can’t go into too much detail, I’m not part of the management team there today, but this is all sort of public information. So the company’s made significant progress and in

In at full capacity we’ll be able to manufacture up to 5,000 tonne of magnets a year, making it the largest magnet plant in the US by far. But still, when you look at supply and demand today and projected numbers between now and 2030 and beyond that, it’s really still not enough in terms of what the United States needs for magnets at least and for rare earth materials.

John Parkinson (06:58.093)
Yeah, and that’s the message we’re hearing everywhere, isn’t it? Like it’s always in the news. Trump is talking about it. Everyone’s talking about tariffs. Perhaps this is a great time to sort of talk about how you see the global stage at the moment and everything that’s going on there. Yeah, what do you think these tariffs are going to have an effect or the desired effect that Trump thinks?

in terms of creating supply of rare earths.

Pini Althaus (07:26.703)
You know.

Pini Althaus (07:30.831)
Yeah, you know, we’ve been talking about this a lot lately because of, let’s say, what people are perceiving as China’s retaliation for the tariffs. But if one looks historically at the Chinese, I would call it weaponization and control of the critical mineral supply chain, we’ve seen going back to 2010 with the now infamous incident of the fishing trawl in the South China Sea when China cut off exports to Japan for 40 days. And it was only due to the WTO that they resumed.

exporting these materials to Japan. But the writing has been on the wall for a long time now that China, or any country for that matter, certainly China controlling upwards of 85 % of all processed critical minerals leaves everybody vulnerable. So not just the US, the EU, Japan and Korea are extremely vulnerable not having any real domestic projects that can be developed there of these materials. So we’ve put ourselves in this situation. This is not a China issue, this is a US issue.

if we’re talking about this country here, where we’ve had our head in the sand for 30 years. China didn’t steal the IP around manufacturing magnets and processing critical minerals. They developed this by acquiring the geomagnet quench back in the 90s, which was a colossal mistake that the US made. The thought process at the time was, China’s a weak country, not very developed. Mining can be dirty, processing can be dirty. Let them do it there, and then we’ll buy these materials.

for cheap. And one only had to look at what the premier of China at the time, Deng Xiaoping, said in 1992 when he said the Middle East has oil and China has rare earths. So the Chinese have understood way before anyone else that these materials are going to be the backbone of advanced manufacturing, future manufacturing, etc. We’re all paying the price for this. Multiple administrations have not addressed this adequately in any meaningful way. And I think what we’re seeing now is necessity being

the mother of invention, is we have no choice, our backs are to the wall. We have to establish a supply chain independent of China. And what we’ve seen in executive orders from President Trump and we’ve seen critical minerals being almost a number one priority for the administration is various measures that are being taken to both spur on domestic supply chain and also looking at agreements and

Pini Althaus (10:00.401)
collaboration with other mineral rich countries like Australia, Canada and in particular Central Asia as well which has become a focus for the administration. We’ve seen reports of Secretary of State Rubio and other senior administration officials having calls with counterparts in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan because quite simply we don’t have enough here in the US and it’ll probably take at least 10 to 15 years to get a real supply chain up and running here and even then the question is will we still have a reliance on China?

at that point in time.

John Parkinson (10:32.555)
That’s the.

Dustin Olsen (10:32.815)
That’s an interesting point. So you made a comment of it’s not a China problem. It’s a U S problem. Would you say other countries also have the same problem we do? it seems like a lot of us are dependent on China. are we all struggling to find supply chain independent of China?

