good day folks Michael from GE investor insights bringing you another episode and today we're going to kick off our Rare Earth coverage by talking about I guess just some fundamental principles that you should be aware of if you're considering investing in rare earth Junior exploration companies now uh the rare earth industry is a relatively new industry rare Earths have been produced out of countries like China and Myanmar for for the last 20 odd years uh and they've been done very cheap and very efficiently however those countries are running out of rare earth and uh globally they're in high demand and have been identified as a critical mineral for Australia for the US for the US uh sorry for the UK and pretty much all Western Nations uh as a part of that identification critical mineral it's also been identified that not only do we need Supply but we also need to we also need the uh refining and then also the ability to manufacture that refined product as as well all three of these areas we uh in the west are particularly behind uh China and a lot of people speculate that perhaps we're about 20 years behind in our understanding of how to mine manufacture sorry mine process and manufacture um these rare earth materials now to give you a quick heads up of why magnet rare Earths are important if you have a magnet that's made made with magnet Rare Earth it has a 40% stronger magnetic field so anything which is required uh magnetics to operate you know you think about wind turo wind turbines things like this um having 40% more efficiency through um simply through the elements that your magnet is made out of is extremely important and magnets are hugely important in almost all green technologies now the first thing I want you to be aware of and keep in mind is there's really three different types of rare Earths or Rare Earth deposits um which you may come across uh one is a hard dep deposit these are normally associated with um carbonatites and things like this this is like what company Linus has and mount Weld and things like that that's not what we're really going to focus on here because a lot of people especially in the junior exploration space are really focusing on uh what's called ionic rare Earths or clay rare Earths all right clay hosted rare Earths so the next thing is ionic Rare Earth this is really important and this is the big area of potential growth and this is really what all Junior explorers are often out looking for at the moment so ionic rare Earths are um Rare Earth elements which have been broken down by the weathering process liberated and have been mobilized through the ground and then they're bound to other elements really quite Loosely all right so other rocks other Clays Clays in the in the weathering profile through cation exchange capacity and other mechanisms they're binding the rare earth to them but they're not binding the rare Rare Earth within the mineral complex or within the mineral structure so if you just think that the rare earth um element is just hanging On Loosely to the existing rock or clay right it's just bound there it's not actually been incorporated into the Matrix of the the rock or the clay material at all this is super important because it means under the right conditions ionic rare Earths are really cheap and efficient to liberate it's very easy to introduce a solution to that rock or that clay and it will just just um kick that that rare earth off that clay right and liberate it and it'll be mobile and you can extract it again now the other type of rare earth occurrence is Clay hosted Rare Earth and um this is probably the most common occurrence and it's not so easy to distinguish especially as a a retail investor the difference between a clay hosted rare earth or an ionic Rare Earth deposit and in fact a lot of companies will unknowingly um announce that they have an on ionic Rare Earth Discovery whereas their rare Earths are really clay hosted Rare Earth so we'll talk about that a little bit more and I'll tell you what to look out for but it is important to know the difference the main difference is is that with ionic those Rare Earth elements are mobile and they're easily separated from the host whatever they're found in um clay hosted rare deposits the uh rare Earths are normally bound up in a few different phases and styles of rare earth occurrence within those Clays uh they might be in Remnant mineraly so some minerals are really resistant to weathering so over time the more something weathers the more you get an accumulation of these uh weathering resistant minerals and those weathering resistant minerals have um rare Us in them so this could be a mineral like monite for example which is often found in place of deposits right where it's been washed away and stored and accumulated in a Sandy sort of environment and it's just a testament to how weathering resistant monite is which is also a a rare Earth mineral so this can accumulate in the clayes and then through that accumulation you end up with anomalous Rare Earth the rare earth also can be bound up by Iron so basically in Iron cement it's a it's a lattice work which it's a submicron level it's extremely small you can't see it but it sort of just interlaces all of your clay minerals as well and there's a lot of rare Earth that are bound up in that Matrix and then the third component is there is often a small ionic component as well so if you have a clay hosted Rare Earth deposit it's usually going to be uh all of the the total sum of the rare earth in the clay hosted deposit are going to be divided amongst those three different categories and I'll tell you sort of why that's important next all right so before we go into any