The conversation about America's rare earth ambitions usually centers on ore, mines, and processing capacity. But Professor Aaron Noble, department head of Mining & Minerals Engineering at Virginia Tech, argues the real ceiling is people. In this episode, Aaron joins Dustin and Daniel to explain why talent is the most overlooked link in the critical minerals supply chain, why tiny markets stall investment, and how a $10M Department of Energy project is mapping Appalachia's critical mineral endowment.
The Cake Analogy: Why Rare Earths Are the Spices of the Materials Economy
Aaron's memorable framing casts society's material needs as a cake. The bulk — the flour, eggs, and milk — is the aluminum, iron ore, and crushed stone that forms the mass of the built world. The rare earths are the cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt: tiny in volume, but responsible for the flavor and the modern conveniences. You don't appreciate them until they're missing.
The Second Layer Nobody Talks About
- Tiny markets, tiny investment: Plot every mined commodity by tonnage times price and the rare earths sit far down the curve. The global samarium market is roughly $10 million — small enough that one person could buy the entire annual supply.
- A negative feedback loop: If you have an R&D dollar or a student to educate, the rational pull is toward the $500 billion base-metals market, not the $10 million rare earth one. That structural bias is why advancement in the sector is so hard.
How the Idea of "Criticality" Took Hold
Aaron traces the modern concept of mineral criticality to the aftermath of the 2010 rare earth crisis. A 2012–2013 Department of Energy critical minerals strategy report was among the first to formally weigh supply risk against importance to energy technology — combining the odds of disruption with the demand pull to produce a criticality score. Minerals had always been essential; what changed was the discipline of measuring which ones are genuinely at risk.
Is Young Talent Coming Back to Mining?
For a decade, enrollment in non-computing engineering disciplines fell by roughly 15,000 students a year nationwide while computer science climbed. Aaron sees early signs of a reversal driven by the AI boom: computer science applications have dropped sharply, and growth is returning to the vocational disciplines — mining, metallurgy, mechanical, and civil engineering.
The Reverse Cycle
- Vocational disciplines peaked first: Mining hit its enrollment peak around 2014, ahead of the broader engineering decline. Now the trend appears to be running backward.
- Too early to call sustainable: The channel is on a dynamic part of the curve. The signals are positive, but whether the shift holds is an open question.
Inside the $10M DOE "Expand Appalachia" Project
Aaron co-leads Expand Appalachia, funded through the Department of Energy's CORE-CM program (Carbon Ore, Rare Earth, and Critical Minerals). The three-year project maps the critical mineral potential of the greater Appalachian region — from Tennessee to Maine — across both conventional resources and unconventional ones like mine tailings, acid mine drainage, and fly ash.
A Rubric-Driven, High-Throughput Approach
- Screening at scale: The team scores targets on economic potential and social suitability, then uses high-throughput tools — including drone-mounted sensors — to flag likely mineralization before committing to detailed sampling.
- Investing in people: A large share of the funding supports graduate and undergraduate researchers. Aaron runs an intentionally interdisciplinary group, recruiting chemists, geologists, and mechanical engineers alongside mining specialists.
The Talent Gap: 200 vs. 10,000
The United States graduates roughly 200 mining and minerals engineers a year across the entire country. China graduates well over 10,000 — and trains specialists in rare earth mining and processing, where the U.S. trains generalists. Aaron frames talent, not ore, as the most critical and most overlooked link in the enabling system, alongside resources, technology, and coordination.
Why the Gap Compounds
- Friction at every layer: Without trained people, every stage — designing mines, running plants, permitting, innovating — adds friction, and that friction compounds over a 30-year horizon.
- Fewer than 10 experts: Aaron estimates fewer than 10 people in the country could design a heavy rare earth separation plant and do it well.
Two Different Challenges — and Why We Confuse Them
Aaron makes a distinction that reframes the whole debate: the acute challenge (producing what industry needs over the next few years, where supply security matters and capital cost barely does) is not the same as the enabling challenge (building a system that sustains production over decades, where cost is everything). Strategies that try to solve both at once often serve neither well.
The Aclara Partnership and the Chicken-and-Egg Problem
Virginia Tech hosts an Aclara Resources demonstration plant on campus — configured and instrumented like an industrial facility. Aaron sees it as fundamentally an investment in people: you can't train the practitioners who know how separation works at scale without a facility, and you can't design the facility without those practitioners. The demonstration plant helps break that negative feedback loop by giving students hands-on experience in the critical mineral space.
