Solcoa Industries is producing zero-carbon, American-made rare earth metals — for under $40/kg vs. $100 market price

that. People have put watches and other assets on chain. I didn't even know that you can do cool things around fractionalization. It was interesting. Very cool. Um uh well, we have our next guest coming in the studio. Uh Human, welcome to the stream. How you doing? Boom. You're on. You're live on the internet.

You're live. Welcome. Um good to have you here. Uh would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and the company? Yeah, sorry I can barely hear you. Awesome. Human, founder of Scoa.

We're a rare earth metalization company based in based in San Francisco right now and we're working to domesticate some of the most important metals in the world. Okay. Uh coolest uh office. Very cool background right now. Are you on the second floor of your office or something? Yeah.

Yeah, the lab is the lab is down there. Everyone's prepping an experiment right now. Yeah. You said you said uh you said something specific about uh metallization or something like explain that to me.

Are you digging in the ground or mixing up alloys or doing chemistry experiments like what what does the business actually do dayto-day? Yeah. So some quick overview there's a set of metals that power much of the world of tech right every fighter jet is 920 pounds of them. Your phone is eight different types of them.

Every electric car relies on them. Semiconductor manufacturing processes clean energy. They're a cornerstone of much of what we consider high-tech technologies. And we have no domestic production capabilities. China dominates the market. We have mines.

We have tons of tons of resource and supply, but we have no ability to turn that supply into metals. Right?

So, what we're doing at Sulcoa is we're developing the technologies to be able to bring that downstream processing, bring that actual metal production step from China to the US and do that both economically and sustainably. So there's two ways to do that.

The first way is working with primary material, basically stuff you get out of the ground. There's some pre-processing necessary, but effectively mine stuff. The second way is doing that with secondary material, which is existing magnets and recycling them. So we do both.

We're able to take in this is for example a magnet from an aircraft carrier that was used to fighter jets. It's about 30% udemium.

We can take these in and we can extract the neodymium droium procedium turbium from these or we can work with mines to instead of having them ship the material to China for processing ship it to us. We'll make metal economically sustainably and we'll introduce that to the market. Where's the key value creation step?

How costly is this? It sounds it seems like a pretty simple widgets business, but what are your costs? And uh are you is the goal just to reshore existing techniques or develop new techniques that are higher margin? Yeah. So right now again we have no domestic production capabilities.

There's a few companies in the west trying to do it and for the most part they're just copying the Chinese process to make these metals. It's called moltenoxy fluoride electrolysis. It's extremely unsustainable and it doesn't work in the west. Mostly because of an economic standpoint, right?

is just the costs don't work out in the west. But also, you don't want a giant poison emitting plants in Texas, right? These things emit perfluorocarbons. They're 5,000x the potency of CO2.

So, the status quo in this industry is extremely dirty processes and that's what everyone's trying to copy and it clearly doesn't work because while we're going through this rare earth crisis and companies are trying to domesticate, our production remains negligible.

So, our pure art of value creation is new technology is an innovation is developing a new alternative way to make these metals. That's very different than that that industry standard, right? The system is still economical. We can make metal for under $40 a kilo. Market value is nearly 100.

And we do that with no harmful emissions. Our system is carbon zero. This is some of the world's first carbon zero neodymium, right? It's oxidized right now. It should be shiny.

Um, but we can do this while not sacrificing sacrificing economics, which allows us to be able to scale that up in the west and do that in an environmentally viable manner. Is the primary regulator for this the EPA? I think there there's a variety of regulators.

It really depends on on the because it's not just one step too. Rare versus a multitude of processes that have to work together. Yeah. Um talk about Yeah. Talk about the demand side of this.

From from my view, this this is something like if you can do it, there's massive massive demand and and and sales will be like the easy part. Is that the correct assessment? Yeah. Well, you're using them right now, right? These metals are are literally everywhere, right? And we make none of them.

So, if you can economically produce these metals in the west and do that sustainably, which is even better. The demand is is massive, right? Every US buyer would want to buy a more stable supply of these things. China just spanned the export of of heavy rares because because of the tariffs.