more detail about the difference between say ionic and Clay hosted and some things to look out for what you can keep an eye out for for I just want to talk generally about the overall grade of rare Earths and something else that the industry probably needs to start doing um but also as an investor you need to start looking for and if you can't find the information it's what you need to start asking for now traditionally uh a cut off of about 300 PPM Trio so T EO so that's um total Rare Earth oxide that's an acronym for total Rare Earth oxide is what people have generally gone off as what's a significant intercept of rare earth and when I say significant intercept what I'm talking about is the absolute bare bottom of the barrel that makes something anomalous now the trick here is that it's not necessarily true so that number 300 PPM really sort of origin originated out of China where they have a lot of ionic Rare Earth deposits or they had and it was essentially just a case where you had these rare Earths that were bound up in the Clays um at the top of these Granite Hills and in China you know with cheap labor and also cheap products and also very little um environmental conditions they could basically just pump acid or very very weak acid uh into the hilltop it would just percolate through they collect it out the bottom and all of the rare earth would come with it right and so in methods of mining like that okay you can get away with a very very low grade and it's economic it's certainly economic for them to do that in China so you often see companies that will say well 300 PPM is our intercept and this is what we've used as our bottom cut off for anything that's worth reporting anything under that we don't really we don't really look at but what you need to be aware of is that not all of the rare earth are valuable at all all right and in fact Serum is that's um uh CE right is so CE is serum and it is the most abundant Rare Earth and it's also the least valuable all right if you just basically think CE when you think about serium just think it's trash all right it has no value and it's useless and um if you could you would you you probably wouldn't even you know produce it in your oxide right but when you produce your Rare Earth oxide you can't really separate out the elements at least not at the early stages anyways so because it's the most abundant and it's the most worthless in most cases generally it will account for about 50% of the rare earth in your sample now that's not a a true hard rule because it does vary and how the CE varies in your sample is extremely important to the nature of the actual Rare Earth that you have but I want you to be aware of this because when a company is um announcing that they've got a 1,000 PPM Trio what they might really be saying is I've got 500 PPM of valuable rare earth or or of rare earth with any value okay so generally when you're looking at a rare So internally when you're looking at a rare earth deposit as a geologist and you're thinking okay and you're trying to work out how much value I have here right and the distribution of the rare earth you're really working with a value which we call Trio minus CE right so it's the the total Rare Earth oxide amount minus the serum because we know that the serum is Just Junk right it's not important um and it's really important that companies start to um I guess include this number in the asex announcements as well right because you might think oh wow this is really high grade it's you know 2,000 PPM but if it's over 50% CE you know all of a sudden it's only 750 PPM actual valuable Rare Earth and 1,250 trash right but you just all people see in the market is just a it's it's a high Trio value right so it is kind of important that you sort of know what you're looking at so if you see a uh someone reporting with a cut off of 300 PPM uh that's nothing to be honest with you what is a significant cut off is 300 PPM Trio minus CE right if you see numbers like that then that is a that that starts to get towards what you'd consider in a clay Hoster deposit or an ionic rare deposit that's sort of when you look at those numbers and you start to think okay where in where at the bottom of an economic cuto off now being 300 PPM Trio minus CE right so I want you to keep that in mind if you come across a company um that's talking about rare Earths then and they haven't um put any details of their Trio minus CE then I suggest that you get on the phone give them a call send them an email and ask them the question um and that will give you a much better idea of the value there now in my experience so far I would say that 300 PPM minor CE Trio is still too low um it's probably um it's certainly worth mentioning and it's certainly significant all right but as far as what I personally be looking for as as economic intercepts um for a place for me to put my money in I'll be looking at 500 to 750 PPM minus C right that's that's good right in in Clays and or ionic right that's really quite important now this concept of Trio minor CE is really quite important it can be a strong indicator as well of the type of mineralization that you've got there now I'll explain the difference between clay hosted and ionic Rare Earth um I'll elaborate a little bit more and um I'll I'll try to keep this simple um um but essentially it's almost impossible for a company to know when they first intercept Rare Earth whether they have ionic rare earth or whe they have Clay hosted rare Earths and inexperienced and um Junior explorer who doesn't really know what they're doing in The Rare Earth space might make an an intersection of anomalous rare Earths in drill holes and they might and this is a