S1 E30 – Mark Jensen: The Future of Rare Earths: Independence from China

Highlights

• Mark Jensen has over 22 years of experience in the mining sector.
• American Resources focuses on producing rare earth elements domestically.
• The company utilizes innovative chromatography technology developed at Purdue University.
• Environmental sustainability is a key focus in their production processes.
• Scalability is achieved through modular production systems.
• The defense industry is a significant market for rare earth elements.
• American Resources aims to supply 100% of the defense industry's needs.
• The company is committed to competing on pricing with Chinese suppliers.
• Workforce development is crucial for the future of the industry.
• Mark Jensen believes in the importance of collaboration and partnerships.

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In this episode of the Rare Earth Exchanges podcast, Mark Jensen, CEO of American Resource Corp, shares his journey in the rare earth industry, discussing the innovative technologies his company employs, the challenges of competing with China, and the importance of building a strong workforce. He emphasizes the need for partnerships and collaboration to meet the growing demands of the defense industry and the potential for the U.S. to become independent in rare earth production.

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction to the Rare Earth Industry
• 03:10 Mark Jensen's Journey and Company Overview
• 05:41 Innovative Technology and Environmental Impact
• 08:30 Scalability and Production Capacity
• 11:12 Market Position and Competitive Edge
• 13:52 Defense Industry Demand and Supply Chain
• 16:25 Future of Rare Earths in the U.S.
• 18:57 Labor Force Challenges and Solutions
• 21:38 Building a Sustainable Market
• 24:15 Future Projections and Company Growth
• 26:47 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

Dustin Olsen (00:00.991)
Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Rare Earth Exchanges podcast. Today we're joined by Mark Jensen, who is the CEO of not only American Resource Corp, but also ReElement. We're super excited to have you here, Mark. And to kind of start the show off, we would love to hear some of your background and how you got into the industry, and then just maybe transition into what you're doing today. What gets you most excited about working in the rare earth industry?

Mark Jensen (00:30.624)
Awesome. Yeah, well Dustin, Daniel, thanks for having us on. Background from Indiana originally. Come from a huge family, a bunch of brothers in the military. Lived in New York, but started investing in the mining space about 22 years ago. So had been an entrepreneurial bug and started buying mining properties. So I've been in the commodity sector for over 22 years going head to head against China on all applications given if you're producing commodities, you're probably selling against them and or to them.

And so we, how we got to the rare space is a little bit unique. We didn't, we didn't try to, we actually bought a bunch of mines down in Kentucky, West Virginia region. And we're trying to clean up the environmental liability in that process. I could concentrate metals and what from the water and from the refuse material realized that I could bring something to a two to 12%. And I started calling around the industry saying, how, what do I do with this? Can I sell it to anybody? And the, everything, the feedback was you got to give it to China. I was like, no.

don't really want to do that, can't make any money just giving a bunch of material to China. So we spent four years doing DOE projects with CoreCM, working with different national labs, working with different universities, trying to find a technology to figure this out, how to actually produce something usable in our country. And it was a pretty amazing experience. mean, especially during the beginning of the COVID era, driving around, trying to meet with a bunch of people in parking lots and everything else and ended up

learning about chromatography through Penn State, but then realized they weren't the experts in it and found the world renowned expert at Purdue University, Dr. Linda Wang, and spent a number of years with her just understanding everything about the technology. And the only thing I care about, I'm a for-profit business, private business, I'm predominantly funded by management. We didn't want to lose our money, so what we cared about was cost. And realized that very quickly solvent extraction is really challenging to operate in the United States.

or really anywhere outside of China economically. And it wasn't very versatile. And the products that we had in our mix were very vast and different. We had Yttrium, we had a lot of other products that were challenging to make money at Insolvent. And chromatography is used at commercial scale in multiple applications. You need computing power to make it efficient, which we have today and we didn't have in the 60s, which is when they first started processing rare earths using chromatography. But it's been an amazing journey.

Mark Jensen (02:53.632)
I guess we were in rare earths before rare earths were cool. now it's quite relevant. have a phenomenal team we built out. We have two facilities in Indiana. We have a facility we're building. We've got a hundred million dollar commitment from Novare in Africa, in South Africa, to build our third facility over there. And it's been an amazing journey. What we're most excited about is the products we produce and where they go.

