Rare Earth Exchanges

In 1973, the oil embargo hit the West like a car crash — sudden, loud, impossible to miss. China's control of critical minerals is the opposite: it's cancer. It grew for thirty years, and most of the West only noticed once it started to hurt.

Tomasz Nadrowski is a portfolio manager at Amvest Terraden, where he runs an equity strategy that starts with geopolitics, and the author of "Mineral War: China's Quest for Weapons of Mineral Destruction." He argues this is not a trade dispute and not a competition. It is a war in the strict Clausewitz sense: it became one the moment the West finally reacted. Dustin and Daniel dig into how the monopoly got built, why the West handed it over, and the one Chinese advantage he believes the West can actually beat.

In this episode:
- Why monopoly in commodities is normal — and weaponization is the line China crossed
- The push factor nobody talks about: Western capital markets refused to fund the midstream for forty years, and the G7 flagged the risk back in 2003
- Lynas's Kuantan capex came in roughly a third higher for one reason — you can no longer buy Chinese equipment
- Cost of capital is the one Chinese advantage the West can beat; cheap labor, cheap land, a managed currency and subsidies are not winnable
- What a German carmaker's procurement chief told him in Frankfurt: "we will always buy from the cheapest source"
- Why downstream OEMs out-lobby the mining industry, and how that already killed critical-minerals policy twice
- It is not just magnets: inverters, capacitors, coating hardware, refining equipment, legacy chips, track-laying machines
- The 14th Five-Year Plan's innovation centers, and why what gets invented in China now stays in China
- DNA sequencing costs 500 to 1,000 dollars in the West; China subsidizes it to 50
- Externalizing the US tax code so American capital can fund Australian and Canadian projects, and harmonizing tariffs by HS code instead of blunt country-wide actions
- Why China's decision to apply its restrictions worldwide, rather than only to the US, may have been its biggest strategic error

Guest: Tomasz Nadrowski, CFA, Portfolio Manager, Amvest Terraden

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 Podcasts

Disclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.

For years the rule in rare earths was simple: nobody cracks allanite. American Rare Earths says it just did — at Halleck Creek, Wyoming, the largest known rare earth deposit in North America.
Melissa Sanderson, director at American Rare Earths and co-chair of the Critical Minerals Institute, returns to Rare Earth Exchanges to catch Dustin Olsen and Daniel O'Connor up on a fast six months: a pilot plant with the Saskatchewan Research Council, a planned NASDAQ listing by year-end, a $456M EXIM Bank letter of interest, a $7.1M Wyoming state grant, and new heavy-rare-earth finds. Then the harder truth — the technical problems are largely solved, and the one risk that remains is capital.
In this episode:
Why hard-rock allanite was considered impossible — and what Wyoming's Red Mountain Pluton changed
The $456M EXIM letter of interest and the $7.1M Wyoming grant behind the push to production
Why samarium and yttrium make Halleck Creek's deposit exceptional
Why capital — not geology or permitting — is now the number-one risk
The hidden costs (insurance, supply cuts, China's November deadline) buyers still aren't counting
Guest: Melissa Sanderson, Director, American Rare Earths; Co-Chair, Critical Minerals Institute
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 Podcasts
Disclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.

Malaysia is sitting on an estimated 16.1 million tons of rare earths, but roughly 70% of it lies inside permanent forest reserves — and the country's own fragmented governance may keep it from capitalizing on the rest.
Dr. Tricia Yeoh, Director of the Asian Institute for Policy and Engagement at the University of Nottingham Malaysia, joins Dustin Olsen and Daniel O'Connor to unpack her ISEAS paper, Ambition Without Alignment. She explains how land, licenses, and royalties sit with Malaysia's states while exports and security sit with the federal government — and why those two levels are increasingly pulling in different directions as foreign governments negotiate state by state.
In this episode:
Why an estimated 70% of Malaysia's rare earths sit inside protected forest reserves
How Malaysia's federal-state split divides control over land, royalties, and exports
The three policy bottlenecks stalling the midstream and downstream
Why the raw-rare-earth export ban both protects value and deters upstream explorers
Why the case for a dedicated national rare earth office keeps getting stronger
Why "pick the US or China" is the wrong question — and Malaysia's answer is "both"

Guest: Dr. Tricia Yeoh, Director, Asian Institute for Policy and Engagement (AIPE), University of Nottingham Malaysia
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 Podcasts
Disclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.

The conversation about America's rare earth ambitions usually centers on ore, mines, and processing capacity. Professor Aaron Noble — department head of Mining & Minerals Engineering at Virginia Tech — argues the real ceiling is people.
Aaron joins Dustin and Daniel to explain why talent is the most overlooked link in the critical minerals supply chain, why tiny markets stall investment, and how a $10M Department of Energy project is mapping Appalachia's critical mineral endowment.
In this episode:
The "cake" analogy — why rare earths are the cinnamon and nutmeg of the materials economy, and the second layer nobody talks about
The negative feedback loop that stalls rare earth R&D: tiny markets get tiny investment
The 200-vs-10,000 engineering gap and what it means over a 30-year horizon
Inside the $10M DOE "Expand Appalachia" critical-minerals mapping project
Why the Aclara Resources demonstration plant on campus is really an investment in people

Guest: Aaron Noble, Professor & Department Head, Mining & Minerals Engineering, Virginia Tech
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 Podcasts
Disclaimer: Educational and informational content only. Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, or tax advice.

Less than 1% of the world's rare earths are recycled — and a Cornell spinout thinks engineered bacteria can change that. In this episode, Dustin Olsen talks with Alexa Schmitz, CEO and co-founder of REEgen, about using bioleaching to recover rare earth elements from catalytic-converter slag, the waste left behind after recyclers harvest platinum and palladium.

Alexa explains how REEgen's biological leaching solution pulls up to 98% of the rare earths out of slag that's 3–3.5% rare earth by weight, why biomining already produces about 20% of the world's copper, and the tradeoff between maximum recovery and real-world economics. She also shares what it was like to be one of 12 founders invited to the White House after China restricted heavy rare earth exports — and why she believes a secure supply chain has to be international, not purely domestic.

A microbiologist-turned-founder on turning industrial waste into a domestic rare earth supply.