澳钪矿商获美政府4亿美元贷款，股价大涨

Rise energy metals in the morning session, which is about 40 minutes into the start of cash trading, we are seeing stuff, uh, about upside being shown across the three day view. That big jump on Monday, obviously on this news that it secured a $400 million loan from the Trump administration, and that deal is to expand production of scandium. It's a rare, rare earth element critical to the military and aerospace industries.

The chairman and top shareholder, Robert Friedland, told Bloomberg earlier that that this agreement could secure the West's supply for decades to come as Washington moves to diversify supply chains away from China. I think killer asset is based in Australia. It's big enough to supply all of the Western world's demand for 30 or 40 years. So this is one element that we have in the Western world that no longer has to be produced or are sold from China.

Let's get some more on this for Sunrise Energy. Meadows CEO Sam Wargo, who joins us now from San Francisco. Sam, really appreciate you coming on for us. Obviously, it's been a big couple of days for sunrise and for your team there. Uh, tell us, what can you add in terms of what we heard from Robert overnight? What are the real implications of this loan and this relationship with the white House and the Pentagon? Correct.

All right. I mean, I look at it really underwrites the future of this project in global standing supply. And this is one of those metals that has been subject to really strict export controls from China for almost two years now. The market is extremely tight. Uh, what what the US government Department of War funding gives us is a 25 year, uh, loan facility that will allow us not only to build a mine, uh, but in the end, also expand it to meet the growing demand from from industrial customers and defense applications.

And in this market is growing fast. If we take a step back, scandium is not a metal that people would necessarily be familiar with is obviously very niche. But can you tell us about why it's critical and the importance of it in a broader sense? Yeah. Yeah, sure. Um. Uh, it's an amazing metal in that it has almost no use by itself in any application. Its real value is in alloying or combining it with other elements. So, uh, the major volume used for scandium in the market today is in, uh, solid oxide fuel cells, which are a really elegant, beautiful solution for power generation in our data centers.

And, uh, uh, it's certainly founded in the last few years in being able to provide readily deployable power for the AI data center build out. Um, so that's that's the main volume application. What we're also saying, though, is that in the last few years, uh, a real uptick in the interest for aluminum scandium alloys used in aerospace components and in particular in 3D printing. It is the most effective printable metal that exists, uh, today for aerospace applications.

It has a weight to strength ratio that's about four times that of structural steel. But with the light weight of aluminum. So very, very functional and useful for aerospace, particularly defense applications. And then the third and probably, um, not high volume, but certainly strategically critical is a semiconductor industry. Um, our transition from 3G broadband to 5G was made possible solely by scandium and the addition of scandium into radio frequency filtering chips.

So, uh, that's a critical, um, uh, industry, particularly as you look at the build out of telecommunications networks, uh, to higher and higher frequencies. The history of this assets. Interesting, right. It's been held for for quite some time. And at one point it was a nickel project until the market sort of didn't stack up. What has changed to this point? And I guess given those changes, how reliable is the outlook?

Yeah, look at um, this is one of the largest nickel cobalt deposits on the planet as well. That sits right adjacent to the scandium resources we're planning to mine. Um, the nickel market is is oversupplied. There's an enormous amount of, uh, Indonesian production, and that that project stays on hold for now. But the beauty of that nickel resource is that there's this very high grade system of, uh, scandium that reports right on the edge of it, uh, which is concentrated up over, uh, millions of years, making it one of the highest grade concentrations of scandium in the ground.

It's been found on the planet today. And as Robert said, uh, we've got a mine plan that envisages roughly 30 odd years of initial production from the mine site, but there's enough resource there at high grades to last, um, many more decades, if not over a century. And we obviously heard from Robert Friedland, um, a few hours ago. And it was, you know, he's obviously got a major stake in this. Was it his relationship with the white House that sort of got you to the table in the first place?

No, it wasn't based on relationships. We went through a very formal process on the, um, a variety of funding programs and not necessarily just this one that was eventually, um, uh, set upon. But, um, you know, what, in the end was was clear was that the Department of War recognized the criticality of scandium in a whole range of defense, uh, based applications and industries and was very keen to support it. Um, you know, we announced a partnership with Lockheed Martin, uh, earlier this year, and we were late last year, uh, which is really focused on bringing high performance alloys to a number of the Lockheed systems.

We're actively engaged with the defense sector on qualifying scandium for using principal alloys. Uh, you know, we worked very hard here. Uh oh. Uh, well, it must be two years now in trying to build a base and a foundation for an understanding of where scandium sits in these supply chains. And unlike many metals, it's in many cases non substitutable. You have no alternatives if it is not available. Um, the you know, I, I think a lot of the um, uh, the success that we've had that it's just culminated now in this announcement really has been driven by the decisions by China to place quite severe export restrictions on the metal.

It's really focused people's minds. Um, so, you know, it's it's pleasing but not surprising that this, uh, this was the outcome. Through that lens, do you think this Australia government should be bankrolling more of these projects? A lot of the funding, obviously coming from the US for rare earth assets in Australia for that sort of national security element. Should we see more domestic funding? And also, I'm curious if other rare earths and nation metals are sort of being focused as well.

Is this kind of the start of a new Ivanhoe? Yeah. Uh, it's a good question. I think Australia needs to start looking a lot, um, more clearly about how it benefits from its critical minerals policy. In our case, uh, we've made the decision that in addition to building the mine and the refinery in Australia, we will also build a metallization plant. And that will be built in the United States. Um, the reason for that primarily is that most of the customers for scandium metal, the chip industry are located there, and it makes sense to be there.

But also, you know, we also announced as part of this funding package an intention to, uh, at least this company on, on a US exchange. So, um, we see it's really important for our growth to be close to our customers that have access to deeper capital markets than we can we can sort of achieve in Australia. And this will become really what is a very defense industry focused company over time as we make investments downstream.

We've already announced that we've invested directly in semiconductor development in the United States, and that's based on scandium technologies. Uh, we're looking also at different areas around alloy development with, uh, the defense contractors. So the value of owning and controlling raw materials has never been more important. And the downstream is prepared to