I mean, I have two brothers, one of them Marine Corps, one of them 101st Airborne. So we are, of my team comes from military or government. so servicing the defense industry is huge for us. And being able to produce these esoteric metals that most people don't know about like yttrium or samarium and some of these gandalinium that go into these defense applications and being able to do so at sub Chinese cost is super exciting to me. I want to win. That's where competitive would come from athletic backgrounds and

It's not about just producing a product, it's about winning from the competition from a cost structure perspective.

Daniel O'Connor (03:58.497)
It's very exciting, know, what you're doing, Mark, and very few people know this. Our understanding is that your company, the subsidiary, is actually, I think, the only refiner, maker of these materials for the military in the country, I think. I mean, can you kind of clarify that and the structure, you know, of the company?

Mark Jensen (04:24.628)
Yeah, absolutely. So, American Resources is the company I originally started in 2015. Re-element was originally owned by it. So we spun out of there last year to go private to our underlying shareholders because ultimately as a private company we can grow faster. American Resource still owns 19 % of it. American Resources also provides feedstock to Re-element from our own ore bodies and ore body relationships to be able to refine it. that's…

what we do at ReElement. We separate and purify a wide variety of materials. And yeah, Daniel, to your point, to our knowledge, we're the only player in the United States or really outside of China that can produce gallium, terbium, germanium, samarium, and gadolinium and yttrium at Chinese cost at high purity. So we're going to, a lot of these defense guys, need like five nines purity, a 99.999 % purity product.

And two years ago, we didn't know if we could do it. And so the easiest way was said, send us your material and we'll turn it back around to you. And if we meet spec, then we'll go to we'll go to contract. And it's been amazing. So we've done that now. And we're doing it today for those defense customers. We work with three very large defense contractors right now that we're supplying product to in conversations or two or three more. There's probably 50 more companies out there that don't even know who we are yet. But the phone's ringing off the hook because we need it. And it's been it's been awesome.

Daniel O'Connor (05:50.983)
Yeah, no, there's no question. Your company is poised to grow very fast. People need to understand that. Now, can you share a little bit about the technology from Purdue? Did you build this from scratch? Did you license it? How did this emerge? And what I understand is it's a sort of electrochemical process, if you could share a little bit about that.

Dustin Olsen (05:58.398)
you

Mark Jensen (06:15.102)
Yeah, so it's basically a modified version of hydromet. It's an aqueous-based process using columns that are densely packed with resins. So Dr. Wang, she's got 40 years of experience with this. She's developed it for Eli Lilly for the insulin industry, where they go to ultra-high purity insulin, used in the sugar industry to separate fructose glucose sugars, used in medical isotopes. So very low-margin, high-volume industries to very high-margin, low-volume industries.

But they started developing this technology 10 years ago for this industry. And we ended up partnering with them and licensing and investing in it. So we sponsored total probably about $8 million of the research at Purdue over the last five years. But most importantly, when we licensed it, over the last five years, we commercialized the technology and we've advanced it tremendously. We hired Dr. E. Ding from Purdue University who studied under Dr. Wayne for seven years at a postdoc.

Once he got his PhD, stayed there and worked with her. Brilliant individual. And then we've hired a number of other chemical engineers since then that also understand, we hired a gentleman that runs our facility, ran a $400 million zinc refinery before us. But instead of using solvent extraction, is emulsion of very toxic chemicals and a series of vats to create the surface area interface, we get surface area interface by using columns densely packed with resins. Why is our process more cost effective?

Because we use a lot less chemical and we use lot less labor and we don't use any energy really. We use just less consumables, which means that we're able to produce product very, very cost effective.

Daniel O'Connor (07:50.053)
And what about a couple other things, the environmental piece to that, are there any differences in the environmental footprint? One, and two, scalability. Like without going into details that are proprietary, can you share a little bit about confidence of scalability and why the confidence is there?

Dustin Olsen (07:51.166)
you

Mark Jensen (08:09.502)
Yeah, absolutely. when we, long story short, I told Jeff Peterson, our chief operating officer who came out of the nuclear Navy, said, go find me a facility. Let's build this six years ago. He found me a facility in the same building as a kid's gymnasium and a church. I said, we're producing rare earth elements, my friend. That probably is not going to work very well. And he said, trust me, it'll work. It's I2 status. That's all we need. And we did it. So environmentally, we are legitimately producing rare earth elements.

and critical minerals out of the same building sharing space with the church and a kids gymnasium. Got permitted in a month and we've had, work with IDEM. We actually got money from IDEM, which is Indiana Department of Environmental Management and a grant because of our process, which is a game changer. And we get permitted so quickly. Our Marion facility, we got permitted very quickly. Africa, we were having no issues there as well. So from an environmental perspective,

Daniel O'Connor (08:50.318)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mark Jensen (09:05.428)
There's really, there's no discharge of anything. We work with our water utilities and had no problems in that from day one. And I forget what your other question was, Daniel.

