Pub 9 2021 Issue 1

this critical mineral in 2019. Vanadium is used in steel, aerospace, chemicals, and emerging grid-scale battery technologies. But here’s the really exciting part; in the last year, we’ve discovered a significant new opportunity at the mill, perhaps the biggest opportunity in the history of the White Mesa Mill and perhaps even San Juan County, Utah. Our core business is, of course, uranium. But it turns out that one of the highest-value rare earth minerals in the world, monazite, also contains significant quantities of uranium. The uranium must be removed from monazite ore before it can be further processed for rare earths. This is where we fit in. We have a long history of responsibly handling and recovering uranium from a variety of feeds. So, we are in the perfect position to process monazite ore for the recovery of rare earths and uranium from monazite. In fact, we have been told that we might be the “missing link” in bringing rare earth production back to the U.S. We are already processing monazite ore at the mill on a pilot scale and producing an on-spec intermediate rare earth product. We expect to reach commercial levels of production equal to close to 10% of U.S. rare earth demand in 2021. In fact, we are more advanced than any other company in the U.S. in bringing the rare earth supply chain back to the U.S. And it’s happening here in southeast Utah. Has your business focus shifted completely to rare earth mineral processing? Not at this point. Our focus is uranium, and we also produce vanadium and do uranium and vanadium recycling. But because of our expertise and experience with uranium, we are better suited than any other U.S. com- pany to be on the front lines of bringing rare earth processing back to the United States. Monazite ore is currently being mined in Georgia at heavy mineral sand operations owned by The Chemours Company, which was spun off from DuPont in 2015. Monazite is also mined in Australia, South America and Africa. These miners typically sell their monazite to China, which recognizes the extremely high value of this mineral. Chinese companies process it and make rare earth products that they export to the United States — and the rest of the world — as manufactured products like electric vehicles, wind turbines, electric motors, cell phones, computers, flat-panel displays, advanced optics, and the like. Their ability to process rare earth minerals like monazite is part of the reason that China controls 80%-90% of the world’s supply of rare earths. Energy Fuels will never supplant China in rare earths, nor do we aspire to. However, we believe we can create a low-cost U.S. supplier of rare earths, with production that is much more environmentally and socially responsible than China. What are rare earth minerals? Rare earth minerals are a series of 17 ele- ments on the periodic table that are used in a variety of clean energy and advanced tech- nologies. Rare earth minerals can be found in cell phones, electric vehicles, electric motors, flat panel displays, medical equipment and military applications, from missile guidance to advance optics. For instance, an F-35 fighter jet uses nearly 1,000 pounds of rare earth minerals in its construction. However, we pro- duce no intermediate or end use rare earth products in the U.S. now, which is a major concern, in particular for the U.S. military. Will the operation in Blanding only process monazite for rare earths? We expect to mainly process monazite. It’s one of the most coveted rare earth bearing minerals in the world, with excellent distribu- tions of the highest-value individual rare earth elements, like neodymium and praseodym- ium used in permanent magnets, and “heavy” rare earths used in various specialty applica- tions. We are mainly focused on processing monazite because it contains uranium at concentrations similar to the typical western U.S. mine and very high concentrations of recoverable rare earths. There are five steps involved in processing monazite to produce rare earths. First, the monazite ore needs to be mined. The next step is to recover the uranium and other radionuclides and produce a clean rare earth concentrate — this is where we come in. Next comes rare earth separation, where you pro- duce individual rare earth oxides. Then, you go to metal-making and alloying, and finally magnet and other end-use manufacturing. We have a distinct advantage over other U.S. producers because we’re utilizing existing production and facilities for the first steps. This means we can save many years of licensing and construction, and hundreds of millions of dollars of capital, versus other domestic rare earth proposals trying to get V Continued on page 12 FOCUS 11