That's caused a lot of issues in the supply chain because you can't make any magnets without heavy rares. They're about 5% droium, for example. So if you have a stable domestic clean supply chain, people will buy it, right? And it's not even just the market today. The market's about to quadruple.

We need more clean energy. We need more electric cars. We need more fighter jets, right? So as the market is about to quadruple in the next couple decades, we need better sources of these metal, right? Metals. We can't just rely on China and we can't just copy them either. We need to out innovate them.

Do you have any insight into how rare earths play into the narrative that we're hearing around project Stargate, these massive data centers? It feels like it's the most cutting edge technology in some way.

I imagine that there's rare earths somewhere in that process, but I haven't actually heard those two stories connect. Whenever I hear rare earths, I hear iPhones and I hear electric cars and then fighter jets. Um, but is there an AI narrative here too?

Not to be too buzzwordy, but I am curious if you build a massive data center are do you need rare earths or is it just kind of a different process? Yeah. Well, rare earths are used anywhere where you need high powered magnets, right? So, when you're looking at data centers, HD hard drives, right?

That's a very big use case for these. We actually we work with hard drive magnets today. We're working to partner with a lot of data centers to offload their their hard drive waist streams because they just shred them right now. They don't do anything with the magnets. So we can extract the metals from those.

So rers are very much used in in hard drives um for these data centers. Semiconductor manufacturing processes often use these rares. Anywhere where you need a high powered magnet, these things are directly applicable.

How many have you run the numbers on on how much uh how many of these valuable rare earths just end up in landfills in the US because we don't have the right processes for recycling and sort of extracting the the sort of key elements. It's a large number, right?

For the most part, a lot of these electric car motors, for example, just get shredded. Almost all hard drives get shredded, right? So, you're looking at I mean, I I wouldn't say maybe a kiloton, but you're looking at very large numbers in terms of um how much of this gets wasted.

There is an existing rare earth recycling industry. It's growing right now. It's just starting, but it relies on traditionally old tech, right? There's a few companies that effectively are able to take these magnets, do some acid leaching or leeching process to separate it into mixed oxides.

Then you have to ship the mixed oxide to be separated into individual oxides. That could be done in China. There's a few other companies in the west that does it, but it's not a very good process. Then you have to ship it to China to be metalized, made into metal, right?

So companies are trying to do that recycling, but they aren't able to do it well. They're not able to do it with very good scale and economics. So our system is able to do that in one direct step.

um which allows us to be able to help move a lot of that that that market um to recycling rather than just having it shredded and dropped in landfills. We're trying to work with landfills though to be able to take more of their more of their waste and extract the metal from those.

Uh JB Strable uh famously maybe a co-founder of Tesla or early employee board member uh longtime Tesla employee uh spun out started Redwood Materials recycling electric vehicles. Is Redwood Materials a part a potential partner to you, a direct competitor? Are you learning things from the Redwood Materials story?

What have they done? Uh, correct? And what could you do better? What are you learning from Redwood Materials? Yeah, I think I think Redwood's a really good story of of getting to scale, right?

I think that's that's something we can certainly learn from and we're always trying to learn from from other other companies in the metal space and how they've been able to take fundamental tech tech and and scale that in the West.

Um, I I would not consider them a direct competitor, but certainly certainly a company we can learn a lot from. We're planning our our first demonstration plant right now, Redwood Space in Reno. We're considering that as an option, too. No way. I imagine that the government's very receptive to this type of stuff there.

That's very cool. Smart. That's great. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This was fantastic conversation. Yeah, super bullish on what you're doing. Yeah, very exciting. And thank you. I feel like you're going to make my life easier soon.

U you're going to keep the iPhone less than $2,000 which is uh people are tracking. Anyway, thank you so much for joining. Talk to you soon. Bye. Yeah. Did you see the poly market that we put up? It has the TBPN logo on it. Let's go. What is the price of the next iPhone? Will it be