Transcript: How This Tech Can Break China’s Rare Earth Monopoly: Dr. James Tour

Your toaster, you have this coil that you put a voltage across it and you run this current through. But there’s enough resistance. That coil gets red hot very quickly. That’s flash joule heating. And it’s like the old incandescent light bulbs. And you see this big glow.

And what we learned is that we can put any carbon material between electrodes and flash joule heat it, turn it into graphene. Graphene is a space age material. And we started a company around that that’s up and going.

But then we realized that we could take certain materials, say industrial waste, like fly ash, which is the residue that’s left over after burning coal, the inorganic material. We could flash it and we could get rare earth elements to come out. And so we could do that. We get other metals from industrial waste and then also consumer waste, consumer electronics.

And you can put a high voltage, high current. And then we learned if you put chlorine in during the process, then they come out much more easily because you convert them from metal zero or metal oxides to metal chlorides, which are much more volatile. You lower the boiling point by 3,000 degrees and then they’ll come out.

And just based on the reactivity of a certain metal to chlorine at these higher temperatures, we can predict when they’re going to come out, and we can separate them coming out. So we developed this technology, we started doing this in 2020. We started doing this on metals.

And then it was after that that the metals that China put this kibosh on, sending us metals. And it became much more important. So I found myself in this very important area.

How the Process Works

JAN JEKIELEK: Okay, so let me get this straight. You’re taking electronic waste or tailings or something like this. You’re putting them between two plates. You’re putting a massive amount of current through it. Wait, you’re adding chlorine to lower the temperature that you do to get them this red hot, to separate everything out, and then you’re somehow collecting each metal chloride as it basically distills out. Do I understand it right?

DR. JAMES TOUR: You have it right. So what happens is when the chlorine comes in at these high temperatures, the chlorine will react with the metal oxides or the metal zero. By metal zero, I mean the base metal. You can have a metal oxide or a base metal and it will make the metal chloride and then the metal chlorides distill out.

And the thing we control is at what temperature are we heating this to react with the chlorine? And then at what temperature are we distilling it out? And based on those two parameters, we can separate. We can pull out one metal and then the next and the next and the next. So that’s right. It’s really that simple. It’s a very simple operation.

Now remember the rare earth elements, right? Now the plants that are separating rare earth elements are 500 meters long, is their process. Now it won’t be a building that long, you know, snake back and forth, but it has to traverse that long. This is much shorter, much shorter. And it will do it much faster than what’s traditionally used.

And we’re not bringing it through in water or acids, none of that. It’s just through this flashing process. So it’s much cleaner and much faster.

As you know, most wars are fought over resources. Water, oil, minerals. People fight over this and they kill each other over this. So when I was presenting this to a group of generals from NATO, and the head guy there, he stood up, he says, “This is going to prevent wars.” He says, “I don’t have to fight for this. Now if you can do this, if you can take our waste and be producing this for us, I don’t have to fight wars over this.”

And we can set up these factories. So the first factory is like $40 million, but it’s cheaper. The next factory we build because we’ve worked out all the technology. And so if we can put these together and they’re the small localized factories that are not generating a bunch of waste that China has absolutely contaminated some of their cities. I mean, it’s just toxic to live there because of the waste that normally comes from some of these processes.

Now you don’t have to run them that way. You can run a hydrometallurgical process and be very quite clean, but you have to be able to trap all these secondary wastes. These are clean, easy to set up, and that’s why we’re building these companies.

The first one is just outside of Houston in Texas. The next one, we have a site, pre-permanent site in Massachusetts. Another one in Virginia, because these are very clean. And we’ve been asked by the federal government to set up more of these entities around the country and think about this.

To be able to not be dependent upon other countries. Look at our presidency. He’s going from place to place setting up deals on rare earth elements here. He’s talking with Ukraine to say, “Hey, we’ll move in there with you and that will help prevent future wars.” I mean this is dangerous stuff and it’s expensive. But if we don’t have to do this, this is a win-win all around.

Electronic Waste as a Resource

JAN JEKIELEK: It’s sort of astonishing. I’ve been learning a bit about this particular process and big question, first of all is when you think of these circuit, let’s say circuit boards, right? This is an example of the type of waste that you’re using, right? There’s a lot of this stuff out there. I mean we’re shipping some of it, as I understand to Africa to basically waste, to landfill it. I don’t even know what they’re doing over there.