Key Takeaways
- Rare earths are the "spices" of the materials economy — small in volume, essential in function.
- Talent, not ore, may be the real ceiling on America's rare earth ambitions.
- The U.S. graduates ~200 mining engineers a year; China graduates over 10,000.
- Hands-on facilities like the Aclara demonstration plant are how you build the workforce a supply chain requires.
FAQs
Why does Aaron Noble compare rare earths to cinnamon and nutmeg?
He uses a cake analogy: base materials like aluminum and iron ore are the flour and eggs, while rare earths are the spices — small in volume but responsible for the performance and modern conveniences that make the whole system work.
How many mining engineers does the U.S. graduate compared to China?
The United States graduates roughly 200 mining and minerals engineers a year nationwide. China graduates well over 10,000, and trains specialists in rare earth mining and processing rather than generalists.
What is the DOE "Expand Appalachia" project?
Expand Appalachia is a three-year, $10M project funded through the Department of Energy's CORE-CM program that maps the critical mineral potential of the greater Appalachian region, including unconventional sources like mine tailings, acid mine drainage, and fly ash.
Transcript
Expand to see full transcript...
Dustin Olsen (00:41) Hey everyone, welcome back to the Rare Earth Exchanges Podcast. We're excited you're here. I'm your host Dustin, joined by my co-host Daniel. And today's guest is Aaron Noble, who is a professor and department head of mining and minerals engineering at Virginia Tech. Aaron, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Aaron Noble (01:01) Doing great, guys. Really glad to be on the show. I've been following your work for a couple years now, and it's an absolute honor to be on here. So looking forward to the conversation today.
Dustin Olsen (01:10) Yeah, we are thrilled to get your perspective. We were introduced to you through somebody else we had on the show, and so we're excited. To kind of start us off, Aaron, you've described rare earth elements — you've likened them to cinnamon and nutmeg as ingredients in a really nice cake, but ones you don't really appreciate until they're missing. It's almost like salt, too. If you don't have salt in your food, you don't appreciate it until it's not there. I like that comparison — how embedded these simple things are in a normal thing in life, and you don't realize they're gone until they are. Can you explain a bit more and help people understand the importance of rare earths?
Aaron Noble (02:01) That's a great question, Dustin. And fundamentally at heart, I am a teacher, right? As a professor, I like to think I'm a teacher. And one of the principles in teaching is that if you can take a concept and make it memorable, that's how you build robust knowledge in the people you're teaching. In this rare earth landscape, I feel a need to teach the public — there's a lot that people don't know, a lot of ambiguity. So anytime we get an opportunity to break this down in a way that's understandable, memorable, and relevant, I like to do that. Through the years I came up with this cake analogy. I initially heard it from another professor at another university, so I can't take credit for the original idea, but I do think one of the talks I gave certainly had the best artistic depiction — they actually had a nice cake up on the screen while I was talking, which was fun to watch. And I'll also say I personally don't like desserts. It's odd — I use that analogy, but I'm not a fan of desserts.
Aaron Noble (03:07) But if you take our material needs in society and the way that analogy works out, you imagine our material needs and our mine resource needs as a cake. The bulk of the cake is not the spices — it's the flour, the eggs, the milk. I like to think of that as the aluminum, the iron ore, the crushed stone. The fundamental building blocks of society, the big mass of material — that's your flour and your eggs. It's aluminum, crushed stone, your base metals. But if you had a cake that was only flour and eggs, it wouldn't taste very good; it wouldn't be a very good cake. In the same way, if we had a society that was just iron ore and crushed stone, we'd be living in the Middle Ages, and it wouldn't be a very interesting society. So the rares are the spices in the cake. They're the nutmeg, the cinnamon, the salt — not very high in volume, but the things that bring out all the flavor and all the modern conveniences we have. The cool thing is that analogy sits at surface level, and I think people can appreciate it. We've all eaten a cake, and probably a good cake, so we can resonate with that.
