Catalyst with Shayle Kann - Building a supply chain for rare earth elements

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

Rare earth elements (REEs) are essential ingredients in electric vehicles, wind turbines, and many electronics. As with most critical minerals, China controls the vast majority of the REE supply chain. And so when it banned the export of REE processing technology last December, it raised concerns about supply. So what will it take to secure the supply of REEs?  In this episode, Shayle talks to Ahmad Ghahreman, CEO and cofounder of Cyclic Materials, a rare earth elements recycling company. (Energy Impact Partners, where Shayle is a partner, invests in Cyclic.) They cover topics like: The five high-value REEs used in the permanent magnets inside EVs, wind turbines, and other electronics The many steps in the supply chain, from extraction to end-of-life Building magnets without REEs Increasing production outside of China The role of recycling Why Ahmad is optimistic about developing a supply chain in North America Recommended Resources: MIT Technology Review: The race to produce rare earth elements IEEE Spectrum: Who Will Free EV Motors from the Rare Earth Monopoly? Are growing concerns over AI’s power demand justified? Join us for our upcoming Transition-AI event featuring three experts with a range of views on how to address the energy needs of hyperscale computing, driven by artificial intelligence. Don’t miss this live, virtual event on May 8.

Latitude Media, podcast at the frontier of climate technology. I'm Shail Khan, and this is Catalyst. I believe with access to mining and downstream capacity in North America, engineers will still really like various magnets, and buyers also will like various magnets because they have multiple options for sourcing of hers magnets now. So I'm really optimistic on domestic supply of various magnets. Well, for all those listeners who've been patiently waiting for a podcast on neodymium,

I just want to tell you that I hear you, I see you, and today's your day. When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub. Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities, coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gigawatts of flexibility built for the moments when utilities can't afford uncertainty. Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on, coordinating EVs, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform built for utility scale. Predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform when it counts.

Learn more at energy hub.com. Trillions of dollars are flowing into clean and critical infrastructure, but those investments aren't driven by technology alone. They're shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and host of a brand new podcast, Critical Capital. Each episode, I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building the clean economy. Tune in as we unpack how progress is actually made. Listen to critical capital on Spotify,

Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Shail Khan. I invest in revolutionary climate technologies and energy impact partners. Welcome. Well, I've been known to say that the energy transition is at least to a first order, basically a transition from fossil fuels to metals and minerals. We've talked about some of these winners of this shift here before, battery metals like lithium, nickel, cobalt, as well as other critical minerals like copper. And I'd say there are two common themes amongst those discussions. First, we're going to need a hell of a lot more of each of these things as we go from early adopter of decarbonized technologies to the majority. And second, there's pretty much always a complex geopolitical challenge that we face in that transition, whether it's the Democratic Republic of the Congo for cobalt or South America,

for lithium and copper, Indonesia, for nickel. And then there's China. Always China. And nowhere are both of these issues, actually, more prevalent than with rare earth elements. The story there is playing out in real time. Demand is growing as it is with many of these other elements. Supply is a challenge,

and it still largely does come from China, which has just recently, actually, a few months ago, instituted a ban on the export of new technologies for extraction and separation of rare earth elements. The whole area is vitally important and very complex. We at EIP have been on a critical minerals and metals kick for a couple of years now, which has resulted in multiple investments

to try to solve some of these problems. And one of those investments was cyclic materials, whose founder Amad Garaman is my guest today. We co-led cyclic series A financing last year alongside BMW Ventures. And today, Amad and I talked about cyclical, but also just as importantly, talked about the big picture challenge

of securing enough rare earth elements supply during the energy transition. Here's Ahmad. Amad, welcome. Thank you for having me. Excited to have you and to talk about rare earth elements. Starting with the definition, what are rare earth elements?

This is actually something that I think probably our listeners appreciate, but I've found a lot of people in the broader public, they hear rare earths, and they think of things like lithium and cobalt and other stuff that are not actually rare earth elements. So what are rare earth elements? So great question.

So lithium and rarest elements and some other metals are in a category called critical metals, and that's probably the times that I see people confuse rarest elements with other elements. Rarerous elements are a group of metals at the bottom of periodic table, and of course you can graduate high school and not learn about them.

