Critical minerals are nothing but a commodity. We’ve been in the commodity industry for over 20 years. And if you can’t compete on cost, you don’t win and you don’t survive. So absolutely. When I say we could be head-to-head against China, it’s not us for China, but it kind of is. They are the dominant producer of rare earth elements today, and they’re the dominant producer of critical minerals. They also refine the OBMs zirconium, all the other products that we rely upon in our great country. We compete head-to-head on costs for those products. In the United States, not counting logistics, not counting any noncash numbers, we compete based on dollars. Not only compete, we win based on dollars. If you look at lithium just — I just give you an example.
Lithium got down as low as about $13 a kilogram, lithium carbonate, which is one of the — we can produce hydroxide, we focus on carbonate today. When you saw a lithium get down to $13 at scale and our 5,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate out of our Marion facility or a Kentucky Lithium site, we’re profitable, significantly sub that. China and other players within the industry started cutting back production because the legacy method is expensive. That’s a phenomenal place to be when we are — the natural hedge we have in place is cost structure. And that’s because of the team and the way that we push our team and the way that we focus on making sure that we survive commodity markets. So yes, it’s purely dollars, Mike.
Mike Niehuser: Excellent answer. Thank you. On the American Carbon side, I’m not — it’s not clear to me what’s operating and what isn’t. It sounds like that the Carnegie mines that have been operating are not now. Is that incorrect?
Mark Jensen : No, that is correct. So we — let me share you where we’re at. So we’re getting ready. We’re doing development in Wyoming, and we spent a lot of time and energy doing development at Carnegie. We’ve also been working with some international customers that would be long-term customer base outside of our traditional platform of who we sell product to today, gives us more stability. Problem with some of our existing customers is it’s been on again, off again. Really challenging to run a mining business like that. What is a phenomenal situation for us right now is the quality of the products that we have, the ability to produce a lot of product from a very low cost. Our Wyoming Complex is a mid-vault complex. We have over $30 some million to allocate on the deployment of that, also deploying the concentration technology, the ability to concentrate critical minerals which we’ll share that over the next week or two.
The results we got, which are phenomenal. As a byproduct, not mining critical minerals or rare earth elements and coal-based deposits. You never make money doing that. You only going to make money doing it as a byproduct. But where are on the mining side? So why are we not operating today is, one, the market is on again, off again. And two, we wanted to be in a position where we can ramp up Wyoming and Carnegie in relatively similar time frames and most importantly, ramp them up a very, very low cost structure. So Carnegie 1, it was a single section mine for a long time. We finished over the last quarter, developing the second section there. So we can operate it today as a 2-section mine. Carnegie 2 is already developed as a 2-section mine.
The ability to ramp those mines up to get to that 60,000 tons a month number, based on the efforts of our team in a really low-cost way because we didn’t allocate a ton of capital to the McCoy Complex over the last year — or the last 6 months, I should say. That being said, Tarlis and the operational team did a phenomenal job there to position that and set them up for success. These are effectively virgin mines and pretty low cost, less than 5 miles from our Bevins branch facility. So ramping the production up there, tying that in, which is high-vol B product, high-vol A and tying that in with our mid-vol product at Wyoming, make an absolutely phenomenal blender at that 100,000 to 120,000 tons a month when they’re both fully ramped up. And that’s where we wanted to be upon the spin-off of American Carbon.
So that’s — Carnegie will probably be the first open up. It will open up a few months before Wyoming, which is imminent in the next, I would say, over the next 30 days and timing it with the spin-off. And then Wyoming will be — and Carnegie 2 will ramp up and Wyoming will ramp up here shortly thereafter.
Mike Niehuser: So when we look at the first quarter to be reported soon, we shouldn’t be expecting a lot in the way of carbon sales, if any? And could I assume that we’re going to start to seize a little bit of a trickle of rare earth sales, product sales start to come in?
Mark Jensen : In the first quarter, you will not see a lot of revenue. In the second quarter, you’ll start to see all that from both sides.
Mike Niehuser: I imagine you’re going to have a very, very, very busy second quarter It’s going to be fun.
Mark Jensen : I mean I will say that I think our teams worked 7 days a week for the last couple of years, but the — getting all the corporate and getting spinout is done really complicated, excluding the Novusterra one. Thankfully, we got that done and completed and all the shareholders that held shares will have — should have those Novusterra shares in their accounts that they don’t call their brokers and make sure that they deliver them to you because they’ve been delivered out of our accounts. Getting American Carbon spun out, which over the next — we’ll announce that next week, will be very timely and give the team focused, right? The teams want to be motivated based on their success. And so putting those into their isolated platforms gives them the ability to focus on their growth and making sure that they have the corporate structure in place to do that.
