Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] In a few years, America may not need to buy critical minerals from China anymore, says synthetic chemist and nanotechnologist <a href="https://www.drjamestour.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">James Tour</a>.

Why? Because of a method called flash Joule heating that he and his team have been studying at Rice University.

China currently has a near-monopoly on global processing capacity for critical minerals, including rare earths. These are essential to much of our modern economy, from electronics to defense to medical devices.

The United States has access to plenty of rare-earth reserves, but minimal capacity to process and refine them. Rebuilding these incredibly complex supply chains independent of China is a major uphill battle.

But Tour and his team have pioneered a process that allows for the quick extraction of rare earths from something we have in abundance: electronic and industrial waste.

“We realized that we could take certain materials, say industrial waste like fly ash … flash it, and get rare-earth elements to come out,” Tour says.

The same method can be used to extract rare earths from mine tailings—the leftover, toxic material from old mines that were once too expensive to process.

“So there’s huge availability of this. And if you recycle it—metals are infinitely recyclable,” Tour says.

<a href="https://www.drjamestour.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">Tour</a> is a professor of chemistry, materials science, and nanoengineering at Rice University. You can find him on X and other platforms: @drjamestour

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Jim Tour, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Thank you for having me.

So recently, the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] basically put unprecedented export controls on rare earths, frankly, affecting the whole Western world. There was a deal reached. There seems to be some backtracking since. What were you thinking when you saw this?

It’s not just rare earths. It’s a number of other metals too. They’re now calling them critical metals. So it’s copper, it’s indium, gallium, tantalum, antimony, and several others. We turned over manufacturing to them over the last 30 years, so we have very little capability to manufacture these metals in the U.S. And a lot of times, if they’re mined here, they’ll go to China for processing. So we don’t have the capability to take the ores and turn them into the base metals that we can use. It’s a big problem.

And we wouldn’t be able to build electric vehicles here. This would shut down our manufacturing of our automobiles. It’s over. This would shut down our Intel plants, our chip manufacturing. So it’s a very big deal, and even just the threat of it shakes up the markets.

And now you’re working on technology that’s directly related to this issue.

Yes.

So explain that to me.

We developed a technology in my group called flash joule heating [FJH]. And it’s not a name that we coined; that’s been around, where you put a high voltage and a high current through a material that is not highly conductive, that has about a one-ohm resistance, which means that you can conduct electricity through it. It’s much like your toaster.

Your toaster has this coil that you put a voltage across, and you run this current through, but there’s enough resistance that that coil gets red hot very quickly. That’s flash joule heating. And it’s like the old incandescent light bulbs. You see this big glow. And what we learned is that we can put any carbon material between electrodes and flash-joule heat it to turn it into graphene.

Graphene is the space-age material, and we started a company around that that’s up and going. But then we realized that we could take certain materials, say industrial waste like fly ash, which is the residue that’s left over after burning coal, the inorganic material. We could flash it, and we could get rare earth elements to come out, and so we could do that. We get other metals from industrial waste and then also consumer waste, consumer electronics, and you can put a high voltage,a  high current.

Then we learned if you add chlorine during the process, then they come out much more easily because you convert them from metal zero or metal oxides to metal chlorides, which are much more volatile. You lower the boiling point by 3,000 degrees, and then they’ll come out. And just based on the reactivity of a certain metal to chlorine at these higher temperatures, we can predict when they’re going to come out, and we can separate them as they come out.

So we developed this technology. We started doing this in 2020. We started doing this on metals. Then China put this kibosh on sending us metals, and it became much more important. So I found myself in this very important area.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay. So let me get this straight. You’re taking electronic waste or tailings or something like this. You’re putting them between two plates. You’re putting a massive amount of current through it. Wait, you’re adding chlorine to lower the temperature to get them this red hot to separate everything out. And then you’re somehow collecting each metal chloride as it basically distills out. Do I understand it right?

You have it right. What happens is when the chlorine comes in at these high temperatures, the chlorine will react with the metal oxides or the base metal. You can have a metal oxide or a base metal, and it will make the metal chloride, then the metal chlorides distill out. The thing we control is at what temperature we are heating this to react with the chlorine, and then at what temperature we are distilling it out. And based on those two parameters, we can separate. We can pull out one metal and then the next and the next and the next.

So that’s right; it’s really that simple. It’s a very simple operation. Now remember, the rare earth elements right now plants that are separating rare earth elements are 500 meters long in their process. Now it won’t be a building that long. It will do it much faster than what’s traditionally used. We’re not bringing it through in water or in acids, none of that. It’s just through this flashing process, so it’s much cleaner and much faster.

As you know, most wars are fought over resources: water, oil, minerals. People fight over this, and they kill each other over this. So when I was presenting this to a group of generals from NATO, the head guy there stood up; he said, this is going to prevent wars. He said, I don’t have to fight for this now. If you can do this, if you can take our waste and be producing this for us, I don’t have to fight wars over this. And we can set up these factories.