These metals are 15 plus 2, so overall 17 elements. And because of their chemical and physical properties, nowadays we have a lot of applications for them in different sectors, especially back to energy transition. And those are your rarest elements. Can you – what are the – I mean, you said there's 17 of them. Is – are our current uses of rare earth elements pretty evenly spread across the 17 or most of the 17, or are there a few that are dominant where we like really use a lot of whatever neodymium but not? or dysprosium, but not a bunch of the other ones. Like, you know, separate them out from each other a little bit for me.

Absolutely. So out of 17 rare elements, there are five of them that we, sometimes six of them, that we call them magnet rarest elements. Let's take a step back. Rarerous elements are used in variety of applications in catalysts and glass and different applications alongside magnets. We use them in permanent magnets. And happens that when we use rarest elements in permanent magnets,

which we call them reverse permanent magnets, those happen to become the most strong magnets that we can make on our planet. So this is really unique to reverse magnets. From volume side, the five or six rarest elements that we use in permanent magnet manufacturing accounts for about 40% of rarest elements. So 40% of rarest elements go into magnets, the other 60% does not. But here is the interesting thing. From dollar value perspective, over 95% of rarest elements are the five that we use in permanent magnets.

And the combined 60% of earthers elements carry only less than 5% of the dollar value in the market for rarest elements. So you can see how valuable permanent magnet rarest elements. elements are, which are subcategory of rarest elements. And which ones are those? Oh, those are neodymium, praesidemium, dysprosium, terbium, and cimmerium. And nowadays, we mix little bit cyerium into magnets as well. Now, neodymium and prasidemium are among the light rarest elements, and those are basically the very important ingredients of permanent magnets.

Dysprosium and terbium, we use them in tiny little bit. concentrations in magnets to give them really high temperature good quality magnets that we use in electric vehicles and some other applications. And this is one thing I've always wondered, right? So we're going to talk a little bit later about, you know, do we really need the rare earth elements? Can we displace them with something else? We'll focus probably on this permanent magnet thing because that is the most relevant

to the energy transition. As you said, it's where the vast majority of the dollar value is. Why is it that this basket of rare earth elements makes permanent magnets so much stronger? What is it about them that enables that? It's their physical and chemical properties. So it happens that when you combine neodymium-prezidemia with iron and boron with very specific physical properties that they have and they carry, you end up with really strong magnets. that has significant energy density in a small volume. And that is the differentiator of these type of magnets,

rarest magnets versus other magnets in the market. And we count on this property of rarest permanent magnets significantly in the energy transition. Simply put, those permanent magnets, now from the application side, one of the areas that we use them very often is when we want to convert electrical energy into mechanical energy from a battery to driving a car or the other way around from mechanical energy to electrical energy in a wind turbine generator.

So when we use rare earth's permanent magnets, we happen to make the most efficient electric motors or generators out there that we know of. And if you're putting a lot of dollars into a battery pack in an EV, it just makes sense to tie it up to a very efficient electric motor and consume that electricity efficiently. And when you think of systems, then using permanent magnet electric motors becomes really important. Yeah, so that speaks to why not only do we use a fair amount of rare earth elements already today, but the trajectory, the expected trajectory follows the expected trajectory of the energy transition, primarily in things like electric vehicle adoption, to some extent, wind, turbine development as well. So now we're back in the category with some of the other energy transition metals,

as you said, like lithium and cobalt, nickel, and so on, where, you know, there's this secular growth trend in demand. We'll come back to demand. I want to talk about supply. So let's start with where we get rare earths from. When there's virgin mining today, where are the rare earths in the world? And then walk me through the supply chain as it exists today. Sure, absolutely. So two things. If it doesn't grow, you mine it. So we start with mining. And the second thing, rarest elements are recycled less than 1% globally. Those are among the least circular metals that we know of out there. So basically the primary source of earth elements today

is mining of earth elements. About 60% of that happens in China, and the other 40%, give or take, is happening outside in other countries, including the US. Now, that's 60% in China. Some of that is byproduct of iron oxide mining as well. But overall, majority of mining happening in China. It happens that in the downstream processing, though,

majority of those mined materials outside China are shipped to China. So China acts really like a vacuum here, brings in all the material to China and processes and produces magnets. The processing is over 90% done in China and magnet manufacturing over 95% done in China. And from there, it's shipped around in final products

in electric motors and other. units for consumption all over the world. And I think, you know, it's true in a number of these categories in critical minerals and metals that China has found itself in a pretty dominant position with regard to processing and refining. So it's especially dominant in rare earth elements and in permanent magnets, but, you know, that is true in lots of different categories. What is interesting, though, is that China is also the home to the majority of the mining in rare earth, which is not true of all these other categories. You look at something like lithium, right? The mining takes place in South America or in Australia,

and then a lot of the refining takes place in China. So is the reason that China is dominant on the mining side because the resource happens to be in China, or is it just that China put more effort and investment into building a rare earth mining industry? Or as you said, a byproduct of iron mining, than other countries have. Oh, the combination of both. So in Canada and US in 1960s and 70s, US and Canada used to be a leader in production of earth elements.