Daniel O'Connor (09:14.593)
So, scalability. So again, this is important because a lot of investors will ask about this. How are you confident that this approach is scalable? I mean, to exponential levels.

Mark Jensen (09:29.088)
100%. So we're working, we actually partner with companies as well. We're working a very large mine over in Australia right now that's, we designed a system for them for 4,500 metric tons of output. But chromatography is based on intrinsic parameters. If it works at small scale, it works at large scale. We actually get performance guarantees from our vendors who build our columns that guarantee the performance of our technology. But we've taken it, we've scaled it up.

Over 1,500 times from lab scale since we originally licensed the technology. Right now, in 7,000 square feet, we have the capability and will, by the end of the summer, be producing 200 metric tons a year of output of oxide, separated NDPR and DY, along with some of these defense elements like yttrium, gadolinium, terbium, and gallium.

Our second phase, our Marion facility, which is coming online by the end of this year, beginning of January of next year, is 2000 metric tons of rare earth oxides with a large component of that being on the heavy side. So it's, and we've already designed the systems, we've already used it at much larger scales. The unique thing about how we scale our business is we add additional columns. It's not building just this massive complex, it's modular and scalable. So you continually stack your production lines thereafter, which gives it

high optimal scalability at low cost. it's resins. mean, you're flowing things through resins. So you're not trying to mix that. So you're not trying to use bigger mixers or bigger settlers. You're just using bigger columns with more resin.

Daniel O'Connor (11:02.148)
Yeah, understood. And Mark, do you all have any patents or is it trade secret or is it patented to protect it? Like how do you take care of that aspect of your business?

Mark Jensen (11:12.928)
Yeah, is so I like I'm a cost hog. I hate having fixed overhead and having to spend money on anything other than production. So what's really cool about our partnership with Purdue is they protect our patents. So our patents, not only we protect them, but they protect them as well. And they have a heck of a legal team. And so yeah, we do we are patent protected. We also have a lot of trade secrets. And most importantly, we have data. We have a tremendous amount of data in our simulation software that gives us the ability

Daniel O'Connor (11:29.772)
Right. Yeah.

Mark Jensen (11:42.122)
to develop flow sheets really, really efficiently. Antimony, which comes from stebinite, which is a rock, we got asked by the Defense Logistics Agency if we could produce it. I said, I have no idea, but I'll go find stebinite and I'll do it. I got a stebinite sent to me from Africa from one of our partners on a Monday. Because we ran the simulations in a day, we produced antimony trisulfide at a 99.7 % purity by Friday because of that data. That data that…

Daniel O'Connor (12:06.903)
Wow. Wow.

Mark Jensen (12:09.962)
Chromatography is all run on intrinsic parameters. You need to run simulations. In the 60s, they used to put 100 people in a lab and just run simulations for countless days on end or years on end to try to develop that. Today, we put it into a computer program with machine learning, and it spits it out. Not perfectly, you've got to adjust it, but within days.

Daniel O'Connor (12:27.127)
Amazing. Just amazing. Now tell us a little bit about, just so we know a little bit more. you know, the parent company, you know, is publicly traded. And obviously, you're involved with, the parent company is involved with mining. Is that primarily it's mining upstream? Okay. So it's going out and it's doing deals around the world to get the material to bring into

Dustin Olsen (12:27.772)
Okay.

Mark Jensen (12:47.391)
Yeah.

Daniel O'Connor (12:56.966)
the actual refinery to produce the goods. The output that you all are making in the refinery, that's then fed to the magnets. Could you explain to a lot of folks who are still learning about all of this, how that works, and where you fit into that value chain?

Mark Jensen (13:17.056)
Yeah, absolutely. So American Resources was starting as a mining company. And that's where my background is. mean, 20 years of running mines myself, where you get the phone call at 2 in the morning because something breaks down at the mine and you got to go buy a part. And it's a fun industry to in. Whoever jumps into mining is a different breed. But we realized we had tremendous amount of value in our ore bodies there, even from the rare earth perspective, the ionic clays or the fire clays.