DR. JAMES TOUR: So we take this waste, electronic waste, a lot of it, we just ship to Africa and they will go through a number of processes to try to reclaim that metal. In many times it wasn’t worthwhile to us to try to do this. They will take it apart and do this. But things have changed and now there’s more money in it.

And so there’s a number of companies, but we have, for example, printed circuit boards. I’m not going to individual houses saying, “Would you give me your old cell phones?” These data centers. Every time you store something to the cloud, that is going to a data center that is storing in some flash drive on some chip somewhere and on a printed circuit board and they will retire these every one to three years.

So you have a huge number of these things that are made by many different manufacturers and so there’s mountains of these. And these are considered a toxic waste. Not by me, just by the government because there’s a lot of metals and you can’t just throw this in the trash, you can’t just easily landfill it.

And so there’s huge availability of this. And if you recycle it, metals are infinitely recyclable. So you can recycle it, recycle it again. And it’s just a matter of the traditional ways of purifying this were really messy. You needed a lot of acid, a lot of water, and you generated what was called secondary waste streams from all of this processing.

And the pyrometallurgical methods of just melting it all down wasn’t able to pull these individual metals out as well. And so our method turned out to be quite fruitful, much cleaner and much cheaper.

Cost and Environmental Benefits

JAN JEKIELEK: Okay, so wait a sec, cleaner, cheaper, what kind of numbers are we talking about here?

DR. JAMES TOUR: Well we always crunch the numbers. Now for any of the papers we publish we have to do what’s called a life cycle assessment and a techno economic analysis. So we have to look at greenhouse gas emissions, which is mainly CO2 emissions. We have to look at water usage, acid usage, chemical usage, and we have to look at it from the cradle to the gate to where we sell it or the cradle to grave where it’s ultimately going to be disposed of again. What’s the cost of this entire process?

And so we have to look at all of these parameters and the numbers that we get. We can often have less than 50% the amount of CO2 emission, sometimes just 10% the amount of CO2 emissions. Our costs are significantly less, many times 80% less, sometimes 50% less.

But, and then if we take into account, this is where we really win, if we take into account the shipping costs. So when something say is mined in Australia, Australia doesn’t process anything. This is a mining country. Then it is shipped, put on barges, goes to China where it’s processed and then from China it’s shipped to places like the United States.

So they’ll take the raw ore, which is just metal oxides, and they’ll convert it to the base metals all separated and then those come on barges to the US. So look at all that’s involved in the shipping. If we could just have it right here in the United States, we don’t have any of that shipping charge.

And a mining operation is huge. Just the capex in a new mining operation is $200 million. We could set up one of our factories for processing this material somewhere in the order of about $40 million. So five times difference based on that.

We don’t have that huge amount of shipping costs all over the world moving things back and forth. And we don’t have the shipping charge when we’re sending these off to Africa when we’re done. So if we’re looking at to the grave site, we save all of that. So overall it’s a very competitive business.

JAN JEKIELEK: I understand it’s something like 75% of these circuit boards are actually still in the consumer, at the consumer level, at homes and so forth. Is that right?

Breaking Down the Waste Challenge

DR. JAMES TOUR: Yes. So that’s always a problem when it comes to waste. How do you get it? Now the nice thing about the printed circuit boards from the data centers, there are mountains of this that they have. But the things that are in households, that’s always hard to get. That’s what makes the recycling of plastic very difficult. People have to throw their plastic away and then they’re hand sorted and things like that. It’s a difficult thing.

And plastics that have been recycled are never as good as the base plastic because a lot of these polymer chains break. Whereas with metals, you don’t have that. Metal goes to metal. They’re infinitely recyclable. They don’t go bad.

But yes, it’s accumulating. How do you get these things? But there are other sources that you’re not dependent upon that. So there’s things called tailings where there’s been mining operations. And there were things that just weren’t pure enough for them to go the next step. They had other impurities. They have huge ponds full of these things that are a nightmare for them because they have to maintain these ponds that have a plastic lining to make sure they don’t leach into the water system. Or they’re stacked up in piles and accumulated.