Significant production of earth elements from mining side was done in other countries as well, outside China. Mining of airs elements comes with some unique challenges. For instance, radioactivity of ores that come off the mines usually is one of the challenges that radioactive materials are from concentration perspective, high enough that they cause really environmental problem on that side, but low enough

that they can't be economically recovered from the material. So things like that, over the time, basically put pressure on mining of those metals outside China in North America specifically, and those eventually ended up in China. So China gradually, picked up on production and mining of those metals, as well as the other environmental impacts. After mining, when you have the ore or concentrate that comes up in mine, usually the chemical process that you would require to put the material through, to get to the metals at the back end, is pretty environmentally, I'm going to say, challenging process. And when you have that in North America, it's basically not ideal.

So we shipped those processing capacity in the past 20, 30 years to China. And all of a sudden, we woke up and they had all the production capacity within Chinese borders. And that happened mostly for various elements from mining all the way to down the stream. But as you said, for some other metals, they really heavily invested in that. downstream processing of copper, downstream processing of other metals, like cobalt, like graphite, like lithium. And that basically all of a sudden gave them a lot of advantages over production of downstream products. Whereas in US, we don't have much of those metals available today to build the plants. This is interesting to note also that rarest elements on themselves are about in 2000.

2024, $20 billion market. But the downstream, or the industry they unlock, is in trillions of dollars. And I think at some point we did a miscalculation on the priority of how important these metals are in North America. And to be frank, China has been publishing their five-year plans every five years in the past 20, 25 years. And they constantly said, we want these metals in China. And here we are. They have it in China. So we'll come back in a few minutes, I think, to what are the solutions to this geopolitical challenge that we face?

But first, just can you walk through the steps from raw ore mining to a magnet that goes into a motor that goes into a vehicle? What are the steps along that process? So it starts with mining. So you produce, well, you mine the ore. Again, majority of that happens in China. To some extent, that happens in California as well by MP materials. The next step is to take the ore, which has only one or two percent rarest element in it, sometimes even less than that, to a product that is called concentrate. Now concentrate, he usually has 50, 60% rare oxide value in it. And that also is quite a bit produced in China and a little bit outside China as well.

Now, majority of concentrates now are being shipped to China. When it comes to processing, now, give or take 90% of concentrates are processed in China. In this process, basically, you take the concentrate. and with very heavy chemical process, drive it all the way to now called mixed rare ore ore oresexite, which is a basket of rarest elements that comes off as a final product from the concentrate. Now, mixed rare ore dioxide really depends. The quality of mixed raref oxide in each plant or each deposit

will depend on the ore that they processed. For instance, for the material from California, Fornia, that is shipped to China, usually you end up with about 70 to 80% of lantinum and serum oxide. Those are the metals that don't carry much value. And this number will be different in other mixerous oxides that come of other deposits, but universally 70, 80, 85% of rarest oxides are going to be negative value rarest oxides in those mixed ore oxide baskets.

For cyclic materials, for us, it's different because we recycle only magnet metals. then I'm going to come back to that. That's a key point, though, and part of why I wanted to ask at the beginning about separating out the different rare earth elements from each other, because you can think of them as one basket, but actually what's interesting about the processes exist today, as you just described, is that you mine an ore,

you concentrate the ore, then you process it, you get this basket of things. So whereas with, you know, I don't know, lithium, lithium is lithium, but in rare earth elements, what you're getting is a basket of rare earth elements, even after you've gone through your processing step. And as you just said, the majority of what is inside that basket is actually negative value. What you really want is the minority of what's inside that basket you've already processed,

which is mostly just those five to seven rare earth elements that we actually care about. Absolutely. And then, again, those mixers oxide now have to go through the process of refining. And that's basically a long chain of solvent extract. unit operations, usually done in 1,000 or so steps, sometimes even more, to separate rarest elements, each of those into an individual basket. Now, you have pure serum oxide, you have pure neodymoxide, you have pure dysprosium oxide. Some of those are mixed together, for instance, NDPR and whatnot. Now, solvent extraction has been around for many, many years. The reason solvent extraction or reflars