Pini Althaus (10:51.599)
I mean the EU, if you look at the numbers from the EU Commission on the anticipated shortfalls between now and 2030 and now and 2050, Europe doesn’t have that many identified deposits for many different critical minerals. You look at all the auto manufacturers in Europe, you look at the consumer electronics companies, advanced manufacturing companies, etc. They’ve got a problem in the EU. Japan is very reliant on China.

and China pretty much dictates to Japan what it can and can’t do in terms of looking at alternative options. So Japan is caught between a rock and a hard place because if it starts becoming too aggressive looking at other suppliers or other sources of critical minerals, that’s enough to upset China. So that threat hangs over Japan, said. And to a lesser extent, Korea, although the Koreans have been a little more aggressive in terms of looking at options outside of

of China. So we’re all in this situation. It’s a global problem. It’s not just a US problem. And there are many things that need to be fixed with this. So it’s not just, you know, exploration, development of projects. We have a problem that China controls the pricing for many of these materials. So the pricing is opaque. As Secretary of Interior Doug Berman was reported to have said today or yesterday to CNBC, you know, part of the issues are that we don’t have, you know, China can dump the material.

when they want, the prices into a freefall and then you’ve got projects in Australia, Canada and elsewhere that go on to care and maintenance because they’re no longer economically viable. And the way China can do this is everything is subsidised all the way from mine to magnet in the case of rare earths, mine to battery in the case of lithium and we can’t compete. So perhaps some sort of critical minerals global task force needs to be put into place comprising of countries that are both

developers of critical minerals and utilizers of critical minerals to start establishing transparent pricing and try to work around this sort of control not just on the raw materials but of the pricing mechanism that China completely controls today.

John Parkinson (13:07.959)
Yeah, it’s really interesting. If you go back in history to when China started in the mid 1980s, they started this plan to take over and build their rare earth and critical mineral deposits and processing. It’s much what the West has to do now. So they had a lot of state intervention. So China basically took control of a lot of its own resources and nationalized it.

Dustin Olsen (13:08.709)
Not agree more.

John Parkinson (13:36.298)
and then provided funding and all sorts of things. So it sounds like it’s something like the governments around the world will have to do now to actually try and build this supply, ex-China supply. And I guess my question is, Australia is doing a whole bunch of things now. So they’re providing debt equity into mines. They’re providing some tax offsets for production. And just yesterday they announced that they’ll actually start to buy some product and stockpile it.

What do think that the US government should do to try and support from mine to magnet, the whole supply chain? What are the things that you think this executive order that Trump’s just done where they have to report back in six months what they’re going to do? What do think that report should say?

Pini Althaus (14:25.763)
Yeah, good question. You know, the argument is…

made you know and often you hear this that you know for western government to subsidize everything is not the way to go things need to sort of stand and fall on their own merits that being said you know we’ve seen precedent during war time where US governors mine manganese in Arkansas and done other things I mean we are in a war right now and we say war it’s not about a trade war it’s about a manufacturing war and we don’t have to use the word war either I mean the fact of the matter is is that we’ve

become completely beholden to China. mean, if you think about this, US defense contractors have been getting their critical minerals from China. So you’re talking about an official enemy state, if you will, that’s supplying defense contractors in the United States with its materials. So how blind does one have to be to see this situation, understand that at some point in time, the chickens are going to come home to roost and either we’re going to do everything that China tells us to do because they control the critical mineral supply chain,

or they’re going to stop exporting product to the US. So we’ve got a real situation on our hands. I think it’s going to have to be a combination of some sort of public-private partnership. I think there are going to have to be various incentives, tax incentives, etc. It’s not going to be free for us as a government, if you will, to develop a critical mineral supply chain. I think we can be looking at different ideas, for example, what Canada has had for a long time with flow-through shares, so perhaps to get exploration going.

going here, nobody wants to invest in green fields today, which is another problem. So there’s no risk appetite for that. So, you you’ve got maybe three, four rare earth projects that’ll come online in the next 10 years in the U.S. And that’s an optimistic view of things. And then you’ve got maybe a handful of viable lithium projects in the U.S. So between, you know, the few projects that are out there in terms of lithium and rare earths, it’s certainly not going to be enough to supply what the United States needs. So we need

Pini Althaus (16:29.093)
As well to start identifying new concessions and perhaps that involves the US Geological Survey working with companies But there’s going to have to be extreme measures taken by the government by the administration Secretary of Interior Berman has spoken a little bit about this today what this might look like in terms of various insurances bonds etc But we don’t have a choice at this stage I mean we have to look at it the same way we looked at it during wartime when these raw materials were needed and

something has to be done and quickly.