Those are just sitting there. That to us is a treasure because we can take those, bring them through this flashing process and bring them up from 20% purity, which might be unusable to them, to 95% purity in an instant. I mean, it takes us seconds to bring it up that high. And we use very little water and our only cost is electricity. But overall our electricity is much lower than the traditional processes. Because we’re so fast. We use a lot of electricity for a very short time. And overall our electricity usage is small.

JAN JEKIELEK: Let me understand this though. So it’s the same technology that you’re using for the tailings and for this recycle waste that you’re going to recycle from the consumer waste and from the data centers. I mean, is it still the same technology for just actual ore?

DR. JAMES TOUR: It’s the same technology for the actual ore. The problem with ores is they can be a thousand times lower concentration of the metals than what I can get in an electronic waste, in a consumer waste. And so I have to flash a thousand times more volume of material in order to get the same amount of metal.

It is much more profitable for us to not work off of ores. And the ores come from some mining operation where they’ve spent huge capital equipment to do mining and then transporting it here if that mine is outside the United States. Again, all this shipping charge. And then volume, it’s a volume problem.

I’d much rather work off of electronic waste where you might have a printed circuit board could be 25% metal, whereas an ore might be 1% metal. And so it’s just a big difference or less than 1% metal. So it’s much better. And so from an environmental standpoint it’s much better. From an energy standpoint, it’s much better. And if we can just think about using our waste and recycling it, it’s a good story all around.

Comparing Concentration Levels

JAN JEKIELEK: So the electronic waste is a thousand times more concentrated with these metals that we want compared to regular ore. What about the tailings?

DR. JAMES TOUR: The tailings can be quite high. It’s not as good as the electronic waste that I can get from a printed circuit board. But the tailings have already been pre-purified from the ores. So they’ve taken the ores and they’ve concentrated it and they have something that’s just not high enough for them to bring on the next step. They’d like to use it, but there’s too much other things in there. But it’s still a pre-concentrate.

JAN JEKIELEK: So what’s the catch here? I mean it seems like this is the perfect solution to actually getting the US up and running in terms of production of these metals.

Scaling Up the Technology

DR. JAMES TOUR: The catch here is that nobody’s ever done a process like this before. So we had to go from my laboratory where we start on 50 milligrams and then we bring it up to two or three grams. And then it has to go to where they’re going to be processing many tons a day. Twenty tons a day is what the projection is.

So they’ll start with a ton a day in January of 2026 and by September, October, they hope to be 20 tons a day of printed circuit boards. Where they would get some portion of that, maybe 2 tons per day to 4 tons per day of metals out of that.

So the catch is, how do you scale this? So we spent two years working with engineering companies to be able to scale up this process. And that was actually more than two years. Because on the graphene side, when we were making graphene, we spent from 2019 until 2025 before we hit the one ton a day mark. So we learned a lot doing that.

Then when we started the metal separation company, it took another two years for the chlorine introduction part and the separating of the metals from that, because it’s not exactly the same technology, it’s related to the graphene. But so it had to be developed, all of this had to be discovered.

Patent Protection Challenges

JAN JEKIELEK: So you hold these new patents. Are you worried anyone wants to get their hands on them?

DR. JAMES TOUR: Well, so the patents are all owned by the university. When we start these companies, we license that technology from the universities and we file patents broadly. We file it in Europe, we file in many parts of Asia, including China.

And patents, they give you protection, but you have to enforce that. Now there are domains and countries that violate these, especially if they consider it important for their economy, they will violate. They cannot sell it into the United States or they can’t technically sell it into anywhere where we have patent protection, but there are violations on that. And so sometimes you have to go to court to protect these things. So that’s a costly business.

But going into a country like China and trying to enforce your patents, first of all, it’s hard for me to get patents in China. They all know me in the patent office there. I patent a lot. I file one disclosure a month for the last 26 years. So there’s a lot of patents that I have.

And China, unless I have a Chinese partner, they’ll never approve my patent. They just give me the run around, give me office actions and slow walk this thing. And so it’s really not a fair process in some of these countries. And then it’s not just China. I mean, we don’t even bother filing patents in Russia because if you go to defend it, you get run over on your way to the courthouse or something. So we don’t even bother with Russia. But you try to gain some space and operating room as you can.