or refining for rarest elements is really complicated is because the chemistry of each individual rarest elements out of the 17 is pretty similar, pretty similar to one another. So you are now separating metals that they behave pretty similar in the process with one another. That's why the efficiency of processes really low, so long chain of solvent extraction happens to do so. This is pretty expensive process as well, and produces a lot of waste simply because, let's state it again, around 80% of your rarest elements in mining industry are value-negative rare sediments that be way over-produced those, so hence they are value-negative.

Now, after you produce individual rarest oxides with high quality, then the next step is to metallize those. So you make metal out of those oxides. You basically remove the oxygen and you make metals. In this step, basically 95% of the process is being done only in China. We don't have much metallization industry outside China simply because the oxides are not available outside China. And the next step is basically magnet companies will take those alloys of magnet after metallization and they grind or cut out the magic.

magnet pieces that they need in the size, a shape that they need, and then they insert it into the electric motors, and then you have your electric motor for electric vehicles or other applications. And that's basically as close as to a product you get. So then the next step is to ship that product into the market. Virtual power plants are becoming a reliable way for utilities to manage capacity, but enrolling devices is just the start. What really matters is confidence, knowing those resources will perform when dispatched and being

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We're living through a profound economic shift, and energy sits at the center of all of it. Trillions of dollars are flowing into power plants, transmission lines, battery factories, data centers, but the future of energy isn't shaped by technology alone. It's shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux,

the capital platform for the clean economy. Join me for my brand new show, Critical Capital. As I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building projects. Together, we unpack how risk is priced, how incentives are structured, and how progress is actually made. Listen to Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so that's the process that exists today. Before we talk about what to do about it, actually, I want to go back to the GEO.

politics for one second, because as we've said multiple times, China is pretty dominant here. Trade tensions between China and the Western world have been high of late, and that has trickled down into rare earth world. So what's the latest on China export curbs in rare earths, and what are we to make of it? So one thing that we really were expecting to happen a few years ago happened last December. China put a pause on exporting of any technology related to rarest elements, mining and recycling and processing. So that's really important to understand simply because they are trying to maintain their dominance in this space and not give it away. At the same time, to counterbalance that, we have IRA and other vehicles in North America, Europe, and other jurisdictions

to help industries to grow in those countries. For instance, Department of Defense awarded Linus in Texas with over $200 million to build capacity on refining of mixed oil oxides or Department of Defense awarded over $100 million to vacuum smits, a magnet manufacturing company to build their facility in South Carolina, which we have partnered with them. So there's a lot of efforts in this space happening to reduce the dominance and dependence of rare sediment supply chain with China.

And I'm really optimistic on this site because those efforts I really think this time around are being done really nicely and the right way they should be done. But still, in 2024, we are heavily dependent on China on sourcing of those materials. Okay, so let's talk about what to do about it. And I think of it as being three categories of things that you can do about it. We're going to save the one that you do, which is recycling for last. But the three categories in my mind are, first, we could change the demand picture. Now, I don't think that's going to be changing the demand picture by reducing demand for electric vehicles.

I think it would have to be, you know, magnets, permanent magnets that do not require rare with elements or that require less of them. So that's one category. Second category would be just ramp up our supply of virgin mining and processing outside of China in the Western world in various places. As you said, there's some of that already, particularly on the mining side in California, you just do a lot more of that. And then the third is recycling, which will save for the end because that's where you're focused. But let's talk about those first two first. You know, what have you seen out there in terms of developments to try to make rare earth elements less necessary if we are building? permanent magnets. Sure. So let's start with rare earth free magnets because there is a conversation

going on on that and some companies are looking into design of rarest free magnets. Just to be clear, rarest free magnets do exist today. So Al-Nicol group of magnets and ferrite group of magnets already out there are already out there. The industry wants to create newer category of rarest free magnets that possibly they could use in substitution to permanent, rarest permanent magnets in electric vehicles, vent turbines and other applications. I don't believe we are there yet. But out of necessity, I believe this is the right step to take.

And some of those magnets already are being produced by some companies out there in the US as well. And appears that some of those magnets eventually will be consumed in speakers industry and other similar industries. again, the majority of drive of rarest element consumption, especially on the magnet side, are going to come from wind turbines from electric vehicles and some other applications that speakers are a small portion of that.