Daniel O'Connor (13:30.826)
the first

Mark Jensen (13:42.176)
we were sitting on already extracted material that had 550 parts per million of rare earths in them. A lot of those rare earths were like yttrium and stuff like that, which back eight years ago, 10 years ago, when we first started looking at it, didn't know there's a use for it. Today, at four nines purity yttrium, I can sell it to the defense industry all day, every day. Also lot of aluminum and silica, which back in eight years ago, semiconductor space wasn't growing. It wasn't that big of a market. Now it's huge and there's a huge demand for it. So we can sell that product at ultra high purity as well.

But I come from the mining industry. We don't partner with the mine unless I see it. I mean, I've been to Africa nine times. I have two members of my team that spent 14 years for the US government in Africa. And we like to feel and touch everything. We want to understand what we're partnering with, what we're doing. We partnered with a mine called Pensana in Angola. Phenomenal team. They got fully funded. Awesome. We're their off-take partner to help them refine that material. So what we do is we take in mined product.

Daniel O'Connor (14:30.529)
Yep, we're open.

Mark Jensen (14:41.532)
Or we take an end of life or scrap product on the recycled side and then we bring it into our facilities. We digest it down into a solution and then we take that solution and we feed it through our columns. And our columns are a series of columns, anywhere from eight columns upwards of 30 columns that runs through, as it runs through that process, it creates a separation protocols and we separate the lights from the heavies and then we separate the heavies from the other heavies.

And then it's depending on how complicated that feedstock is, is how many columns we use and how fast we run it. But that's what it gives us is we add additional columns for more complex mixtures or we use less columns for less complex mixtures. Like rare earth magnets, we recycle those all day every day. We've been doing that for five years where we can essentially do that in one column. Now we run continuous, so we run it in eight columns where you're constantly feeding columns.

And then we pull that material out in a high purity solution and we precipitate it out into a powder and then we size it for the customer based on the micron size that they need.

Daniel O'Connor (15:41.761)
So, I mean, it's safe to say, so if we look at heavy rare earth refinery, refining, you're the only company, I mean, MP announced some kind of prototype or something, but I think you're the only company in the United States doing this.

Mark Jensen (15:58.208)
We're definitely the only company in the United States doing it. MP, I think, just got some money from the government to try to develop the process. Linus just built their facility in Malaysia. They're separating the dysprosium and terbium, but they're not processing the SEG. Most people know our defense industry uses very little neodymium-based magnets. They actually use a tremendous amount of samarium cobalt, which is in the SEG. The SEG is samarium, europium, and gadolinium. Samarium and gadolinium are desperately needed by the defense industry. And so we separate all of the above.

Daniel O'Connor (16:04.246)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Daniel O'Connor (16:10.463)
Yeah.

Daniel O'Connor (16:14.613)
Yes. Yeah.

Mark Jensen (16:28.16)
And we're bringing in seg from overseas customers today to process their seg because very few people outside of China do that, if anybody.

Daniel O'Connor (16:36.001)
Now, if you look at on the defense side, probably, and you correct me if I'm wrong, but we read about 95 plus percent of the heavy rare earth magnets that the defense industry uses in the United States are coming from China and mostly from either Southern China or Myanmar or Laos. And so let me ask you this, your company,

Mark Jensen (16:58.676)
Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep.

Daniel O'Connor (17:06.368)
scaling up, being conservative, but also being ambitious, what percentage of the defense demand could you fulfill, do you think?

Mark Jensen (17:19.872)
So out of my Marion facility, legitimately, with proper funding, today I don't have all the funding to do it, but with proper funding, I can supply 100 % of the defense industry's needs on the heavy, rare side. They don't use that much, I mean, it's estimated around 200 metric tons. It's not that much material. What we do is we go out and find that feedstock. Now, we're building our own facilities, but we're also partnering with our partners. So our partner in Australia, our partner in South Africa,

Daniel O'Connor (17:35.902)
Right. Right.

Mark Jensen (17:49.536)
We're building these other facilities not only for our own purposes, but also for redundancy, right? And most importantly, I don't want to, there's not that many rare earth mines in the United States. mean, NP runs, NDPR. So what we have to do is we have to go overseas to find it. And if we want to go quickly and go really quickly, which we do, we need to go faster than we're going today. The world does. But what I don't want to do is sign a contract with a company overseas. And then all of a sudden China comes in with a bunch of handful of cash and bribes them and steals my feedstock.

Daniel O'Connor (18:00.672)
Yeah, I just just, right.

