Randall Atkins: Chris, go ahead.
Chris Blanchard: Nate, so the inventory levels that we’ve put out are sort of combined clean and raw, but just from a run of mine raw standpoint, the size of Elk Creek is we’d like to be running somewhere around 200,000 tons. So we have some flexibilities for the ebbs and flows of production without impacting the preparation plant, but never in the position where we’re having to re-handle coal or have any concerns about it sitting. So if that answers your question.
Nathan Martin: Got it. Yes, just trying to figure out how much more there was to go. And I think you guys mentioned as well hopefully kind of a working cap tailing through the next two quarters because of that? Okay.
Chris Blanchard: Nate, to add on a little bit to Chris, I mean, we’ve had kind of a funny year because of the fact that we had sort of built up inventory and anticipation of sort of flicking the switch at our prep plants and to knock the production up five million tons from two to three million. So we had a little bit of delay getting that plant both open and then ramped up to full processing capacity. So that’s what caused the inventory. And I think in general, we will certainly refine it. But at the moment, our expectation is we’ll have that inventory back down to normal levels, probably just after the first quarter next year.
Nathan Martin: Great. Appreciate the thoughts there, guys. And then, and then maybe just thinking about a little bit intermediate term. And Randy, you made the comments, you guys are very comfortable where you are now, maybe a four million ton plus kind of run rate. You know, next year, looking at next year, we don’t know what the macro economy is going to bring with some of the issues that we’re all keeping a close eye on. But let’s say the market cooperates and you see more demand for your product. And I’m curious, what’s kind of the next stage of growth and development framework on the whole side? What projects are you looking at? Maybe what kind of growth CapEx would that entail?
Chris Blanchard: Yes, I think basically, Nate, we have, as I’ve indicated, baked some optionality into next year, depending on how we see the market. We’re going to continue generally about the same called four million ton level. We could ramp that up without really bringing on much new growth CapEx at all to a higher level. I won’t give you the exact tonnage right now, which we’ll probably try to provide a little bit more clarity on after our budget. But we could wrap that up reasonably substantially next year if we solve a demand there. And I think going forward we were kind of a company that hits mostly singles and doubles as opposed to trying to go for grand slams in terms of production increases. You know, we’ve got a number of projects out there on horizon one of which we’ve talked about before is taking our Maven complex, which we’re now operating as sort of a surface Highwall proposition and looking at the possibility of taking that into a deep mind production, which attendance prep facilities, et cetera.
But that’s down the road. We’re not there yet. But we have a we have a ramp that I think Jeremy has put in our presentation, which gets us to about 6.5 million to 7 million runs over the next couple of years. And we’re very comfortable, comfortable that can be accomplished with nominal road CapEx.
Nathan Martin: Got it. That’s helpful. Yes. And it used to be nice to see that chart in there as well. It kind of broke out the CapEx. So that’s what I was trying to kind of get to. So appreciate that. And then, maybe just one final one, shifting direction a little bit. Randy, I appreciate your prepared remarks on both the RE and carbon product initiatives, but could maybe give us an update on the timetables there kind of what stage are you at in each of those and how long do you think it could take before you do have a commercially available viable product for either.
Randall Atkins: Yes, I think, Nate, the way I’d like to answer that is that peculiarly the rare earth business is an entirely different type of mining exercise and coal mine. You know, coal mining, you’re dealing with gold. You know, you can find, see and touch a lump of gold when you’re dealing with rare earth, you’re dealing with microscopic metal deposits that are measured in parts per million. So the real challenge is once you’ve found a sufficient level of rare earth to find it in areas of concentration, which you could economically extract from, and then to figure out what would be the appropriate sort of processing refinement techniques that would be able to get those minerals out. We’ve got some very interesting things going on.
We’re doing some deep coring now, because we think that there’s a possibility that there may be some deposits, which we’ve missed since we’ve pretty much only used cores that have been originally developed from our coal mining exploration, which was generally fairly shallow in the a couple hundred feet, one to two hundred feet levels, and we’re going to go down to a lower level to really test how much might be down there, way slower. So I think that’s a roundabout way of saying what we’re going to be involved in is more testing, not only on the dimension of the deposit, but more importantly, on sort of the chemical and mineralogic characteristics, which really define the ultimate economics. So I don’t want to put a timeframe on it that buttonholes us in, but I’m hopeful by next year probably sometime in the first half, that we’ll be able to have some pretty solid preliminary thoughts on where we are in terms of defining that deposit.
And of course, we’re getting a lot of help from the National Labs, not only our friends at NETL, but we’ve got a host of other National Labs we’re working with as well on not only just the deposit aspect, but also on some of the aspects of processing and, frankly, magnetic production down the road, because if the deposit bears out to be the size and conformity that we hope it could be a very important deposit from a national standpoint. So that’s kind of where we are on Rare Earth. On the carbon products what we’re trying to do is we’ve identified sort of two areas that we think have a lot of promise and could potentially use a lot of coal. And we’ve got some very interesting, pretty novel intellectual property that we’ve been able to develop around these with the National Labs again.
You know, one is sort of taking coal and using it to make really a carbon fiber type activated carbon, where we could use that as a form of direct air capture, which is kind of interesting. And we’re essentially using coal to capture CO2. And the other one is the idea that we would be able to basically do some other forms of development on graphite, where the Chinese just put the kebab on export of graphite, where we’ve been working for several years with a Bridge on developing synthetic graphite, essentially from coal-char. And so that is taking on a little bit more importance and urgency. And we were actually thinking about trying to get a prep plant built, pardon me, a pilot plant built in West Virginia to be able to exploit that. So in terms of the sort of near term commercialization of those two, again, I would probably say give us about six months or so to sort of see where we are on the sort of commercial critical path.
And we’ll be able to give you a lot more definitions to when we are able to turn this sort of technology into actual some form of sales or further development.
Nathan Martin: Perfect. Yes, we’ll be waiting for more from that for sure. And then, I guess just curious real quickly though that the feedstock and the carbon products initiatives, would you plan to use your own production there or no?
Randall Atkins: In terms of the coal that would go into the carbon product feedstock, Nate?
Nathan Martin: Correct. Yes, correct.
Randall Atkins: Yes. Yes, that’s a great question. So the answer is we would use our own production. We’ve been doing our testing on synthetic graphite from our low-vol coals in Berwind. And indeed, that’s where we’re sort of currently contemplating we’d build a pilot plant. And in terms of the sort of the melt blown activated carbon that we would use for direct air capture, we’ve been using our Wyoming coal. And we’ve got plenty of that. So our general thesis is it’s time goes by my bandwagon has been the use of coal for higher value products under the theory that coal is too valuable to burn. We can use it to make something else with it. It might be more valuable to those of us in the industry who would go in that direction. So that’s kind of where we are on that.