John Parkinson (17:02.413)
Just a follow up question, I this report’s not gonna come out for six months. Do you think we can afford to wait six months?

Pini Althaus (17:04.281)
the

Pini Althaus (17:12.697)
You know, I can tell you the administration is working at a frenetic pace on this critical minerals issue. What’s, I guess, the upside, the silver lining about all this is five years ago, nobody knew what critical minerals were in this country. It was just limited to people that were involved in the sector. It’s become very topical today, first with the discussions about Ukraine and the US potentially entering into an agreement, and that’s put it into the national spotlight. We don’t have six months. I think six months.

is sort of the stated, let’s say, time frame for it. But I’m in communication with various officials in the administration and this has become an absolute priority. No one’s resting on their laurels. What we’re seeing now for the first time is more of a coordination from the top down. So in previous administrations, both Republican and Democrat, you’ve had the DLA within the Department of Defense controlling a lot of this for a while.

with very little involvement from other agencies and then when other agencies did get involved it was very much siloed. So there was not a lot of discussion, coordination, cooperation between the various agencies so it was a very fragmented approach which hasn’t worked and I think sort of seeing the president himself with senior administration officials start to let’s say take notice of this issue, start with having executive orders, I think we’re going to see a far more coordinated effort now.

on the part of an administration for the first time in this country.

Dustin Olsen (18:48.589)
I agree. think here in the United States, though, I think we’re still lacking a lot of things like industrial policy or even the lack of having someone who can like head up, like the process of mining and bringing that sort of business here, because, I think a lot of the different departments within the federal government kind of roadblock each other because they don’t have the same goals in mind. do you think

That’s coming down the pipe. you think we’re going to see that in six months?

Pini Althaus (19:21.881)
You know, I’ve seen a market change.

since President Trump’s inauguration in terms of, let’s say for example, Secretary of Commerce, like Secretary of State Rubio, Secretary of Interior, Berman, National Security Council, starting to work a lot more in concert with each other. I’ve been calling for some time now for a critical mineral czar, and not just so we have somebody with that title, but somebody out of the executive office, if you will, that actually has the mandate and the ability to be able to coordinate the efforts among the

various agencies. But again, I think with the President’s focus on this, with the National Security Council’s focus on this, I think we’re going to start seeing material outcomes for the first time. the administration does not have its head buried in the sand. It’s an absolute priority. know, if you look at our company, for example, Cove Capital and Kaz Resources, which is our operating company in Kazakhstan, there’s very quick turnaround in terms of our various discussions.

with the administration. There’s a lot of attention to this and this is not something I could say was happening three years ago or five years ago. But you know what’s really shocking in terms of how we got here was when I made my first visit to the Capitol to discuss critical minerals in 2019, think there were maybe four members of Congress that knew what a rare earth was, knew what lithium was, knew what a critical minerals were and that’s because they were on the Senate Energy Natural Resources Committee. So people like Senator Markowski, Senator Manchin,

who was there at the time. But other than that, we had to go on a complete education tour of Congress. And what was interesting was this is during the first Trump administration. When we’re talking to Republicans, the message that resonated was national security, manufacturing, onshore manufacturing, et cetera. When you talk to the Democrats, it was about renewables, electrical vehicles, et cetera. But it eventually achieved the same goal. And this is one of the only bipartisan issues in Washington.