Mark Jensen (18:19.71)
So we go local and by going local and deploying our technology locally with our partners, they won't cut us off because our partners are making more money. And so that's a huge driver for us, but we can meet the defense needs out of our Marion facility. Now we also have awesome customers like Vulcan Elements who's building their magnet line. Great team, come out of the military, come from SpaceX and we partner with them. So that's defense and commercial applications.

But from a defense perspective, that's our goal is I want to I want to meet all these little unique Contracts these five metric ton type contracts that the defense industry needs at four nines five nines purity Very lucrative for us and and I could also get it to a sub Chinese cost, which is a huge deal for them

Daniel O'Connor (19:01.816)
I mean, it's huge. It's amazing that this is happening and that you're able to do this because it's just, again, it's not very well known. We're going to change that. let me ask you this. With understanding how China operates, and we've learned about how cutthroat this business is and how it's unfolded and how China has bolstered and grown a monopoly position, has the train left the station?

Mark, mean, in terms of, you know, the US is not going to go back. We're moving full forward towards resilience. And if that's the case, what do you predict in terms of like, when will we be able to truly say we're independent, we're not dependent on the Chinese anymore?

Mark Jensen (19:48.234)
Daniel Wernitwin. We live in America. We live in the greatest country on the planet. We do not finish second and we can't stand for that. We're not going back to China for alliance. I can build production lines in six months. If there's awareness, and part of like, I'm super thankful for you guys inviting me on because a lot of our customers don't even know who we are or our future customers don't know who we are yet.

But there's the opportunity. And I will say, like, and NUCOR and some of these other companies that are trying to build out capacity, it's awesome. We need it. We need more than one company doing it. And we're excited that they're getting funded. And we're excited that they're doing what they do. Now, from our perspective, we need to go fast. We need to go hard. we need to be able to compete. We can't compete based on just being domestic, though. That doesn't mean… The minute a company can go back to China to buy materials at a lower cost, they're going to do that.

Like everybody is. mean, that's why we shop at Walmart. Where do they get their products from? From China, because it's really cheap. So we have to focus on that resiliency, that cost structure that really matters so that we can stay domestic, so that we don't fall back into this trap again.

Daniel O'Connor (20:49.545)
That's right. Yeah.

Daniel O'Connor (20:56.862)
Absolutely. And this is what I want to ask you, and I want to be delicate about this because, know, MP is a big player. You know, they just got a $400 million deal, you know, with the Department of Defense. It's a big deal and a billion dollars of loans worth of Goldman Sachs. I mean, this is a lot of money. This is what I'm hearing. I'm hearing, you know, there's this little gem in Indiana that can do a lot of this stuff, you know, economically and

then there's this massive kind of buildup of capital to try to get something going. These are very different realities.

Mark Jensen (21:36.64)
Very much so. needed it. mean, listen, the MP is the visibility within the space, right? They lost their customer, they had no sales, they had a big overhead. I mean, they needed that money. Now, from our perspective, we need a lot less money to build out the same amount of capacity. But we also, we didn't go high flying. Not a lot of people knew who we were until the last year or so, because we funded it ourselves. We didn't go out to market and try to raise money. We bet on ourselves.

So management has over $17 million invested in our company. And I did that because I wanted to prove it. And more importantly, I wanted to own it. And I know what we can do now. And now we're going out there and we're unleashing the beast. So that's our goal today, is to build capacity as fast as we possibly can, displace the other players within the market, displace China within the market, and showcase a cost structure that dominates. And that's our focus.

Daniel O'Connor (22:30.813)
Now on that, this is an important question. What we've learned, there's no real market for these elements and minerals today because China really is the market because they're 90 % plus of it. So as you're building a market, you're a market maker, in fact. With all these partnerships you're doing, you're actually building a market. Is that something that…

the pricing that you're getting, is that all proprietary or is that something you can showcase as this is a ex-China pricing for these goods? Do you see what I mean or is it all proprietary?

Mark Jensen (23:11.068)
No, it's I actually go to most of my customers say I'll sell to you at Chinese prices. And they're like, well, those prices are manipulated. I'm like, well, you're claiming they're manipulated down. So you should be happy with that. I don't I'm not trying to out price people. I want to compete on their pricing. And if they want to manipulate them down, let's go. Let's go lower. Lower is good for the industry. Lower is good for the customers. We make a lot of money on our products at Chinese prices today. Now.

Daniel O'Connor (23:20.039)
Right.

Dustin Olsen (23:20.59)
Thanks.

Daniel O'Connor (23:28.059)
Right, Yeah, absolutely.