But there's also some subtlety. There's another layer that I actually think reveals the fundamental challenge of enabling rare earth production in this country. Picture a plot in your head. Take all the mine commodities, and look at how much is produced on one axis — tons of production globally — and then how much it's worth, what it sells for. Multiply those together and you get almost a market cap: how much is this commodity worth globally? If you look at your flour and eggs — your really big commodities: iron, aluminum, copper, gold — these are the biggest in terms of market share. These are hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap. The global iron ore industry produces billions of tons a year at $100 a ton, so that's hundreds of billions of dollars. Interestingly, gold's almost the same market cap, except it's on the other side — very low volume, high value — but still in that $100 billion to $500 billion range.
If you look at the rare earths, you have to work pretty far down that curve. The best rare earths are hundreds of millions of dollars. And something like samarium is like $10 million globally. I've sat in rooms with people who could buy the global samarium supply with their personal bank account. To me that's a very obvious thing to know — we all know these are small, specialized markets. But the implication, on my side as an educator and someone who thinks about technology, is: where do we educate people? Do I educate my students to go into base metals and crushed stone, or into really specialized metals? And if I've got an investment dollar I can put into an R&D project, do I put it into a $500 billion market or a $10 million market? So it creates a negative feedback loop that I think stands as a fundamental challenge. The cinnamon-and-nutmeg analogy lands well, but underneath it, thinking about the implications, this is why development and advancement in the sector is so challenging.
Dustin Olsen (07:09) Well said. The visual is very strong, and most people enjoy eating, especially desserts. So I think that's great.
Daniel O'Connor (07:19) Yeah, on that note — we started this show and the website at the end of 2024, so it's been a little over a year and a half. We've learned a lot, and I think we've helped shine a light on this at least a little. It's interesting from your perspective because you've been at this for some time. These spices you mentioned are extremely important, and much of the industry today depends on — albeit small amounts, nonetheless amounts of — these inputs. How long, in the academic world, have we known this is a mounting problem? Or has the ideology of the last decades been that we just outsourced this and things sort of magically happened? Could you give the audience a higher-level view of the last few decades and how thinking has changed?
Aaron Noble (08:22) It's a really good question. Like you said, I've been really active in the rare earth teaching and research space since about 2015, so my trajectory has been interesting. I was not active during the initial rare earth crisis of the early 2010s — I was still a student then, pretty active in mineral processing, but if you'd asked me to name three of the rare earths, I wouldn't have gotten one. And I did pretty good as a student. So my perspective is really this last 10 years predominantly. Before that, there's an interesting historical perspective. One of the quotes I used to show on a slide — we've talked a lot about recovering rare earths from unconventional sources like mine tailings, acid mine drainage, and fly ash — there's this famous quote from a Penn State professor in the 1950s. They were doing prognostication on what the world would be like in the year 2000. And what the quote says is: geochemists have found notable concentrations of germanium and rare earths in fly ash; by the year 2020 we will not be wasting those, we will be recovering them.
It's really interesting to think about, because at the time this notion of waste valorization and reutilization was pretty weak, pretty nascent. And at the same time, the rare earth industry was very nascent — we weren't using a lot of rare earth for magnets and things like that, and Mountain Pass was the leading supplier. So it's a really interesting quote. Now, we didn't make it by 2020, so we still have a ways to go, but at least on order of magnitude we were headed in the right direction. This notion of criticality has become more common over the 10 years I've been engaged. I go back to right after the first rare earth crisis in 2010 — I think it was 2012 or 2013, the Department of Energy published a critical mineral strategy report. That was one of the first references where they took a critical look at the two main measures of criticality: one being potential for disruption, and two being importance — in this case, to energy technology. You look at supply risk and demand pull, put those together, and you get an indicator of criticality. That report was really the first time I saw it articulated that way. We've known minerals are essential forever — that's the bedrock of mining going back to the dawn of humanity. But this notion of criticality really became very present after the 2010 rare earth crisis, and we've seen the maturity of those discussions evolve since.
Daniel O'Connor (11:24) Makes sense. One of our hypotheses is that efficiency was the driving factor in global economies from maybe the 1950s through to 2000 or 2010. And now supply chains — and resilience — have become ever more important. To have resilience, you need control of your supply chains, which means even these small little spices for the cake, we need to control. We've been big on industrial policy and trying to find ways to raise awareness. Our paths crossed a while ago, and again, we're grateful for all you're doing. From that standpoint — based at your university and others — are you starting to find there's an interest in industry again, in mining, metallurgy? Are you starting to see changes among young people?