Pini Althaus (21:24.593)
So we’re at a really crucial point in time. would say this is the precipice right now. We either do something and action is taken or we’re in a lot of trouble. And it may mean that we have to have a lot more collaboration with other countries to make up for some of the shortfall while we get a domestic supply chain going here. And perhaps sort of the, you know, what’s been happening with tariffs lately, critical minerals, I think is going to play a significant role in that. So I think

And again, I’m speculating here. I don’t have any insider information myself but I think what we’ll see is that countries that become more aligned with the United States in terms of becoming suppliers to the US or allowing US companies to develop projects in that companies will be perceived in a lot more favorable light than other countries. So I think that’s a bargaining chip right now for countries that have critical minerals, although we haven’t seen it translated yet, for example, in countries like Australia, etc. But I think there will be positive outcomes.

from this.

John Parkinson (22:26.143)
Interesting. Just going back to the 1990s when China was starting to take over the world in terms of developing its rare earth minerals and processing, nobody even knew how to spell ESG back then. So they built all their processes and as we know, it’s quite polluting out there and there’s some labor issues. So the ESG credentials aren’t very high. guess, Kof Capitol in York

your projects, is that something that you guys take seriously? What do you guys do about ESG?

Pini Althaus (23:04.803)
You know, ESG has become a dirty word, and it’s been something that’s been forced down our throats. I think if one is running a company responsibly, and especially a mining project responsibly, we have the bare minimums that we need to do in terms of good behavior practices environmentally. We’ve been working for 20 plus years in mining projects. We’ve never had to have somebody talk to us about ESG. If you’re an American company operating in a foreign country, you have responsibilities to operate.

in an environmentally responsible way and in a corporately responsible way in those countries as well. So these ESG mandates have done nothing in terms of moving the ball forward in terms of our operations. We do have a recycling site at Cove Capital as well. We have a company called Remag. Remag has developed perhaps the first real carbon-free process for recycling end-of-life magnets. No chemicals, no reagents.

establish a presence in Australia as well and we’re in the process of collaborating with some of the more well-known institutions on bringing this to the final commercial phase. So we’re involved in everything in terms of mining these materials, processing these materials. We can do metals and alloys, magnet manufacturing, recycling, etc. On the lithium side we don’t do batteries. There are bigger companies than us that do batteries with more proficiency but we can process these materials either

into a carbon, hydroxide or any other specifications that customers want and it goes beyond these two materials as well. are a number of critical minerals that we’re dealing with. you know, and the other thing is when you’re operating in another country, these countries are extremely sensitive to foreign companies coming in and operating there. And if it’s not to the benefit of the host country and to the locals as well, in terms of implementing social economic programs, whether or not the government asks you to do it or not, at the end of the day, if you want

support from the local government and you want support from the locals themselves, you have to make these projects a benefit to them as well. One of the things we’re doing in that line, besides having social economic programs, employing locals at site and at the processing plants and facilities in order for them to gain local knowledge is we’re not just going to be bringing raw materials back to the US and doing the processing here. We plan to establish vertically integrated supply chains in those countries and

Pini Althaus (25:34.353)
the materials being shipped into the US supply chain. And this helps the host country as well benefit a lot more economically and also in terms of their local expertise.

John Parkinson (25:48.333)
Yeah, that’s great. Sorry, Dustin, to you. Didn’t want to jump in front of you.

Dustin Olsen (25:50.225)
Thanks for that.

Dustin Olsen (25:56.411)
No, you’re good. Go ahead, John.

John Parkinson (25:59.224)
Okay, well, I guess, so just for the ESG, just wanted to dive down. So how do you then deal with, say Europe is, it might be one of your customers and they’re highly ESG sensitive and then you might have other customers that are very not sensitive to ESG requirements. Does that just mean you have to build, make everything up to that high ESG sort of level? Like you have to provide that sort of thing?

