How rare earth metals could be a big deal for one coal company.
Randall Atkins, the founder, chairman, and CEO of Ramaco Resources (METC), sits down with Julie Hyman and Josh Lipton on Market Domination Overtime to discuss the company’s business operations and the role of the US in the rare earth metals market.
Atkins explains that Ramaco “found a deposit somewhat by accident” when mining for coal that contains “heavy and medium magnetic rare earths,” which are “very valuable.” He says the resources can be considered “vitamins for electronics.”
The CEO says the company’s operations are especially important amid geopolitical uncertainty, given that “there’s very limited production in the United States and candidly, most of it does go to China. So we have kind of styled ourselves as Team USA. So we hope once we are in production, which could be a few years out, that we would focus primarily on US domestic and perhaps some European customers.”
“Fortunately, we found our rare earths essentially in coal and carbon-based deposits. Most rare earths are found in hard minerals uranium, cobalt, lithium, etc. Not only are they harder to mine, but they’re radioactive so that there’s a radioactive tailings component to both mining it and then more importantly, processing it. Which is why most of this is all sent to China. But they don’t have the same environmental constraints about processing. So in terms of the cost, we think we will be able to conventionally mine this almost like a surface mining technique in the West, which is not terribly expensive.”
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This post was written by Naomi Buchanan.
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