Aaron Noble (12:36) Really good question, Daniel. If you'd asked me 12 months ago, I would have said no. I think we're seeing some marginal uptake in interest, but over the last 12 months we're on a very dynamic portion of that curve, so it's hard to tell. And the reason is actually this boom in AI. If you look historically — not at mining engineering but across all engineering disciplines: mechanical, electrical, civil — if you take all the engineering disciplines but pull the computer-facing ones out, and look at enrollment trends in the US, peak enrollment actually came around 2016 and 2017. We've been dropping by about 15,000 students nationwide a year in engineering. That's been the trend — over the past decade, the number of engineering students has gone down by about 15,000 a year in the non-computing disciplines. Meanwhile the computing disciplines have been on this exponential takeoff.
Now the interesting thing when you layer that back — what's the second layer of the cake? If you look at when each engineering discipline hit its peak, the more vocational, industry-related disciplines peaked first. Mining peaked around 2014. Petroleum probably a little before that — actually it was probably nuclear, then petroleum, then mining, then metallurgy, then civil, then mechanical. That was roughly the order in which they peaked and started declining. But in the last cycle — I can tell you here at Virginia Tech, application demand for students in computer science is significantly lower than it was a couple years ago. Significantly. And nationwide, application demand for the computing disciplines has gone down — I'll throw out a number, maybe 50% of where we were 10 years ago. Where we now see growth is in the vocational disciplines: construction engineering, mining engineering, metallurgy, mechanical, civil. So it's almost like we're going through the reverse cycle. We are at the very beginning, the leading edge of this, so I'm really curious to see how it plays out. From that larger, holistic policy view — are we seeing some self-reversion in the system, people leaving computing and going back to the vocational disciplines? Is that happening naturally? Early signs are yes. Let's see how sustainable it is.
Daniel O'Connor (15:28) Great answer. Dustin, I have more questions, but please chime in.
Dustin Olsen (15:35) Yeah. First of all, I think it's great people are finding more interest in these vocational disciplines. No surprise that because of AI, people are leaving the computing disciplines — I think that's a fascinating stat. But I'd be interested to hear more about the ten-million-dollar DOE research fund you're managing there at Virginia Tech, and what it's allowing you to do, what it's unlocking, what doors it's opening.
Aaron Noble (16:11) Yeah. The project in question is funded by the US Department of Energy through their CORE-CM program. CORE is Carbon Ore, Rare Earth, and Critical Minerals — they call it the CORE-CM program. Our specific project is called Expand Appalachia. The project's principal investigator, the lead here, is Dr. Richard Bishop, one of my colleagues, and I'm co-leading it with him. Through the CORE-CM program, what the Department of Energy did is take the entire US and break it up into regions, roughly following some geologic trend. The region of interest for us was called the Appalachian region. For me, I'd call it the Greater Appalachian region, because if you draw the boundary it goes from Tennessee to Maine and is inclusive of every state you'd draw from Tennessee to Maine — from Memphis all the way up to Acadia National Park. That's Greater Appalachia in that sense.
What we've been charged to do is identify the critical mineral potential within that region broadly. A big portion of this is understanding existing data sets — are there data sets that identify and quantify resources in the ground? So conventional-ore-type resources, and this broader base of unconventional resources: mine tailings, former industrial waste sites, acid mine drainage, fly ash — pretty broad in scope. And the material scope we're looking at is rare earths, anything on DOE's critical mineral list, and carbon ore. So the project is significant — a large geographic study area, a large base of resource we want to quantify, and a pretty large set of material categories.
Thinking broadly, we try to be innovative: how can we identify potential targets of opportunity quickly? We have a rubric-based, somewhat rigorous approach, looking at economic potential and social suitability. Is this in a national park? Well, we might as well not go sample it — we're not going to be mining in a national park. So we look through this rubric, identify where there's existing data and where the data needs to be augmented, and then take an approach of: are there high-throughput screening tools we can use? My colleague Richard Bishop is a drone expert, and he's researching whether we can use certain sensors on drones to get early indication of potential critical mineral or rare earth mineralization. If so, you can follow that up with more detailed sampling and analysis. So — large study area, large material scope, but it enables us to begin to identify and, to an extent, quantify what we're calling the critical mineral endowment through our region. And in their wisdom, DOE now has an awardee in every region throughout the country, so every part of the country is reflected by, or has a representative, region. They're all taking similar approaches with that charge of understanding the critical mineral picture.