Mark Jensen (23:36.576)
We've been approached by blockchain. We've been approached by a lot of things that want to tokenize our output and set market based indexes. Super interesting. American Resources is potentially looking at it as the as the 19 % owner of Reelement, which then could truly set not only a price, but a price based on real output. That's interesting. That's interesting to me because it would actually just define what is it worth in the US? Everybody says it's worth four or five X. I mean, hell, $110 MREC, which is what the government's paying MP.

Daniel O'Connor (23:49.542)
Interesting.

Daniel O'Connor (23:56.028)
Yeah.

Mark Jensen (24:06.272)
That's I'm producing. I'm committing to all my recycling partners. So if somebody hands me a hard drive, for example, or a wind turbine, I will turn that back around to their magnet producer at 25 to $35 for separated purified oxides, which is about a 40 % discount to Chinese prices today. That's that's what we're committed to doing because I want to I want to compete. I want to help. I want them to drive down their cost. I want them to try to go lower. And at the end of the day, the minds need to learn to survive.

I run mining companies most of my life, all my business life. You always have to compete on cost. There's always ways to create better, safer environments for your workforce and also produce at lower cost.

Daniel O'Connor (24:48.937)
Well, the interesting thing, Mark, is that the Chinese companies are subsidized. The state is behind them, and the state has grown accustomed to using them as tools. So I think what you're talking about is a more reliable price point because there isn't an ideology, let's say a communist ideology, that's interfused with everything. It's just business, which is a big change that you're working on.

Mark Jensen (25:15.936)
Mm-hmm.

100 % and and now we'll say that mean we and we've applied for DOD DOD money DOE money I mean with a couple hundred million bucks we could build out most of the capacity for the defense industry It's not it's not billions of dollars. It's not that much money now That's probably where my highest cost structure comes from because I got to amortize my cost of capital out But if we got grants from the government if they want to subsidize capacity and production lines, I'm all for that I'm all for the money that gave the MP just don't put price floors. That's not good for the industry Let's let's let's compete

Let's compete and win. But yeah, we need to create a US-based index pricing, which is why I'm not a blockchain guy. I don't know much about crypto at all or any of stuff. But blockchain is interesting because it can create that market environment if we're tokenizing real production, actual production coming out of our lines. That's interesting.

Dustin Olsen (25:50.235)
you

Daniel O'Connor (26:07.099)
Do you think you could introduce us to those guys and talk to them just about right to write about what they're doing? Do you think? Yeah, I think that's something that's quite interesting. So right now, let's look at your company. right now, mean, the publicly traded one, what are the revenue? What can you share about the revenue and the size and only what you can share? Where are they at today? And what's your like next year? What's the projection?

Mark Jensen (26:13.054)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, for sure.

Mark Jensen (26:36.884)
Yeah, so American resources is actually just starting to mine its own ore bodies because we sold off our background of my business and probably why I didn't get a lot of money under the Obama or the Biden administration was I I ran coal companies. A lot of our our resources are in our refuse sites that have already been mined. So we're getting ready to fire those up. We're actually going to we have a pretty big announcement coming out here in the near future. Hopefully we'll be out by now. By the time there's the

Daniel O'Connor (26:50.99)
Okay.

Daniel O'Connor (26:56.325)
Got it.

Mark Jensen (27:06.292)
that we're extracting those resources. Now from Reelement, the 20 % owner of it, we have signed contracts today which have put us north of 300 million in revenue. On that we make about $140 million of cash flow. Very high profit, high margin business. Now some of this defense stuff can just continue to catapult that forward because it doesn't take a lot of money to build on capacity for what they need.

Daniel O'Connor (27:17.755)
Wow. Wow. Wow.

Daniel O'Connor (27:27.355)
So you're telling us that Reelement Technologies has enough business, it's not backlogged, it's not signed yet, but it could be signed for a few hundred million dollars.

Mark Jensen (27:39.412)
Yeah, we have a fair amount of that signed already actually. yeah, for next year. Going into next year and then for the next five years. I have one contract that I need to review in my inbox right now that three years out from now, next year it's about 80 million of additional revenue and scales to about 400 million of revenue. The latest MREC deal that the government just did, I got to figure out feedstock costs on that, but it's a very, very lucrative contract for us.

Daniel O'Connor (27:41.731)
Really?

Dustin Olsen (27:43.577)
you

Mark Jensen (28:07.289)
with a large company overseas, but they're looking at building here in the U.S., which is why they're signing this contract.