Long-Term Supply Potential

JAN JEKIELEK: How long would this waste, electronic waste, possibly last? Because we’re going to need a lot of this and we’re only going to need more and more year after year.

DR. JAMES TOUR: So because we have so many tailings all over the country from former mines that are sitting there, that are waste sites that have to be managed, and these waste sites they will gladly let you take it off their hands. They have to manage it, make sure it doesn’t get into the environment.

Now we can also deal off of other types of waste. We can deal off of what’s called red mud, which is bauxite residue. It’s the residue that’s left over after aluminum production. As far as the eye can see, you can see these red fields, big piles that are 10 feet high and just as far as the eye can see. This is hematite. It is iron mixed in with the aluminum and some titanium.

How do you get these? These are tailings, meaning that they’re too contaminated with iron to get at the aluminum that still resides in there. So we can just flash this in an instant. We pull out the iron, and that can then go right back into the normal aluminum purification. So we’re cleaning up waste sites, things that were too expensive. But when you make it so that it’s economical, you make money by cleaning up the site. Not only do they pay you to clean it up, then you take that material, you make money. That’s the only way to get these sites cleaned up.

So we have the red mud, and then we also have mountains of fly ash in this country. Fly ash is the inorganic residue from coal burning. So you burn coal, the carbon burns away. You’re left with the inorganic material. It’s aluminum, calcium, silicon, and then it has other metals in it. So we can get these metals out. We’ve demonstrated it.

Now, I would rather work off of electronic waste because it has a higher percentage of the metals that I want, but we’ve demonstrated it. So you have these huge waste facilities that are there. So we could run for a long time based on this.

But if we had to supplement these wastes with ores, we might use ores, but I would rather get their tailings because the tailings for me are useful. So, for example, even in lithium mining, again, lithium is a critical metal. We need it for all our lithium ion batteries. Every electric vehicle, every cell phone has lithium.

So the tailings, a lot of times the particles are too small for them to deal with. That doesn’t affect me at all. I can run off the small particles, so I can take the things that have no value to them and use them. There are other mines that have the rare earth elements, but not as oxides. In these mines, they’ll be as phosphates. That’s useless to them. It’s hard for them to process the rare earth element phosphates. Doesn’t bother this process.

We can take what is to them useless material and turn it into good material. And so it takes off the table this idea of we’ve got to get our elements, because if we can’t get these, if really we can’t get these, there will be wars fought over this, I can guarantee you that.

A Patriotic Element

JAN JEKIELEK: The one thing that strikes me here is that this is also something that Americans could actually be rallied around because there is a lot of this electronic waste at home, for example. And I think these export controls which the Chinese Communist Party threatened America and frankly the entire west with, were kind of a crystallizing moment. At least I hope that they were a crystallizing moment. So I wonder if this doesn’t even have a kind of a patriotic element to it.

Breaking China’s Rare Earth Monopoly Through Recycling

DR. JAMES TOUR: Yes. If you could tell people that if you take your electronics that you’re getting rid of and you put them in a certain container to be carted off, this is patriotic. I mean, that would be a further incentive for people to do it.

So these things are there, but also what we’re getting from the Trump administration is we’re getting a guaranteed floor price. So they’re saying, we will pay you X amount for your rare earth elements. Because what will happen is this is the way some countries operate. So they don’t like us developing this business. They will artificially lower their price in a way that we could never compete and drive us out of business.

As soon as we’re out of business, they will raise the price back up. So what the US Government is already doing, preemptively saying, we will guarantee you this price. And it’s not really the US Government supplementing it. It is. That’s the price that it’s going to ultimately be sold for.

And so by doing this, they will allow us to get this start that we won’t be driven out of business. So we’re getting actually a lot of help and consideration from the US Government to say, hey, we really have to do this. This is an important thing for the country. And we offshored so much of our manufacturing, we’re trying to reshore a lot of that. And because we see what can happen.

And President Trump went and he recently, as you know, made a deal, and China said, okay, we’ll start selling this to you again. You know, I wonder how much of that was just out of the goodness of their hearts or because they saw these other technologies coming online, because when you make it difficult for somebody to get something, they will figure out another way. It always happens.