So the first factory is around $40 million, but it’s cheaper for the next factory we build because we’ve worked out all the technology. And so if we can put these together, they’re small localized factories that are not generating a bunch of waste. China has absolutely contaminated some of their cities. I mean, it’s just toxic to live there because of the waste that normally comes from some of these processes.

Now, you don’t have to run them that way. You can run a hydrometallurgical process and be very clean, but you have to be able to trap all these secondary wastes. These are clean, easy to set up. And that’s why we’re building these companies. The first one is just outside of Houston in Texas. The next one, we have a pre-permanent site in Massachusetts. Another one in Virginia, because these are very clean. And we’ve been asked by the federal government to set up more of these entities around the country. And think about this: to be able to not be dependent upon other countries.

Look at our president. He’s going from place to place, setting up deals on rare earth elements. Here he’s talking with Ukraine to say, hey, we’ll move in there with you, and that will help prevent future wars. I mean, this is dangerous stuff, and it’s expensive. But if we don’t have to do this, it is a win-win all around.

It’s sort of astonishing. I’ve been learning a bit about this particular process. And the big question, first of all, is when you think of these circuits, let’s say circuit boards, right? This is an example of the type of waste that you’re using, right? There’s a lot of this stuff out there. I mean, we’re shipping some of it, as I understand, to Africa to basically waste to landfill it. I don’t even know what they’re doing over there with it.

So we take this waste, electronic waste, a lot of it we just ship to Africa, and they will go through a number of processes to try to reclaim that metal. Many times it wasn’t worthwhile for us to try to do this. They will take it apart and do this. But things have changed, and now there’s more money in it. And so there are a number of companies.

For example, we have printed circuit boards. I’m not going to individual houses saying, would you give me your old cell phones? These data centers, every time you store something to the cloud, that is going to a data center. That is storing in some flash drive on some chip somewhere and on a printed circuit board. And they will retire these things every one to three years. So you have a huge number of these things that are made by many different manufacturers.

There are mountains of these things which are considered a toxic waste, not just by me, but by the government. Because there’s a lot of metals, and you can’t just throw this in the trash; you can’t just easily landfill it. And so there’s huge availability of this material. If you recycle it, metals are infinitely recyclable, so you can recycle it again and again.

It’s just a matter of the traditional ways of purifying this being really messy. You needed a lot of acid, a lot of water, and you generated what was called secondary waste streams from all of this processing. The pyrometallurgical methods of just melting it all down weren’t able to pull these individual metals out as well. Our method turned out to be quite fruitful, much cleaner, and much cheaper.

Okay, so wait a sec. Cleaner, cheaper, what kind of numbers are we talking about here?

We always crunch the numbers now. For any of the papers we publish, we have to do what’s called a life cycle assessment and a techno-economic analysis. So we have to look at greenhouse gas emissions, which is mainly CO2 emissions. We have to look at water usage, acid usage, chemical usage, and we have to look at it from the cradle to the gate to where we sell it, or the cradle to grave where it’s ultimately going to be disposed of again. What’s the cost of this entire process?

So we have to look at all of these parameters, and the numbers that we get, we can often have less than 50 percent the amount of CO2 emissions, sometimes just 10 percent the amount of CO2 emissions. Our costs are significantly less. many times 80 percent less, sometimes 50 percent less. And then if we take into account, this is where we really win, if we take into account the shipping costs.

So when something is mined in Australia, Australia doesn’t process anything. This is a mining country. Then it is shipped, put on barges, goes to China, where it’s processed, and then from China it’s shipped to places like the United States. So they’ll take the raw ore, which is just metal oxides, and they’ll convert it to the base metals, all separate, and then those come on barges to the U.S. So look at all that’s involved in the shipping.

If we could just have it right here in the United States, we don’t have any of that shipping charge. And a mining operation is huge. Just the capex in a new mining operation is $200 million. We could set up one of our factories for processing this material somewhere in the order of about $40 million. So it’s five times the difference.

Based on that, we don’t have that huge amount of shipping costs all over the world, moving things back and forth. And we don’t have the shipping cost of sending these off to Africa when we’re done. So if we’re looking at the grave site, we save all of that. So overall, it’s a very competitive business.

I understand it’s something like 75 percent of these circuit boards are actually still at the consumer level at homes and so forth. Is that right?

Yes. So that’s always a problem when it comes to waste. How do you get it? Now, the nice thing about the printed circuit boards from the data centers, there are mountains of this that they have. But the things that are in households, that’s always hard to get. That’s what makes the recycling of plastic very difficult. People have to throw their plastic away and then they’re hand sorted and things like that. It’s a difficult thing.

And plastics that have been recycled are never as good as the base plastic because a lot of these polymer chains break. Whereas with metals, you don’t have that. Metal goes to metal. They’re infinitely recyclable. They don’t go bad. But yes, it’s accumulating.