Daniel O'Connor (28:14.934)
And Reelement, is there any plan to take that public?

Mark Jensen (28:19.988)
Yeah, there is. Because we spun it out to our underlying investors. We're a private company, but we have a lot of investors. We have like 30,000 investors. Management owns roughly 35 % of it, which is we own 35 % of American resource too. yeah, we're working with Canter right now, our investment bank. We also work with Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. We will probably go public. We want to get to about that $500 million in revenue before we do. And just because ultimately our shareholders need that.

Daniel O'Connor (28:27.502)
Wow. Wow.

Daniel O'Connor (28:48.612)
Yeah, I understood. What a story. I this is amazing. It's amazing what you're pulling off. mean, this is sort of American ingenuity that you think about what we used to have.

Mark Jensen (29:02.816)
I mean, you can't do it without a team. You can't do it without collaboration too. We work with some amazing companies. I mean, like I said, Vulcan. We work with AML, another small magnet company, really cool company. We work with a lot of bigger companies, with Posco, our Korean partners. It's, but visibility, like what you guys are doing. I mean, you guys are adding to the supply chain. You guys are showcasing what companies are doing and it's awesome. We can't do it without you guys because people don't know who we are. Like some of the defense business we're doing, literally last week I was talking to a customer and they said,

I didn't know you guys existed until today. So we need what you guys do to also add value to this industry to make it efficient. And we can't do it alone. You need partners, you need to collaborate. Otherwise, it stalls out.

Dustin Olsen (29:40.666)
Okay.

Daniel O'Connor (29:44.633)
Well, we appreciate that. And what we're doing is we have upstream, midstream, downstream. So we have these rankings. And we're not yet at where you're at. What we're doing, we're finding now. So you're on our radar, and then there's magnet production. So we're going to have all these rankings that are dynamically updated. have software we're building. then we'll probably expand into other critical minerals. But the idea here is that we're sort of democratizing access to this data for investors.

so that they can make better decisions. So believe me, you're going to grow soon. can feel it. Dustin, any, I mean, we're coming up to near the time. Any questions that you have, Dustin, for Mark?

Dustin Olsen (30:18.382)
Okay.

Dustin Olsen (30:25.017)
You know, I don't have any burning questions. Dan, I think you did a great job with the questions you had. I think the statement that you said is Mark is a market maker with what he's doing. And I think that's awesome. And Mark, just hearing your comments about we need each other, we need partners to make this work. And we've been big proponents of globalization. We all need each other. The world's far too small to do it all on our own.

Daniel O'Connor (30:38.201)
Yeah, he is.

Dustin Olsen (30:54.713)
And you emphasize that perfectly with how you approach the business that you're doing. So I think that's awesome. Super exciting. So.

Mark Jensen (31:04.544)
Well, man, I appreciate it. One thing I would add is we need a strong workforce too. I mean, we're building in Marion, Indiana. We lost 6,000 people in the building that I'm occupying now. It used to be the largest tube TV manufacturer in the world. We're going to put about 800 people to work in there with our partners as well that are going come in and collaborate, creating a phenomenal workforce for that community, bringing it back. I mean, they lost all their jobs to Asia. We're going to bring them back home by bringing an industry back from Asia.

Dustin Olsen (31:09.741)
Yes.

Daniel O'Connor (31:29.241)
Well, let's talk about that for a second. You know, we did an article recently about the gaps across the supply chain for rare earth. And of course, it goes into critical mineral. What do you see as the biggest gap right now, the biggest hole in the labor force when it comes to the supply chain? What is the biggest problem that we need to solve in terms of developing talent, labor, you know, that can do these things?

Mark Jensen (31:54.164)
Yeah, mean, from our process, actually, this is a super cool story on the labor side. We have 10 individuals that work for us now in our Noblesville plant, which we're refining at. Our Marion plant, we got renovated that over a two year period. used to be an abandoned building. The 10 employees we hired to renovate that building are now running my Noblesville plant.

They killed it. They worked super hard and they proven that they want to work hard and we trained them from the ground. They have no chemical engineering experience. We trained them from the ground up. Now, I will say from the industry perspective, I've run mines for 20 years. The mining side is hard to find labor. You got to find people that are passionate, that want to work in tough conditions, that want to work hard. I I applaud the miners of our world and of our country because that is a hard job and you got to find a workforce that wants to do a hard job today.

Daniel O'Connor (32:25.666)
Wow. Wow.