I saw it happen in oil and gas industry with guar for fracking. The Indians kept raising the price and then boom, they came out to something called slick water, which you add polyacrylamide, a chemical, so you pump at a fast rate, you find a way around.

But interestingly, after President Trump left a couple weeks later, they say, ah, yeah, we will sell it to the US but it can’t go into any of your military hardware. So again, we have to have our own capability. We can’t be held to the whims of other people around this.

And that technology that the Chinese are using, that was developed in the U.S. actually, it was developed in the U.S. during the Manhattan Project because we had to get the rare earth elements. Because when you get uranium, you get rare earth elements with it. We had to separate the rare earth elements to get the uranium. So we figured out how to do all of this separation.

That technology was purchased by China. Actually, it started to get purchased in the sixties, again heavily in the 1980s, because the US was getting out of the business. Because in the rare earth element business, you were pulling up uranium with it. Now we want the rare earth elements. We didn’t need their uranium. And that was for us, a radioactive waste which is very expensive to get rid of.

And so the Chinese bought the technology. And again, we didn’t realize that we were selling something that turned out to be very important to our country.

Dr. Tour’s Background and Expertise

JAN JEKIELEK: Before we continue, just tell me a little bit about yourself. I mean, you seem to know quite a bit about all this. I know you do.

DR. JAMES TOUR: Well, I am. I’m trained as an organic chemist, but I work quite broadly. I’ve been a professor for 36 years. I’m a professor of chemistry, of material science and nanoengineering and computer science. So I have to know things across many different fields.

But I’ve started 17 companies that range from pharmaceutical companies to materials companies to electronics companies. So I’ve worked in this space broadly, always from the chemical perspective, but then even building devices and thinking of things electronically. So my group, I have a big research group, and so it thinks quite broadly.

And I’ve consulted a lot on the Department of Defense, served on committees related to the Defense Science Board and the Defense Science Study Group. So I’ve looked at it from the military side as well.

JAN JEKIELEK: I should add. You said you started 17 companies, but quite a number of these companies have been quite successful.

DR. JAMES TOUR: Well, they’ve made some people some money.

JAN JEKIELEK: And so you’re also attuned in the business realm. I guess that’s…

DR. JAMES TOUR: Yeah, I don’t like it, but I let other people do that. And I’m never an officer director in the company. So that’s how I can have 17. I don’t run them. Other people do. I don’t particularly like the business side. I’m forced to balance my checkbook, so I have to know a little bit. But other people run it. But I’m familiar with how businesses work. Yes, right.

JAN JEKIELEK: Well, exactly. And it’s, you know, the right product at the right time is there. It’s kind of a mantra like this. Right. Of how you get business success. Right.

The Economics of Metal Recovery

DR. JAMES TOUR: The thing that makes this a little bit hard is that these metal prices can fluctuate a lot. So you’re subject to that. Now, one of the metals that does not fluctuate a lot is gold. Now, still, gold can go up and down, but it doesn’t. It’s not as big of a fluctuation as many of these other metals.

And so what we’re always going to have is the gold operation. Now, gold is not considered a critical metal. It’s not that China is not selling us gold, but that’s not a problem. But we’ve now been solicited by jewelry manufacturers, say that for them the electronic waste gold is a great selling point because some people don’t want to buy jewelry that has caused people to have mining because mining operations are inherently hard on the environment.

And gold mining often is cyanide based. And so it’s a messy, dirty, toxic operation. And they say that there’s a good market for gold jewelry that is made from gold that is reclaimed from waste. People like that. So they will pay us top dollar for that gold.

So the gold will be for us like a buffer that we’ll always be purifying gold because a lot of electronic waste has gold in it. Sometimes touch screen displays which we say are indium tin oxide has indium and tin. There’s actually more gold in a lot of these than there is indium and tin. So we grab all of that gold. We’re not going to discard gold because there’s a very high price on it.

Catalytic Converters and Precious Metals

The other thing that for us is very good that we’re moving into is catalytic converters. If you’ve ever had a catalytic converter stolen from underneath your car, which a lot of it’s $2,000 to replace it, that is just a metal oxide that has platinum, palladium, and rhodium.

Those three metals are needed to take the carbon monoxide that comes out of an exhaust and create and convert it to carbon dioxide, to take it from a very toxic gas to a much less toxic gas. And then some people would say not toxic at all. So you convert it to carbon dioxide. You have to have that.