Dustin Olsen (19:43) That's really interesting. Two follow-up questions. One, what's the lifespan of this project — how far are you able to go with that funding? And two, is any of that funding being used to incentivize students to join the program and further their education there?
Aaron Noble (19:53) Another really good question. On timing — the current effort is a three-year project, which is a pretty typical lifespan for most of our projects. Most of the funded work we do is on a two-to-three-year time horizon, so three years is about right. This is coming off an initial phase one a couple years ago. In phase one they had a lot more regions, it was scoped a little differently, and the overall magnitude of the projects was much smaller. We were one of the phase one awardees, and now we're on this phase two. Phase one was a year and a half to two years; this phase two is three years.
And yes — the student-facing portion of this, as with any of our R&D programs, is an important but underappreciated value of what we're doing. A big portion of any research project we do involves direct graduate student support. So if any aspiring graduate students are listening to the podcast, please know you can get your education paid for and learn quite a bit along the way in a really awesome area. So there's my plug for joining Virginia Tech's graduate program. We also have a really big emphasis on undergraduate research here. Within my research group at any time I'll have multiple undergraduate researchers, sometimes as many as 10 — I think one summer we hired 10 undergraduate interns just in my research group. It's a really good opportunity to get your hands dirty, learn more about a topic, interface with graduate students and research professionals, and get excited about the field.
One of the big components of my research group is that I take a very interdisciplinary approach. When I'm recruiting undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs, I don't constrain myself to mining engineers and metallurgists. I want to see students with an interest in chemistry, geology, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, chemical engineering — let's span the gamut to get as many people interested in the field as possible. For example, right now we have one chemistry student working with us, and in a presentation she gave a couple weeks ago she said, "Four weeks ago I had no clue any of this existed, and now I think it's one of the coolest projects to be working on." To me, that's such a win for what we're doing. I wish we could do that every time we have the opportunity.
Daniel O'Connor (22:31) On that question about Virginia Tech — I know there's an ecosystem of universities teaching mining and metallurgy. Could you share a little about Virginia Tech and why it's so important? It's a good time to promote the university, too. What's special about Virginia Tech? Why do we hear such good things about it? What's your focus, and what are some of your colleagues' focuses, so we can have a better understanding?
Aaron Noble (23:06) Virginia Tech. I'm a three-time alum of this program, I've been a faculty member here about 10 years, and a department head for three. I'm wearing my Virginia Tech tie today and my Virginia Tech lapel pin — I bleed orange and maroon. We have a very passionate alumni and student base, and you see that a lot. But I like to say — most people don't think of Virginia as the center of mining or a big mining hotbed, and most people don't even know Virginia Tech has a mining engineering program. When I tell people on the street that I'm a mining engineering professor at Virginia Tech, I get a surprised reaction. But in seriousness, mining is ingrained into the Virginia Tech culture, going back to the very beginning. The fun fact I like to share: the very first engineering degree awarded here was in mining engineering, I believe in the 1870s or 1880s — over a hundred years ago.
Over that time, we've had a strong commitment to serve the industry, serve our students, and recruit top talent across the board and in every facet. We want talented students, talented faculty, talented leadership. What makes us distinct today is our ability to convene talent and then resource that talent — faculty, students, graduate students — to be impactful. When we do research projects, we know at the end of the day it's going to have an outcome for some constituency. If we're doing the Expand Appalachia project and trying to understand the mineral potential of Appalachia, that's so hopefully one day we can create jobs in Appalachia, so people can be gainfully employed and contribute to society. We want to do this for impact in the end. I think that's something that makes our department very unique — obviously the scientific work, the publications, will happen; we'll generate new knowledge and report it. But we are very focused on impact: what is that knowledge going to do or accomplish? That's baked into our culture.
Going back over the years — in the 1950s, one of the Virginia Tech researchers here came up with a very famous equation for quantifying the strength of coal. That essentially led engineers to be able to design coal mines that don't collapse — a way to quantify the strength of coal so we can design underground mines that stay supported. That formula is still taught today; it's still part of an undergraduate curriculum, and it started here at Virginia Tech.