Mark Jensen (32:48.384)
And I think President Trump's trying to bring that back. mean, he's put, for so many years, you got land-based if you were a miner. was like, got thrown under the water, maybe with bathwater. mean, was, and now he's promoting it, which people don't want to get back into, which is awesome, because that's a workforce we lost. And we lost a whole generation of that. So training those workers back up, working with the National Mining Association and these industries is a huge deal to get people back motivated to work and hard again.

Daniel O'Connor (33:00.897)
Yeah.

Daniel O'Connor (33:08.974)
Yeah.

Mark Jensen (33:16.838)
And I think our country is starting to see that. I think they're starting to see the urgency of fear of wartime scenarios and stuff to that extent that they need to start working hard again. And I think we're starting to, I think we're gonna get it.

Dustin Olsen (33:26.867)
Okay.

Daniel O'Connor (33:28.492)
Yeah, I do too. just think it's the labor problem is something that is significant and it shouldn't be glossed over. We're advocates of industrial policy in the sense that there are things that government, local government, state government, industry, partnerships, nonprofits, universities, like what you've been doing. It's a great example of what you've been doing with Purdue.

Mark Jensen (33:55.52)
In trade schools, like Ivy Tech. Ronald Morell, the mayor of Marion, awesome guy, become very good friends with them since we actually bought, we moved to Marion before he got elected. But he just announced that as kids graduate high school, if they don't want to go to college, that the city of Marion will fund them to go to Ivy Tech, which is a game changer to go to a trade school.

Dustin Olsen (33:56.185)
you

Daniel O'Connor (33:57.802)
Yes, yes.

Daniel O'Connor (34:18.636)
Yeah, yeah.

Mark Jensen (34:19.806)
Because trade schools put people back into production. mean, back in the day, was like, if you graduated high school, you had to go to college. If you didn't go to college, people, they like, we tried to look down upon them. And nowadays, we're starting to promote trade schools again, which is what people want to do. Like, we don't need to go to a four year college to go do the trade work, which they want to do in the first place. And so I'm super, we've got an awesome partnership with Ivy Tech as well. And now with what Ronald Morell, Mayor Morell is doing, it's awesome. Now, I mean, we're going to get flooded with workforce there in the next few years, because they're going to be trained up.

Daniel O'Connor (34:37.685)
Yeah, yes.

Daniel O'Connor (34:49.175)
Well, Mark, think another, would be great to do, and maybe even go over and like do a show over there where we meet with a few people and show how you built up this capability over the last three, four five years. I think it's really important that people can see it's happening. Yeah, that would be great. So Dustin, think Mark, any last statements that you would have for the…

Mark Jensen (35:07.008)
Let's go, let's do that, that'd be amazing.

Daniel O'Connor (35:16.833)
the audience and again we'll write this up. A lot of people will get to see this and any last minute thoughts about messages you want out there.

Mark Jensen (35:27.508)
Yeah, mean, my goal and the goal of my team is for American Resources Corp and ReElement to make rare earths no longer rare and critical minerals no longer critical. The only way we do that is we produce a lot of them so that at the end of the day, they're not a talking point. Now, that's going to take a few years to do, but we can do it as a nation. We do not need to succumb to that China is going to dominate pricing or China is going to manipulate the market. We just need to win. And the only way you win is you do something.

You just put two feet in front of the other and just keep walking and keep moving forward and keep working together with the industry such as yourself to help bring awareness to what we got to do and how we got to do it. So we're excited about it. We're pumped to win. We're pumped to compete. And let's get after it.

Daniel O'Connor (36:12.246)
100%, 100%. That's awesome, Mark. Dustin, any last-minute thoughts?

Dustin Olsen (36:15.992)
Yeah, yeah, no, I think well said and I know to anyone who's listening if you liked what you heard in this episode give us a thumbs up if you don't want to miss a future episode, please subscribe to the channel that you're listening on and We're gonna keep you informed

We're going to have more great episodes and Mark hopefully we'll have you back on the show in the future like Daniel was suggesting and just get an update on where you're at, the growth you're seeing and how you really see the country changing and embracing the need for mining and refining domestically. So thanks for coming.

Mark Jensen (36:53.344)
Well, thank you guys so much. Can't thank you enough. It means a lot that you invited us on. They helped bring exposure to what we can do so we can get more customers and we can build more capacity.

Dustin Olsen (37:02.273)
Absolutely. Well, great. Thanks again, you guys, and we'll see you in the next episode.