But the catalytic converters, after about 10 years, don’t work very well anymore. So all of those are recycled. For us to pull the platinum, palladium, and rhodium out is much cheaper than for the traditional processes. And platinum, palladium and rhodium are very high priced, particularly rhodium and then platinum and then third palladium.

But all of these are precious, what are called precious metals, and not just critical metals, but precious metals, which means that the price on them is much higher, so we can get a much higher return from these.

And already in place is a system to reclaim catalytic converters. Catalytic converters are already reclaimed. There are companies that all they do is they have the equipment that tears these things open and reclaims this material. And then we would get this material from them and turn it around because our process will be cheaper.

And also, in cell phones and things like that, there are already companies that do that because they are trying to reclaim certain parts of these phones to reuse in refurbished phones. So we get from them something. And this is good for the bottom line of their business because now they have an avenue to sell parts to us that they wouldn’t use anyway. And then we would reclaim those parts just by pulling the metals back out.

Maximizing Resource Recovery

And actually, we’ve been talked to by other companies that really want the glass, the glass that’s on the iPhone, the glass that’s on the cell phones, because that glass has lithium in it. And that to them is a good recovery source. That lithium makes it a very tough glass. So they are reclaiming the lithium that’s in the glass.

So in many ways, it’s sort of like American Indians where they used every part of the animal. Even in these printed circuit boards we’ve already got in place in this company, because when they flash it, the plastic is turned into carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Why hydrogen? The hydrogen bond is much stronger than the carbon hydrogen bond. So the hydrogen atoms prefer to come out as H2.

That H2 is a tremendous fuel source. So you can use that to run generators to run your company, or you can take the carbon monoxide hydrogen mixture which is what’s called syngas. S, Y, N, syngas. And that is used in the chemical industry every day for making a lot of the chemicals that we use on a routine basis.

That mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen is very good. It’s used in a reaction called the hydroformylation reaction. And the plant we’re building is very close to the Houston ship channel that uses a lot of syngas. So there’s an outlet for that. So even the plastic from the printed circuit boards is to us valuable.

JAN JEKIELEK: Basically you’re telling me that there really is very, very little waste here in the process.

DR. JAMES TOUR: Very little waste in the process. There will be some things that we can’t use, but very little waste. And so it’s a big win. It’s a big win for our country. It’s a big win for the environment. So the company has already been taken public and so people can just invest.

Military Waste as a Resource

JAN JEKIELEK: There’s also military waste. That’s another piece. Right.

DR. JAMES TOUR: Huge military waste is huge. Right. You get a retired aircraft, so retired aircraft that has a lot of the rare earth elements and the critical metals, a retired submarine, retired batteries, lots of military waste and lots of flame retarded material in the military. All that antimony we can get back out. So yes, that is for us a constant source.

JAN JEKIELEK: And I’m trying to imagine what this looks like in my mind. I was sort of imagining, you know, a sort of a wood chipper that is fed all these different basically types of waste, but a very, you know, very industrial. What does this actually look like? Paint me a picture.

The Technical Process Explained

DR. JAMES TOUR: So I have never walked into the company. Yeah, I start the company and there’s a reason for that, is that I’m a professor, I’m trained to speak. And so I don’t even want to learn about their know-how, how they do the conversion. Yeah, I’m a scientific advisor. I say you can try this, try that. But I can tell you the basic layout.

It’s exactly what you say. There is a way to take large pieces, it chops it up into small, so grinding and breaking things up. The machines for that are already well known in the industry. We don’t have to develop that. So it breaks it up into small pieces.

It will go into an environment where it’s heated to extremely high temperatures. And the way we do it in our labs is what’s called resistive heating. And so it goes into a resistive heater. It heats up very high while chlorine gas is injected in.

Chlorine is a commodity chemical. It’s used in very large volumes. All of PVC, polyvinyl chloride, plastic. I mean, it’s all used chlorine in very large amounts. And so the chemical engineering for the use of chlorine gas is extremely worked out. Well worked out. Safety operations for capturing it. Any excess is recycled and brought on through.