Telltale sign and if they come out and announce just straight away that they have ionic rare Earths they don't know what they're talking about all right and that should be your first red flag and your first warning sign okay um because you can't know if your rare Earths are ionic or not just simply from drill intercepts you really need to do U metallurgical recovery tests to know if they're ionic or not and then and and that's probably not the thing that you're going to do so you're going to get your drill intercepts first you're going to find that you've got the anomalous rare Earths you're going to it takes you time to get your actual assays back and then once you have those then you're going to go send those off a recovery test potentially and then you're going to get your result and then you're going to have your first indications if it's ionic or not so how will you know if it's ion ionic or not well to liberate the rare Earths from an ionic uh deposit you really need a very weak acid you only need a very very weak acid so um an mildly acidic solution maybe of a pH of say four so ph4 is classic but ph3 is probably okay as well uh if and if you put your drill material in a a weekly acidic solution it will kick the rare earth off the Clays in half an hour right and your your rarus will be liberated and in solution so it's low acid and it's very fast recovery right that's the main things that you need to know to to say okay it's ionic if you use anything stronger than a pH of three or four and any timeline longer as well well the odds are is that your Rare Earth are actually bound up in Remnant minerals or in the iron oxides which bind your clay or you know some other means right um now there's a problem with this this is where one of the big problems with Clay hosted rare Earth come into it and this is where we're so far behind well we're not so far behind but this is where we've got so far to go let me put it that way so the key to rare Earths being economic is they have to be super super cheap to extract right this is really really important so you don't want to have to use a lot of acid right so you need a a a weak acid solution um and then you don't want to have to leech the material for a long time as well all right because this can also impact your acid um consumption your power consumption everything so you just want to put a super weak solution onto it and recover your rear R really really quickly and then it works as soon as you have to increase the strength of your acid so you're using more acid which is quite expensive and or use your increase your time as well the less economic that it's going to get but the big problem really is is that once you get above a pH of three and I would argue that it this occurs even at a pH of 3 as well you start to get what's called Gang minerals in your solution so gang minerals are just um other minerals which are in the rock or in the clay which you don't want to extract essentially so the these most common ones are um Iron Iron and aluminium once your pH gets to say pH of 2 or pH of 1 you're going to get uh your rare earth or certainly a portion of your rare Earth's liberated but you're also going to liberate all of your iron and aluminium as well well not all of sor but a lot of iron and aluminium as well which means that your your extract is not pure anymore and the bad thing is unfortunately is that when you then take your solution and try and precipitate out your Rare Earth oxide right your Rare Earth from that that acidic solution iron and aluminium precipitates out of that solution basically at the exact same point of that rare earth do so the oxide that you produce is impure right and it's really not something you can Market or something you can sell cell or something you can do anything with so that's one problem the other problem is that um even at a pH of one for example you may not get much of your actual Rare Earth out of the solution and in this instance what it's telling you is that the rare Earths are mostly bound up in very resilient minerals such as monite okay so you can soak monite in a pH of one acid all the time and you know it's never going to liberate its its rare Earths so if you have let's say you've got 1,000 PPM um minus C right and it's all in monite your Trio value would likely be something like 2,000 PPM Trio right but minus CE it's going to be say 1,000 you're going to leech that at a pH of 1 get no Real Recovery um or get a very low recovery and the recovery that you get is going to be impure because you've got a lot of aluminium and iron with it and the stuff that you haven't leeched that that hasn't come out is cuz it's bound up in monoy now the Metallurgy involved in trying to recover rare Earths from clay hosted deposits not ionic rare deposits but clay hosted deposits is quite tricky and there are some things you can do um with the chemistry um with the makeup of the acid with the time that you leech for with the temperature with all with the beneficiation with all of these different things that you can try and play with different parameters to try and improve your results but essentially we really need to make some significant um inroads into our Metallurgy these types of deposits before they can become economic at this point um if we can work out a very efficient way that we can leech Clays that are higher or a lower pH I should I should say um and then remove the aluminum and the iron from the uh solution prior to precipitating out the rare earth and that would be amazing right that would that would absolutely be amazing but at the moment we're not quite there so when you're looking for a rare earth company to invest in and even though a lot of