Rare Earth Exchanges

China is now surpassing the U.S. on silicon carbide quality, says Penn State's Josh Robinson. Silicon carbide is the power chip material in EVs and AI data centers. U.S. universities led the research in the 1990s, then handed it to industry and stopped teaching it.Josh Robinson is director of Penn State's Materials Research Institute, which he says has about 77 staff and nearly 300 affiliated faculty, and he leads the university's Silicon Carbide Innovation Alliance. He joins Dustin Olsen and Daniel O'Connor to talk about the part of the critical minerals story that usually gets skipped: what happens after the ore is mined and separated.In this episode:Why a barrel of rare earth oxide isn't useful until someone can process it into a finished materialHow U.S. silicon carbide research faded after industry took it in-houseWhy losing gallium would hit America's power electronics, including AI data centersPenn State's work on rare earth separation, metallization, and neodymium magnetsWhy DOE wants universities to double the number of critical minerals graduatesGuest: Josh Robinson, Director, Materials Research Institute, Penn StateRare Earth Exchanges is accelerating transparency in the rare earth and critical minerals supply chain. New episodes weekly.🌐 https://rareearthexchanges.com🎧 Also on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple PodcastsDisclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.

E-waste is fifty to a hundred times more concentrated than the ore coming out of a new mine — and America still treats it as garbage, shipping nearly every circuit board overseas because, as Bedingfield puts it, the ability to handle difficult-to-process scrap left the country twenty-five years ago.Matt Bedingfield is Global CEO of Mint Innovation, a New Zealand-founded cleantech company that recovers copper, gold, silver, tin and palladium from scrapped printed circuit boards without a smelter. Mint produced what HP calls the first certified closed-loop copper — metal recovered from HP's own end-of-life boards and returned to new HP laptops. Before Mint, Bedingfield spent seventeen years in metals and recycling at Novelis, Tri-Arrows Aluminum and Wieland, where he built a $100 million-plus secondary copper refinery in Kentucky and won a $270 million federal grant for a copper smelter that never got built.In this episode:- How batch-continuous hydrometallurgy makes a batch of copper traceable from a dead laptop to a new one- Why Mint doesn't recover rare earths — and where they actually end up- What a non-smelting metals plant looks like: tanks, vats and pumps, or "a microbrewery on steroids"- Why 900 US e-waste recyclers still send every board overseas- Fifteen months and $45 million versus seven years and $1 billion- The framing that makes recycling fundable under either partyGuest: Matt Bedingfield, Global CEO, Mint InnovationRare Earth Exchanges is accelerating transparency in the rare earth and critical minerals supply chain. New episodes weekly.🌐 https://rareearthexchanges.com🎧 Also on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple PodcastsDisclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.

Until now, every ton of Malaysian rare earth carbonate legally exported went to China. DTEC Mineral & Metal Technology says it now holds the first permit to send it to the United States: a 700-metric-ton allocation for R&D, with the first 30 tons scheduled to leave Penang on October 31, 2026.Milan Perlly, CEO of DTEC Mineral & Metal Technology, joins Dustin Olsen and Daniel O'Connor to explain how a year-old, majority U.S.-owned Malaysian startup got the permit, why Malaysia's ionic clays matter for heavy rare earths, and what Malaysia expects in return.In this episode:• How DTEC secured the first export permit for Malaysian rare earth carbonate to the U.S.• Why the ministry required DTEC to buy the carbonate before it would consider the permit• How Malaysia's states control mining rights while the federal government controls exports• Why the Lynas plant in Malaysia doesn't process Malaysian rare earths• DTEC's plan for licensed separation technology and a midstream plant in MalaysiaGuest: Milan Perlly, CEO, DTEC Mineral & Metal Technology Sdn BhdRare Earth Exchanges is accelerating transparency in the rare earth and critical minerals supply chain. New episodes weekly.🌐 https://rareearthexchanges.com🎧 Also on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple PodcastsDisclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.

If China cut off rare earths tomorrow, would the West cope? John Parkinson, who builds the REEx Rankings, says no: "if China was to switch off now, the world would stop."In this Q4 update, Dustin Olsen and Daniel O'Connor sit down with John Parkinson, Chief Business Officer at Rare Earth Exchanges, to walk through the October REEx Rankings. Miners are advancing into construction while processing has barely moved, and John says Neo's magnet plant in Estonia is now producing, which lifted Neo in the rankings. The update also adds a brand-new ranking of rare earth recyclers. John also takes on a market puzzle: why a fully funded project can reach its final investment decision and still see its share price fall.In this episode:- Why processing and separation are still the bottleneck, and why John thinks governments are funding the wrong end of the supply chain- Arafura reached FID and moved into construction, so why did the market punish it? (John discloses he holds Arafura shares)- Lynas's bid for Meteoric Resources and the push into Brazilian heavy rare earths- The heavy rare earths the REEx Rankings don't cover, and how John says China produces them once a year- The new REEx recycling rankings, and why John sees recycling supplying no more than about 5% of ex-China needs over the next five years- The milestones to watch next, from Pensana's financing to an ex-China pricing mechanismGuest: John Parkinson, Chief Business Officer, Rare Earth ExchangesDisclosure: John Parkinson stated on this episode that he is a shareholder of Arafura Rare Earths.Rare Earth Exchanges is accelerating transparency in the rare earth and critical minerals supply chain. New episodes weekly.🌐 https://rareearthexchanges.com🎧 Also on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple PodcastsDisclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.

Anthony Hall says Osmond Resources will be the only project in the world that gets its rare earths for free. The zircon and titanium in the same rock pay for the mine, and the rare earths come out as a bonus. He also says the EU today extracts none of those minerals at all.Anthony Hall is Managing Director and CEO of Osmond Resources (ASX: OSM), a Spanish critical minerals company listed in Australia, developing the Orión project in Jaén province, Andalucía. He has run three listed mining companies and took the first two from IPO into the ASX 300.One deposit carries rare earths, zirconium and titanium at once. Hall explains why Brussels has moved slower than Washington, and what the Técnicas Reunidas partnership gives Osmond. He also makes the case that the endgame here is robots.In this episode:- Why Osmond calls its rare earths free, and what has to be true for that to hold- Hall's account of European extraction today, and the domestic-supply target the Critical Raw Materials Act sets for 2030- Why 27 member states make EU subsidy support so hard, and why Spain and Andalucía matter more to him- The $16 billion that went into robotics in six months, and what it needs out of a mine- Why permitting is the one risk he names, and how an underground mine with no surface tailings changes his oddsGuest: Anthony Hall, Managing Director and CEO, Osmond ResourcesRare Earth Exchanges is accelerating transparency in the rare earth and critical minerals supply chain. New episodes weekly.🌐 https://rareearthexchanges.com🎧 Also on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple PodcastsDisclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.