Energy and Environmental Research Center

I see Carol sitting out there now, too, helping me understand what the job was, doing a good job, I hope, as a team when we were there, and how it was fascinating this morning to see the continued work of the Lignite now working with rare earth elements, The PSC gave out their awards earlier today, and so a huge thank you to all of you for what you do for the state, and on a personal side, it was very important.

And then you transcend to fortunate enough to work at the EERC.

You've all heard the quote where Teddy Roosevelt says, if it wasn't for his time in North Dakota, he never would have been president.

Well, I'm gonna change that.

If it wasn't for the time with the EERC and Charlie Gorecki, I don't think I'd be president of Bismarck State.

And I mean that, right? Because the time that I spent at ERC was a different perspective.

Working on the research and development side, working on with the college atmosphere, understand that relationship of business and moving the research pendulum forward.

Our bread and butter will always be North Dakota.

Now as we've got closer and closer to commercialization, it becomes more and more interesting, the things that we can possibly do with it.

And that's kind of how we've got started into this with AmeriCarbon and then with EERC, with MicroBeam, with UND and other companies and facilities that are working on in this area.

We've been involved in a lot of stuff and And I keep pushing our group and I keep pushing everybody I talk to.

The research is great.

its figure was 1.3 trillion tons.

And so when we first started 10 years ago, there was maybe a couple hundred samples to characterize the rare earth concentrations across 1.3 trillion tons of coal.

So now, and not just us, the 2,500 samples that we have now, but the work that the mines have been doing, UND, EERC, Microbeam has done characterization work.

I think now we're at the point where probably the best characterized basin as far as the critical mineral contents of what we have here.

Mike comes to this race, as you all know, with a career deeply rooted in energy research, technology, and public policy.

His experience includes the EERC, Babcock and Wilcox, and he spent nearly a decade leading research and development work for the Lignite Energy Council.

Mike has spent years working around public policy and policy makers, and while he often jokes he doesn't get the politics behind things, and I tease him that he gets them better than most people, this year he decided to become a candidate himself.

So Mike, can you tell us a little bit about yourself District 43, your connection to the industry, and what made you decide to run this year?

It can be an economic development opportunity for an entire region.

We asked the EERC to put real numbers behind that opportunity.

Their analysis showed that a project on the scale of either a 100 megawatt critical mineral processing facility or a 400 megawatt data center could generate approximately $4.5 million every year in property tax revenue for the host county.

That's four and a half million dollars every year and think about what that could mean in a rural county.