Pini Althaus (26:32.079)
Most definitely. mean, if you’ve got a US automotive manufacturer coming in and entering into an offtake agreement, you know, they want to make sure that your mines are operated in a clean way, your processing facilities are clean, not harming the environment. That being said, I mean, there is a significant level of hypocrisy with all of this, right? Because one of the arguments that I was making to the Democrats on the Hill is you want electric vehicles, you want renewables. Well,

have you actually gone to China and had a look at these processing facilities and mines and in the Mongolia as well and seen the absolute environmental disaster that they’ve caused, not just ruining the environment around them, but also making people sick around these projects. And China’s admitted that. And that also helps China keep their cost of mining and processing down because they don’t have to jump through all these soups. So there’s no question about it. If you’re a Western company and you’ve got to get an environmental impact assessment before

you know you get your expiration or your extraction permits I mean you can’t be doing things in an irresponsible way there’s no countries that we’re working in right now that would accept anything that’s below par in terms of the highest standards

Dustin Olsen (27:51.225)
Do you think that will continue to be one of the biggest hurdles that we all face in the broader discussion we’ve had with developing our own supply chains is cost? Like how are we going to compete if things are just going to cost more, there’s more hoops to jump through? Do we have time to even do all that?

Pini Althaus (28:10.777)
Yeah, so first of all we don’t have a choice, right? So China’s not exporting these materials. mean, think about this, the problem could be a lot bigger. For those of us that sort of travel outside the US, you go to pretty much any country today and you’ll see whether it’s a BYD or a Li or a Cherry or other Chinese made electric vehicles, which are extremely well made and yet cost a lot less than what an electric vehicle would cost

country. So I’ve seen, for example, in Kazakhstan, we have electric vehicles in our fleet there that might cost about $40,000 a year, but it would cost about $150,000 here. We’re talking about fully loaded, Range Rover-esque kind of four-wheel drives that if they were sold here on the market, they would be very expensive. the fact that we don’t have Chinese electric vehicles in this country,

that’s a requirement because it would put every automotive company out of business, not just Tesla, but everyone. So at the end of the day, there’s gonna be pain and there’s gonna be short term pain. But you you make a mistake in life, there’s a consequence to pay. we, and I say we, all of us in the West and in Asia as well, we’ve made the mistake of burying our head in the sand, kicking the can down the roads. And I can tell you as well, there were a number of executives from big US companies that when we were lobbying to have

of exports of critical minerals to China or imports of critical minerals to China here in the US, trying to wean the US off this dependence while we still had time, we had a number of companies that were lobbying against that because they were more interested in reporting earnings today and making their shareholders happy. They’re gonna pay a price. Everybody’s gonna pay a price for this. So if a car’s gonna cost a little bit more here because the magnets cost more, because the copper, the cobalt, the nickel, the graphite, the manganese, the battery,

cost more, well so be it. We don’t have a choice at this stage and it’s going to take us quite a while to establish a supply chain independent of China.

Dustin Olsen (30:22.437)
Yeah. So, okay. So one last question. And then a lot of people are pretty upset here in the United States with the, the tariff wars, the trade wars, all that sort of going on. You know, they feel like their way of life is being upset. You know, we already had, bouts of inflation, you know, just life costing more in general. What would, what would be the message you’d say to, you know, the, general citizen of the United States as we.

go through the short-term pain, what would you say to them? Just sit it out? Tough luck? Like, what’s the message there?

Pini Althaus (30:59.279)
Yeah, no, I wouldn’t use those kind of words, you know, when people are suffering from sort of high costs of living, et cetera. You know, and I’m not an economist. I can’t speak to the tariffs being a positive or a negative. What I can speak to is the fact that the tariffs are not the reason behind these export bans by China. As I’ve said, in 2022, export bans started with various materials. In 2023 as well, during the Biden administration, we’ve seen antimony, germanium, gallium being cut off from exports.