the money of the market and the rare earth boom has largely dropped off at the moment this is when I typically it's just like a lot like lithium I think you know the lithium price crashes the investment money globally sort of disappears a fair bit for it lithium companies drop this is probably the best time to invest in a good company um because in 3 or 4 years times when when times when it turns around you know you're going to really be able to capitalize on your investment and I think it's the same at the moment for Rare Earth as well the other additional um positive of looking into the rare space at this time is that a lot of companies which really didn't know what they're doing and we're just trying to jump on the bandwagon of rare Earths uh now that the money's not there and there's no interest in those projects you'll see that they will have stopped work on their Rare Earth deposits or their Rare Earth projects right it's it's gone um the Market's not interested in it like immediately and so they didn't have that good a project anyways and so it's just sort of done and dusted they'll just trying to milk it while while they could but if there's a company that at the moment is still still continuing to develop their Rare Earth deposits they've got metalurgy which shows and proves that it can be economic so example um uh they've been able to extract ph's from the sorry PHS at Rare Earth from the ground at a pH of three or four then that's excellent um they're they're reporting things as far as Trio minus CE things like that then um that would be a company that I'd be taking a good look at and have a lot of potential for the future because despite the current I guess lack of want in the market for Rare Earth at the moment the global demand for Rare Earth has not gone anywhere right um there's a bit of a disconnect between the Strategic interests of the West uh and what the market and where the money from the market is going at the moment so um that's all all well and good so in summary I'll just say these are some things to watch out for these are some red flags uh companies that announced they found ionic rare Earths you know straight after drilling without doing any metalurgy work or publishing any metal jle work or recovery tests or anything like that companies that are announcing a high recovery rate using a very strong acid right that's an indication that um well two things maybe they only used a strong acid to start with that can happen you start there and then you work your way back um or alternatively you only got a good response with a strong acid right that's a red flag because you should be getting a strong response with low PH with phes of three and four and should be quite quick that's what you want to see um if people aren't actually revealing the details of the acid acid that they've used as far as the pH or even the type of acid as well sulfuric acid or whatever it is that's important as well some people are saying things like we used weak acaria we've used you know acaria diet whatever it is these this is a really strong acid all right this and by the metrics of rare earth recovery things like this don't make any sense all right so if companies are announcing those sorts of things the results that they've got associated with it are likely just going to be garbage right you can use a super strong acid and recover all of your Rare Earth but you'll recover every other mineral I sorry every other element as well at the same time and you've just got a whole bunch of crap in solution it's the same you know companies if a company produces an oxide and doesn't give you any indication of the purity of that oxide they say oh we've got an oxide well big freaking deal because anyone can produce an oxide but if it's got no value if if no one's going to buy it off you right because it's impure because it's filled with gang elements so yeah watch out for companies which don't know what they're doing by just saying it's ionic straight away uh watch out for companies that are just announcing big grades without giving you what the trio minor CE is because that's what we really care about the variable rare Earths um a positive thing to look out for is um companies that have a high ratio of heavy Rare Earth to light Rare Earth that's important that's a good indicator as well that it could be ionic and also look out for companies that are talking about um really large scale lowgrade rare Earths where they're using say a a cut off of 300 PPM but it's not P 300 PPM minus CE right just be sort of wary of that um you really got to try and get your head around these sorts of things before you invest in them and it's okay to ask these companies for more information as well so over the next uh a few weeks probably a month or so um we're going to review a couple of rare earth companies Junior explorers in this space uh I'm going to go through the data that's publicly available on their websites as well and uh and just give my opinion of what I think is good and what I think is bad if there are any companies that you'd like me to have a look at uh please leave a comment below um and just FYI as well I do have a significant amount of experience in this space um when it comes to Rare Earth Cs and last but not least if um you have found this video to be of some value please remember to like And subscribe new channel and um yeah every every subscription helps immensely and every like really helps with the algorithm and helps get around to more people so please share this to people that you know people that you like anyone that might find some interest in it and hit the like button and please subscribe so until next time uh thanks you for watching