TRER Touts New Board Member, Round Top’s Potential in Quarterly Update
In an update for investors Tuesday (Jan. 6), Texas Rare Earth Resources officials touted the addition to the company’s board of a veteran rare-earth executive and stressed what the company believes is the unique potential of its proposed mine at Round Top Mountain.
TRER is seeking to mine for a class of heavy metal called rare earth elements – critical for a range of consumer and military technologies – from the volcanic rock of Round Top, a 5,600-foot formation in the Sierra Blanca range, about 10 miles west of the Hudspeth County seat. The project has stalled since a round of exploratory drilling about three years ago, the company’s stock has languished, and TRER is seeking additional investment to develop a mining operation
TRER last month announced that a long-time rare-earth industry executive named Eric Noyrez had joined the company’s board. Board Chair Anthony Marchese said Tuesday that Noyrez was a “significant addition for Texas Rare Earth Resources moving forward.”
Noyrez most recently served as the CEO of Lynas Corporation – one of only two companies outside of China producing rare earth elements – and he oversaw the launch of the company’s rare earth processing facility in Indonesia. Marchese said Noyrez’ “in-depth industry contacts,” including within China, would serve TRER well, and that Noyrez could facilitate connections with potential purchasers of rare earths from Round Top.
“Outside of China, he’s the most experienced rare-earth executive in the world,” Marchese said. “It brings a vast amount of credibility, from someone who has frankly seen it all.”
Dan Gorski, the company’s CEO, provided an update on the company’s recent research and activities.
TRER holds a lease on almost 55,000 acres of state land, managed by the Texas General Land Office, in and around the Sierra Blanca Mountains, and Gorski said the company has now acquired an option to purchase some portion of the surface of that land from the GLO. Owning the surface rights would allow the company to move forward more swiftly, Gorski said. TRER’s operation would be surrounded by GLO land – and would not abut any private landowners; in the permitting process, the concerns and input of adjacent private landowners has special weight, and the absence of adjacent private landowners could expedite permitting for a mining and processing operation at Round Top, Gorski said.
Gorski said the company has also acquired water rights on 8 sections of land about 3 miles east of its Round Top location. The land was part of a planned real-estate development and has two existing wells, Gorski said, one reportedly capable of producing 950 gallons of water a minute and the other with a capacity of about 450 gallons a minute. Gorski said those quantities of water would be sufficient for TRER’s proposed “heap leaching” operation, in which raw ore from the mountain would be saturated in sulfuric acid to isolate targeted minerals.
“One of the major concerns of any mining operation is water,” Gorski said, “and we believe we can develop our water with very little cost and effort.”
Additionally, Gorski said, TRER has been working with a Florida-based chemical-process company called K-Tech to develop a small-scale “pilot plant” to concentrate rare earths from its heap-leach solution. K-Tech has been working with sample solutions from Round Top ore, and Gorski said the company has been successful in developing a process to purify the solution, to create “feed stock” that could in turn be sold to a rare-earth concentration plant. Gorski said K-Tech would continue to refine the process in the months to come.
TRER board member Jack Lifton reiterated the company’s claim that Round Top is a unique deposit – rich in the “heavy rare earths” essential for the magnets used in everything from military devices to hand-held consumer electronics. At present, almost all of the world’s rare earths are produced in China. Lifton said that China had been uniquely endowed with exposed deposits of heavy rare earths – which in recent years have been exploited by often-unregulated or illegal operators and with devastating effects to the environment and human health. But he said those “plays” are being exhausted. The Chinese government has announced plans to conserve the elements, and Lifton said a mining operation at Round Top could meet the world’s demand as Chinese exports declined.
“Round Top may be well be one of the largest deposits of heavy rare earths accessible on the planet,” Lifton said. “There’s not something like this in China – or they would be working it day and night. Now is the time to do this.”
Rare earths exist in low concentrations at Round Top, but are apparently spread throughout the mountains volcanic rock. In crushing and leaching ore at the Round Top site, TRER would also isolate radioactive and toxic elements, including uranium, thorium and beryllium. Company officials said Tuesday there could be a market for those elements as well. Containing those elements and insuring that they were not released into the environment would be one of the more difficult and costly challenges of a Round Top mine.
TRER recently began a “rights offering” for shareholders, aimed at raising up to $1.6 million for the company’s operations.
The company’s stock once traded at nearly $10 a share, but now lingers around $.25 a share. Marchese said Tuesday that the low stock price is “shameful,” in light of what the company believes is the project’s potential. He said he believes changes in the global market for rare earths will ultimately change the company’s fortunes.
“We have the best board in the industry,” he said. “I believe that recent events around the world will eventually find their way into the industry.”