If you look at our faculty, right now we have about 11 faculty in the mining and minerals engineering department. About four of those sit on the processing side — how do we extract and recover minerals, with a lot of focus on critical minerals and novel technology. The remaining faculty sit in more traditional mining disciplines: upstream, how do we identify and extract resources, how do we coordinate technology and people and systems, and then the thread of health and safety — how do we ensure the work we do benefits the workers? Connecting the dots: one of our great researchers is now looking at coal mine dust, trying to understand why there's an increasing prevalence of black lung and how to mitigate it. So you go back to the 1950s, we were developing formulas to make mines safer for workers; today in the 2020s, we're looking at coal mine dust to make mines safer for workers. To summarize it, I think what makes it special here at Virginia Tech is our focus on impact.
Daniel O'Connor (27:06) That's very powerful. And that's what we pick up on through the market and the various networks in these industries — your program is very good at connecting to real-world scenarios, and we know you have dozens of projects with companies. On that note, let's talk about what is needed. One of the challenges we've run into — and I'd love your critical feedback on this — is that even with the amount of capital being allocated from Washington, which is great (I think the government's woken up to a lot of these challenges), there still seems to be a lack of emphasis on education, workforce development, talent development. Is that a real issue? And if it is, how can we use Virginia Tech and other universities to start raising awareness and get more people involved? Because I think we do have to re-industrialize here, and we're going to need people.
Aaron Noble (28:23) Dan, that's an exceptional question. If you're a hammer, you only see nails — so if you're a professor, you're going to see problems a certain way. But a couple layers to this. One, I like to think about the enabling system: what's going to be needed to enable sustainable and robust production of rare earth and critical minerals in this country? Underneath that enabling system, there are resources — we can't mine if we don't have the resources. There's technology — if we can't innovate and produce the best technology, we're not going to be able to compete. There's also talent. And from my standpoint, talent is the most critical. They're all critical — it's like the critical mineral list, there are so many on it and they're all important — but to me, talent is the one that's often overlooked yet absolutely essential. The last one I always throw in is coordination and alignment. So we need resources, technology, talent, and coordination and alignment. That's how we define the enabling system.
Let me take another angle. I've thought a lot about this — the critical mineral challenge, the rare earth challenge in this country — and I think often we're actually confounding two challenges. One challenge is the acute need. If we were facing a real supply shock — and you could argue we're facing that now — how do we produce what industry needs in a very rapid time period and for a fixed duration? How do we produce, over the next three years, enough to meet industrial needs? That's one challenge. The other challenge is: how do we develop the enabling system that sustains us over decades — 20, 30, 40 years? When you separate those two, you begin to realize that, for instance, in the short term CapEx doesn't matter — if we're facing acute need, supply security matters. Over the long term, cost is all that matters. When you break that down, you realize the strategies we're taking are trying to solve both challenges at the same time.
Looping back to this talent question — right now in the US, in mining and minerals engineering, nominally we're graduating about 200 people a year. We're sending 200 engineers across the country into the ecosystem.
Daniel O'Connor (30:58) Well, Aaron, just to clarify — is that 200 at Virginia Tech or 200 nationwide?
Aaron Noble (31:05) Sorry — I wish it were 200 at Virginia Tech. That is 200 nationwide. Across the nation, 200 mining engineers. Virginia Tech, we produce 15 to 20 percent of that in any given year.
Daniel O'Connor (31:20) Wow. Wow. Just out of curiosity, what would that compare to in India or China?
Aaron Noble (31:24) In China — make sure you're sitting down. Hard to tell, but that number's probably over ten thousand.
Daniel O'Connor (31:29) Wow.
Aaron Noble (31:33) So we are not even close. A couple weeks ago there was a Reuters article that talked about degree specialization in China as well. Here in the US, going back to the cake analogy, we by and large train generalists — people who can go work in crushed stone, iron ore, base metals, and perhaps rares if there's opportunity. Because of the scale in China, they produce specialists. They'd have degrees in rare earth mining and processing. Here we don't have that degree of specialization because we don't have the same scale. How this trickles down over the 30-year horizon is that that lack of talent becomes barriers to innovation, barriers to project development, barriers to operations. If we want to meet our critical minerals ambitions — if we want to meet all these goals and targets and really intensify production — who's going to operate all those plants? Who's going to design the mines? Who's going to innovate the next generation of solutions? Who's going to permit those mines? Every layer where you don't have people trained in the subject matter creates friction in the system. And that friction compounds. That's what really inhibits you over that 30-, 40-, 50-year time horizon.