So we still will have the demand for rare, as permanent magnets out there in the next years to come. I haven't seen the solution. to that just yet. And is that because, as you said at the beginning, the reason rare earth elements are so valuable in a magnet is they make the magnets stronger. And so is it true that the applications

where these rare earth-free permanent magnets make the most sense are the applications where the requirement for magnet strength is lower? And that's what's true about speakers, for example, but not as true about wind turbines and electric vehicle motors? Correct. So how strong the magnets are per unit of volume. So that's one indication for quality of the magnet. And the second one is at high temperature,

they still remain magnetic. So they don't lose their magnetic properties at elevated temperatures. And now when you have a speaker usually is at room temperature, maybe a little bit elevated temperature. But when you have a traction motor of an electric vehicle, because of the rotation, you usually have heat in there. So that's a little bit different game in there. So those qualities And the energy density in the magnet basically are the reasons that some of those magnets haven't found use in high-end applications in industry just yet. Okay, so, all right, so substitution may play a role eventually, kind of hard to tell. Technology is not quite there yet, but you could imagine that.

So the second option is just ramping up supply X-China. What do you see happening there? And that's supply both from a mining perspective and then obviously equally importantly from a processing and refining perspective? This is where I'm quite a bit optimistic. So, for instance, mining industry in U.S. and other jurisdictions are looking into extraction and processing of air sediments. For instance, MP materials in past few years have shown that they can basically mine and ship

the material to China and processes in China. So there is already one step of the process completed in the U.S. Now they're looking into downstream to bring the process. back to US and processed the material up until production of magnet through MP materials. So they have been having some press releases on that side in the past few months and making advancements on production of magnet and also production of high-quality neodymium and US on that side as well. I think mining and processing is the area that we have spent a lot of money in North America

and Europe, of course, on it as well. eventually will come very handy. Simply put, on the mining side, we have resources out there that are producing concentrate today, so that's good. On refining side, for instance, Linus, that already is refining in Malaysia, is building a plant in Texas. So that's another really strong indication that very, very likely, we'll have refining capacity in the US as well.

And on magnet manufacturing side, also companies like vacuumishments, which has, years of experience in manufacturing high-quality magnets, are starting to build capacity in North America as well. So from that perspective, I'm really optimistic. Now, today, when it comes to consumption of magnet in the companies, let's say OI and car manufacturers, there are two stakeholders in their engineers. They love rarest magnets.

They can't get enough rarest magnets, actually. The second stakeholders are buyers and OEMs, and they dislike rarest magnets because their supply chain is heavily associated with one country. Now, fast forward a few years, I believe with access to mining and downstream capacity in North America, engineers will still really like rarest magnets, and buyers also will like

various magnets because they have multiple options for sourcing of earth magnets now. So I'm really optimistic on the domestics supply of rarest magnets. Okay, and that brings us to category three, the category that cyclic is focused on, which is recycling. You said before that we only recycle 1% of rarest today, which, you know, anybody who knows something about lots of other commodity metal industries like copper and steel and so on, we recycle a fair amount of all those things. Why is it that we don't recycle rare earth today?

And then obviously that will dovetail into what are you doing about it? Absolutely. Yes, true. Rare earth elements, which actually when Department of Energy looks into critical metals, categorizes them as the most critical metals in the category of how critical those are. Happens to be the least circular metals as well. So we don't recycle much of those at all today. simply because when we recycle end of life products, magnets being magnetic attached to seal and travel with steel into seal recycling plants, iron recycling plants. And because of the chemistry in the steel recycling plants, rare earth elements report to a phase or chemistry and seal production plant that is called slack. It's a glass, just looks like glass on our windows really,

and rarest elements are locked inside the glass for good forever, and thermodynamically really stable, and you can spend a lot of money, recycle those and recover those, but that would not make you money, and would be very environmentally pollutive as well. So that's the main reason why we don't recycle rare earth elements today, because we lose them into steel recycling plants. Right, it's like it's the process.

of steel recycling that locks the rare earths away permanently because they end up in the steel slag and, you know, as you said, extremely thermodynamically stable. So you theoretically could get the rare earth out of there, but it would come at such an energy penalty. It would never be worth it. Correct. It would be very expensive and environmentally harmful. Right. Okay. So how do we solve that? So we do have two set of technologies in our company. The first technology basically in our spoke operations, separates magnet from everything else. So imagine a traction motor of an electric vehicle comes in. We separate copper aluminum, steel, and magnet into four different buckets.

