Mountain Pass rare earth mine

There is exactly one operating rare earth mine in the United States.

Mountain Pass sits in the California desert, just off Interstate 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

It didn't start mining for magnets.

It started out mining for color television.

[upbeat music] I bought color TV.

The entire rare earth market back in the '50s was europium, and that's because europium offered the red phosphor that was becoming very popular in color television.

The red in America's first color television sets came out of that desert, and for decades, Mountain Pass helped make the United States a global leader in rare earths.

Then, slowly, the economics changed.

And there's no money on the planet as dumb as government money.

$400 million into Mountain Pass, which has been bankrupt three times in my career.

My preference would be that rather than subsidizing mining, and processing, that the U.S. government got out of the way and let it occur.

We talk about Chinese dominance of the copper business.

At the same time, a relatively new company centered around a mine 45 minutes west of Las Vegas was hoping to expand into more vertically integrated operation.

MP Materials was formed in 2017 to purchase the Mountain Pass mine out of bankruptcy.

Mountain Pass is one of only four known or rich sources of rare earth elements in the world, with two in China and one in Australia.

Rare earth elements are common throughout the earth's crust, but rarely concentrated enough to make them commercially viable.

The Mountain Pass mine has a refinery right next door that processes the raw ore into concentrates that can then be used downstream for production of an array of products including magnets, batteries, solar panels, LEDs, MRIs, and even refining crude oil.

GM approached MP about purchasing material to have made into permanent magnets for motors, something that was only available from China at the time.

Ultimately, with an agreement from GM to purchase magnets, MP Materials established a magnetics division and built a factory in Fort Worth, Texas that I visited this week.

MP also has production deals with Apple and the Department of Defense.

But you mentioned you started with the importance of Nevada in the critical mineral space.

And I'm thinking about Mountain Pass, which is one of the very few rare earth mines we have, just a stone store from here in Vegas.

Right.

are you seeing any new funding opportunities coming out of the Department of War or maybe Department of Energy for states that are, I mean, we're unique, but we're not alone, that we have a very unique role in overall national security.

I've also talked about in my lithium ion bowl that Rag Udd, the incoming CEO of Albemarle, is a 30-year BHP lifer, right? So he's a mining guy bringing mining mentality.

And King's Mountain for lithium was like Mountain Pass for rare earths.

historically, you know, and might album wall, which dewatered the pit in March, the King's mountain mine pit, and also got, I think, federal fast 41 permitting for King's mountain.

Right.

Yes, it's rare to be able to mine them in an economical way.

There's one producing rare earth mine in North America, or in the United States at least, it's the Mountain Pass Mine in California.

It's near the Nevada border, up in the high Mojave Desert.

between Las Vegas and LA towards the...