Daniel O'Connor (32:55) This is a very important point — you just informed me on something. I had no idea there were that few engineers being graduated every year. It's really striking. Now let's talk about — I know you're in the university system and it's very important — but let's also talk about the state college system, the community college system, and even the technical schools, private technical schools. If the President of the United States came to you and said, "I want to develop and accelerate a workforce army of trained, educated professionals across the value chain, from upstream mining to midstream separation, metallurgy, to downstream magnet production" — would there be some blueprint you'd think about?
Aaron Noble (33:55) I don't know if I have a blueprint, but I'd say the pieces are there to do that. What's needed is the motivation and the alignment. Most of the universities do have partnerships with local community colleges and trade schools. They're not always leveraged as well as they could be, especially in the mining and processing space. Sometimes I think it's just demand-driven — there's a mismatch between what the industry needs and what students are interested in, what the student demand is. But if you could get that student push to go along with the industry demand pull, then the pieces are there to align top to bottom — from your PhD-caliber innovation leads, to your practicing engineers and metallurgists, to your frontline workers, welders, and tradespeople and everything below that. So the pieces are there. How you pin them together and align them is something that needs further consideration.
Daniel O'Connor (35:02) Understood. Dustin, very fascinating.
Dustin Olsen (35:12) Yeah. One question to wrap up the show today: I'd like you to talk really quick about the Aclara Resources project. You have a facility on campus now, and I'm always intrigued when commercial meets education at the same level. What is that doing for you to further the work?
Aaron Noble (35:39) Thanks for asking that, Dustin. The Aclara partnership has been one we've been very proud of and very pleased with. Last March they had their ribbon-cutting ceremony there. I'd encourage your viewers — shameless plug here — if you get the opportunity, go watch the speech I made at the ribbon-cutting. I think it captures a lot of what makes that partnership so special. And tying back to the theme of the last question, it is really an investment in people. What I said in my talk for the ribbon-cutting was that supply chains aren't built by workshops, they're not built by university professors, they're not built by podcasts — even though I love this podcast. At the end of the day, they're built by people. If we're going to develop and build the rare earth supply chain in this country, it's going to start with people, which necessarily requires an investment in people.
And one of the big fundamental challenges in this space is that you're essentially trying to start from scratch, which creates a chicken-and-egg dichotomy. In order to design and operate real processing plants — that can do the complex separation, the complex chemistry, all of it — you really need experienced people who know how it works at scale, who know where there are going to be hiccups and challenges. You need practitioners who have seen it and felt it and tasted it. But because we don't have any production, there's no proving ground for those people to be trained. So you don't have the people to do the design because you don't have the facility, and because you don't have the facility, you don't have a way to do the design. It creates a really negative feedback loop — and frankly, in this country, it's one of the big challenges. I've sat in meetings before and said: if you want to design a heavy rare earth separation plant, there are probably fewer than 10 people in this country who can do it and do it well. Fewer than 10. And we'll be sitting in rooms with 40 people, and I'm like — fewer than the people in this room are the people I'd trust to actually do this well.
So Aclara made an intentional investment to partner with the university, with this talent pipeline being a big component of that. Right now we have students and researchers who work there every day. They get to see how the equipment works, they get to see how what they're learning about in the classroom actually translates and looks in practice — and doing that in a facility that's not simple. We call it a pilot plant, but it's actually a demonstration plant; that's how I'd categorize it. It looks just like an industrial facility, except smaller, but the way it's connected, configured, and instrumented is all very similar to what you'd see in industry. That hands-on, experiential learning has always been a hallmark of the Virginia Tech educational experience, and this is a great way we've been able to bring that to life here in the critical mineral space.
Dustin Olsen (38:52) That's fantastic, and exciting to hear. Like I was saying, when commercial businesses are interested in being part of the educational experience, I think there's only one way and it's up. So that's great. Aaron, thank you for being on the show with us. You gave us a lot of great insight and opened our eyes and minds to what's going on — from an education perspective but also from an industry perspective. Hopefully we'll have you on the show again to give us an update and provide more insights as things progress. Because, as you said earlier, in the last year a lot has changed and shifted, and I'd imagine over the next 12 months we're going to see even more. Thanks again.
Daniel O'Connor (39:43) Thanks, Aaron.
Aaron Noble (39:43) Excellent. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