exports to the United States and elsewhere. We saw Tungsten cut off on January 2nd, so even before President Trump took office. So this is, you know, this last round of export bans of magnets and rare earths. I mean, this was inevitable, I think. And again, even if there wasn’t an export ban, what happens in a year from now? What happens in six months from now? Five years from now? Do we continue this dependence on

on a country like China, but I wouldn’t just look at it as China. mean, any country, right? You never know what the geopolitics are going to be between one country and another. If you’re a country like the US or you’re a block group like the EU, do you want to be beholden to any one country? So having 85 % plus of processed critical minerals coming out from one country, I mean, it’s completely ludicrous. So if people want someone to blame, let them blame all of their collective governments, Republicans, Democrats, everyone that’s been in office for 30 years.

across the globe and say you did absolutely nothing about this and no one’s done anything about this so the general population should be outraged by inaction by all of their governments and we’re to pay the price for it and that’s perhaps the best reason or argument to make why governments have to now kick in because they’ve been a big part of the problem.

Dustin Olsen (32:51.441)
Hey, we know well set and I would probably say that’s a great way to put everything into perspective, right? Yeah, go ahead.

John Parkinson (32:56.859)
can I just jump in quickly though, Dustin? Sorry, Dustin, I definitely have one more question. So as an investor, always looking forward and trying to understand what the vision of a business is and what the next sort of milestones that I should be looking out for. So for your business, what is your vision looking forward, say for the next five years and what’s the short-term things we should be keeping an eye out for?

Pini Althaus (33:23.375)
Yeah.

Yeah, you know, the majors and even the mid-tier companies, again, concerned with sort of the bottom line, putting projects on care and maintenance when the commodity prices dropped. A company like Cove Capital, we’re taking the other approach. The best time to start developing something is during the downturn, the best time to acquire projects. know, people that acquired gold projects when gold was 200 or 300, and then it went up to 2000, you know, before, you know, 2010, 2011. And the same thing now. I mean, you can’t buy quality projects.

when the commodities are trading at all time prices. So you have to find like-minded investors. You have to take the risk. At the end of the day, we know what the supply and demand looks like. And we know there’s going to be a shortfall. So even if lithium’s a little weak today, rare earth prices are weak today, it’s going to change. And you don’t want to start developing these when the commodity prices go up. Because again, China had that ability to dump materials on the market, send the prices back down again. So I think there has to be a concerted effort globally. And I think governments have to

get together where it’s a type of a G20 type of structure obviously without China but I’m saying you know there has to be a global block of countries as said before of both producers like Australia and Canada but also utilizes these materials like the US, the EU, Japan, Korea to get together because I think the most effective ways for everybody to join hands and a rising tide lifts all boats here I think a fragmented approach is going to be very difficult. The US does

have the ability if it moves quickly to develop a supply chain here over the next 10 to 15 years but also you know one of the things the US has been lacking and which is starting to change is that China has not only been mining its own projects within China within Mongolia within Myanmar I mean they’ve been going around the globe for 30 years they own a lot of projects or have offtake agreements in Africa and Latin America and the US has been nowhere to be seen in all of this activity and what

Pini Althaus (35:23.953)
we’re hearing from governments across the world is that they’re looking for diversification. It’s not an anti-China thing. They don’t want all their eggs in one basket either. They want diversification. feel that having Western companies, it’s from the US, the EU, Australia, will enhance their domestic sectors, will enhance their economies. So I think that we’ve got to start focusing on doing this sort of as a block and not everybody sort of running around by themselves. But in the interim,

The administration now is taking steps to, I guess, try to establish a supply chain.

Dustin Olsen (36:04.047)
Well said. And with that, are out of time. So, Peony, we appreciate so much your time, your thoughts and your expertise and sharing that with us and our audience here. And hopefully we’ll see you again here on the show. So.

Pini Althaus (36:17.997)
It’s been a pleasure and glad you guys are covering this topic.

Dustin Olsen (36:21.679)
Yes, we’re excited about it. There’s a lot going on. yeah, again, we appreciate you being here.

Pini Althaus (36:27.351)
Excellent.

Have a good one guys. See you, bye.