Why Refining, Not Mining, Is the Real Rare Earth Problem

Everyone's talking about mining more rare earths — Ukraine mineral deals, buying Greenland, reopening domestic mines. Mark LaVerghetta says that misses the actual problem. You can dig all the rare earth ore you want out of the ground. You still can't put it in an iPhone, a battery, or an F-35 until someone refines it. And right now, that refining runs almost entirely through China. Mark is Co-Founder and Director of ReElement Technologies — a domestic critical-mineral refining company and a subsidiary of publicly-traded American Resources Corporation (NASDAQ: AREC) — using a 100-year-old technology, chromatography, to do what conventional refining can't: separate and purify rare earths cost-effectively, flexibly, and cleanly, on American soil. In this conversation, recorded at the UNC Clean Tech Summit, he walks Nico through why the midstream is the single most overlooked vulnerability in the clean energy and defense supply chains — and how to break it. Inside the conversation: ⛏️ Why refining — not mining — is the real bottleneck. The mineral deals making headlines don't matter if you can't refine the ore into the ultra-high-purity products manufacturers actually need. 🇨🇳 How China built a "deep and wide moat" around the midstream — separation, purification, refining, metallization, magnet manufacturing — using a dirty, energy-intensive process that ignores the environmental rules the U.S. abides by. And why that dominance is "not just economic security, it's national security all wrapped into one." ✈️ The market flip: buyers who once chased the lowest price will now "pay whatever to get it," because the cost of the rare earth input is negligible against the multi-billion-dollar F-35 it ends up in. 🧪 The 100-year-old solution: chromatography — the separation method the Manhattan Project preferred for purifying rare elements, then shelved. ReElement adapted it with technology licensed from Purdue, replacing hundreds or thousands of mixer-settler units with resin-packed columns that achieve up to 1,000 equilibrium phases each — and scale by simply using a bigger or smaller column. 🏭 "Innovation, not imitation." Why trying to copy China's refining infrastructure stateside was a non-starter — untenable to finance, impossible to compete on cost — and why the flexible, modular approach matters as feedstock shifts from lithium batteries to rare-earth magnets to yttrium, gadolinium, germanium, and gallium. 📍 The North Carolina connection: the state holds the largest reserve of ultra-high-purity quartz in the country — and almost all of it gets exported to China. 🛡️ Plus: the government and defense partnerships, the recycling angle (end-of-life magnets, EV rotors, wind turbines), and why "we need to make more stuff in this country" is now both an economic and a national security imperative. Whether you follow critical minerals, clean energy supply chains, reshoring, or national security — this is one of the clearest explanations you'll hear of why the rare earth problem isn't where most people are looking. 🎙️ More from Mark LaVerghetta: Connect on LinkedIn   / mark-laverghetta-1012b0122   🌐 Learn more about ReElement Technologies: reelementtech.com 📈 ReElement is a subsidiary of American Resources Corporation (NASDAQ: AREC): americanresourcescorp.com Chapters 00:00 Rare Earths as a National Security Issue 03:01 Why Refining, Not Mining, Is the Real Bottleneck 05:16 "Innovation, Not Imitation" 06:54 Why Some Buyers Will Now Pay Anything (The F-35 Problem) 08:38 The 100-Year-Old Tech from the Manhattan Project 09:40 How Chromatography Beats China's Scale 14:42 Government Partnerships & the Road Ahead Find all of our past SunCast podcast episodes here: https://www.suncast.media/media/podcast Listen to SunCast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/393Etix... Listen to SunCast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/su... This content was brought to you for FREE thanks to our sponsors, check them out here: https://www.suncast.media/ytsponsors #SunCast #RareEarths #CriticalMinerals #ReElement #CleanEnergy