So you heat it up under chlorine and then these metals come distilling out. And you trap the metals as they come distilling out, and you individually distill them out based on their boiling point or their temperature and based on what’s called the free energy formation of the chloride. At what temperature did the chloride form the metal chloride, and then at what temperature does the metal chloride come distilling out?

But metal chlorides distill out at relatively low temperature compared to metals and metal oxides, sometimes 3,000 degrees lower temperature. We can distill out these metal chlorides and then we will sell them as metal chlorides, or you expose them to air and air oxidation and they’ll convert back to metal oxides. And we’ll trap the HCL that comes out.

That’s basically how the operation runs. Comes in as these printed circuit boards and comes out as metals in different metal streams, and then those are sold.

Modular Technology and Rapid Deployment

JAN JEKIELEK: Something that I really like about this model that you’re describing is that you, for a relatively small investment, it’s almost like, I don’t know when you use the term modular, but you can imagine people licensing this technology and sort of starting up these relatively small operations all over the country. And this is, it feels like an actual method to within a year’s time, because that’s kind of the rough window that I think the US has to figure this out, actually. Would it be possible to get independent within a year’s time?

DR. JAMES TOUR: I don’t think we’d be able, we’d be running that fast to get the US independent in a year’s time. But what it would do is it would give us a map to get independent. I could see it happening within five years where we’re really independent on this.

But if we had help, because we are licensing it out, we’re licensing it out in some of the, for example, for the bauxite residue, the aluminum work, we’re licensing that out. And we could build many of these companies, and yes, they are modular. They go in and for a manufacturing site that you can do, you can get these things going for a few tens of millions of dollars. That’s not very much when it comes to this type of manufacturing.

Energy Requirements and Infrastructure

JAN JEKIELEK: The one thing that strikes me is you did mention that it takes a lot of electricity, a lot of energy. And that said, I was just at an energy roundtable of energy experts, and the discussion is entirely around how do we deliver enough power to run the data centers for AI? Essentially, I mean, that’s the bottom line. This would sort of fit into that, the rubric of trying to increase, build. We’re talking nuclear. Nuclear all of a sudden is okay again, basically, and anything goes.

DR. JAMES TOUR: Yes, overall, our energy is less than the traditional recycling operations and traditional mining. Our energy is less. We need a lot of power for short intervals of time. When we do that flash, it may only be seconds that we bring in high electricity.

Our electricity overall demand is much less than a data center. In fact, one of the ways to get cheaper electricity is you build something next to a data center because they’re already bringing in a lot of electricity, and you pay fractionally more than what the data center pays. So the electric company will gladly siphon it off to you in those bursts when you need it.

So there are ways to do that, but compared to the data centers, we’re nowhere close. And we are less than the normal industry. But what we need, which is unusual, we need bursts of electricity. So there’s where we may bring in 4 megawatt line into the system so that we can bring in a lot all at once. But then it’s turned off between these operations. So you flash and you’re done. New material is brought in, flash and you’re done. And so it comes in on belt.

Solving the China Problem

JAN JEKIELEK: So bottom line, does this solve the entire problem with Communist China when it comes to these metals?

DR. JAMES TOUR: Yes, these metals are now called critical metals because we can’t get them anymore. So they’ve been named critical metals, which is rare earth elements, plus a number of other metals. This will solve the problem.

Now, it won’t solve it overnight because we have to gear up. But it could solve the whole problem within five years. If we push this process, it could solve our problem within five years where we would get to a steady state where we’re able to produce as much as we use.

If we have to bring in more, we have these mountains of tailings that we can access, and we have these constant mountains of printed circuit boards. If we had to supplement, we can run off the ores. So if you had to do mining again, we can always run off the ores, but this would solve it. We will be able to manufacture what we need.

A Scientist’s Dream

JAN JEKIELEK: Well, Jim, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation for me. A quick final thought as we finish.

DR. JAMES TOUR: This for me is so much fun to be able to go in a laboratory, devise something new, publish papers, graduate students. That’s my business. That’s what I do. But then to see this translate into a company always brings it up another level. But now where it has so much need for this country to be able to solve a critical problem for the country, this is like every scientist’s dream.

JAN JEKIELEK: Well, Jim Tour, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

DR. JAMES TOUR: Thank you.

JAN JEKIELEK: Thank you all for joining Jim Tour and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

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