Now, copper steel aluminum, they already are known in the market how to treat those. So we sell those off. Magnet, we hold onto it. We send it to a secondary operation or technology that we have in the company. which is the core, the technology is the core of our hub operation now. So we have a spoken hub model. And our hub magnets would come in, and with hydrametilogy process, we would basically process those magnets and we produce mixers oxide.

Now, I will point out that our mixture of oxide is one of the highest quality mixers oxide today available in the market, actually, simply because it's purely concentrated with magnet-rars metals. Right. The other way to put that is that if you're mining an ore, you're getting a bunch of birds out with no regard from the ore body as to whether those are the ones that we humans happen to care about or not. Whereas if you're recycling, you're starting with only the stuff that we used in the first place.

100%. But above that, when you mine worse elements very, very often, in the majority of cases, you have some radioactive materials to treat as well. But in recycling, because we recycle end-of-life products that already have been refined, we have no radioactivity in our operations because nothing comes as a feat to our processing plants. Okay, so cyclics process, as you said, is two steps. Step one, you remove the magnet from the steel, and obviously from the other things as well, which you can sell off as commodity metals like copper.

Step two, you take that magnet, you sent it to a central processing facility, that processing facility gets you your basket of rare earths, mixed rare earth oxides out of the magnet. I guess the question is why two steps? You're doing this hub and spoke model. Why is that the right way to run this kind of recycling operation? Great question. So we do recycle end of life products that carry magnet. And in the flyer products consumed by human have really large entropy,

meaning that they are distributed on our planet, where we have more population, we will have more of those in-the-fly products. In recycling business, one of your key elements to optimize for is your logistics and shipping and handling costs. So we would like to be closer to our feedstock sources. From that perspective, having a few, for instance, in North America,

spokes will make sense. So we would be closer to the centers where those end of life products are available, we will process those. And simply put, iron, aluminum, and copper have large market with distributed market all over the planet. So you can tap into that market. But magnets, which are less than 5% of feet that comes to a spoke,

could be shipped to a central plant. And you could, for whole North America, you could have one central plant, one hub, and process the magnets in there and produce their air oxide in there. So that would give you the optimum operating costs on the spoke side and bringing in feedstock and also optimum capital costs on the chemical plant, having just one central location to do so. So one of the questions that gets asked a lot in the context of battery recycling

is like what portion of global demand could recycling actually supply? Like at what point, you know, battery recycling, people say if we recycle all the batteries that are available to us, and in some future state, you know, we don't need to mine so much virgin, lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, etc. What is that in the context of rare earth? Like, what portion of global rare earth element demand do you think could be met by recycling and when? So when it comes to other metals like copper, aluminum, steel, we research. give or take 40 to 50% of those metals. Even for metals that we produce a little bit of those like germanium and others,

we recycle about 50% of those metals as well. When it comes to rarest elements, we are doing really a poor job these days at around 1% recycling. And I believe rarest elements also could be recycled at around 40, 45%, 50%. So there is a significant market possibility opportunity out there for the earth's recycling. Cyclic Materials Plan is by 2030-1-32, we will be recycling around 2% of the world rarest elements. And also our vision is that rarest elements recycling is not a substitute to mining. It's just to reduce the pressure on mining.

And also when you recycle rarest elements from environmental standpoint, you produce far less carbon dioxide. you consume a fraction of the water that mining industry consumes to produce the same amount of product. So from those instances also, we really need more and more of rare earth recycling, but because of the increase and consumption of the metals in the industry, we can't really just rely on recycling and we will need a combination of healthy recycling and strong mining operations as well. All right, Amma, this was enlightening. Thank you for your time.

we obviously wish you the best and wish the industry the best at figuring out how to develop a geopolitically secure and clean rarer supply chain. Thank you so much. Ahmad Garamon is the CEO and co-founder of cyclic materials. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to Latitude Media.com for links to today's topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures. Prelude backs visionaries, accelerating climate innovation that will reshape the global economy for the betterment of people and planet. Learn more at preludeventures.com. This episode was produced by Daniel Waldorf,

mixing by Roy Campanella and Sean Marquan, theme song by Sean Marquan. I'm Shale Khan, and this is Catalyst.