But there are other sources where you’re not dependent upon that. So there’s things called tailings, where there’s been mining operations, and there were things that just weren’t pure enough for them to go to the next step. They had other impurities. They have huge ponds full of these things that are a nightmare for them because they have to maintain these ponds that have a plastic lining to make sure they don’t leach into the water system or they’re stacked up in piles and accumulated. Those are just sitting there.

To us, that is a treasure, because we can take those, bring them through this flashing process and bring them up from 20 percent purity, which might be unusable to them, to 95 percent purity in an instant. It takes us seconds to bring it up that high, and we use very little water. Our only cost is electricity. But overall, our electricity is much lower than the traditional processes because we’re so fast. We use a lot of electricity for a very short time. Overall, our electricity usage is small.

Let me understand this, though. So it’s the same technology that you’re using for the tailings and for this waste that you’re going to recycle from the consumer waste and from the data centers. I mean, is it still the same technology for just actual ore?

It’s the same technology for the actual ore. The problem with ores is they can be a thousand times lower concentration of the metals than what I can get in electronic waste, in consumer waste. And so I have to flash a thousand times more volume of material in order to get the same amount of metal. It is much more profitable for us to not work off of ores.

And the ores come from some mining operation where they’ve spent a lot on huge capital equipment to do mining and then transporting it here. If that mine is outside the United States, again, all this shipping charge. And then it’s volume. It’s a volume problem.

I’d much rather work off of electronic waste where you might have a printed circuit board that could be 25 percent metal, whereas an ore might be 1 percent metal. And so it’s just a big, big difference or less than 1 percent metal. So it’s much better. And so from an environmental standpoint, it’s much better. From an energy standpoint, it’s much better. And if we can just think about using our waste and recycling it, it’s a good story all around.

So the electronic waste is a thousand times more concentrated with these metals that we want compared to regular ore. What about the tailings?

The tailings can be quite high. It’s not as good as the electronic waste that I can get from a printed circuit board, but the tailings have already been pre-purified from the ores. So they’ve taken the ores and they’ve concentrated it and they have something that’s just not high enough for them to bring on the next step. They’d like to use it, but there’s too many other things in there, but it’s still a pre-concentrate.

So what’s the catch here? I mean, it seems like this is the perfect solution to actually getting the U.S. up and running in terms of production of these metals.

The catch here is that nobody’s ever done a process like this before. So we had to go from my laboratory where we start on 50 milligrams, and then we bring it up to two or three grams, and then it has to go to where they’re going to be processing many tons a day; 20 tons a day is what the projection is. They’ll start with a ton a day in January of 2026. By September, October, they hope to be 20 tons a day of printed circuit boards where they would get some portion of that, maybe two tons per day to four tons per day of metals out of that. The catch is, how do you scale this?

So we spent two years working with engineering companies to be able to scale up this process. And that was actually, if you look at it, it was actually more than two years because on the graphene side, when we were making graphene, we spent from 2019 until 2025 before we hit the one ton a day mark. So we learned a lot doing that. Then when we started the metal separation company, it took another two years for the chlorine introduction part and the separating of the metals from that because it’s not exactly the same technology. It’s related to graphene, so it had to be developed. All of this had to be discovered.

So you hold these new patents. Are you worried anyone wants to get their hands on them?

The patents are all owned by the university. When we start these companies, we license that technology from the universities, and we file patents broadly. We file it in Europe. We file in many parts of Asia, including China. And patents, they give you protection, but there are violations of that. And so sometimes you have to go to court to protect these things. That’s a costly business.

But going into a country like China and trying to enforce your patents, it’s hard for me to get patents in China. They all know me in the patent office there. I patent a lot. I filed one disclosure a month for the last 26 years, so there’s a lot of patents that I have.

And unless I have a Chinese partner, they’ll never approve my patent. They just give me the runaround, give me office actions and slow walk this thing. And so it’s really not a fair process in some of these countries. And it’s not just China. We don’t even bother filing patents in Russia because if you go to defend it, you get run over on your way to the courthouse. We don’t even bother with Russia. But you try to gain some space and as much operating room as you can.

How long would this waste, electronic waste, possibly last? Because we’re going to need a lot of this, and we’re only going to need more and more year after year, right?

Right. So because we have so many tailings all over the country from former mines that are sitting there that are waste sites that have to be managed and these waste sites, they will gladly let you take it off their hands. They have to manage it, make sure it doesn’t get into the environment. Now, we can also deal with other types of waste. We can deal with what’s called red mud, which is bauxite residue, the residue that’s left over after aluminum production. As far as the eye can see, you can see these red fields, big cakes that are 10 feet high and just as far as the eye can see.

This is hematite. It is iron mixed in with the aluminum and some titanium. These are tailings that are too contaminated with iron to get at the aluminum that still resides there. So we can just flash this. In an instant, we pull out the iron and that can then go right back into the normal aluminum purification. So we’re cleaning up waste sites, things that were too expensive.

But when you make it so that it’s economical, you make money by cleaning up the site. Not only do they pay you to clean it up, then you take that material, you make money. That’s the only way to get these sites cleaned up. So we have the red mud and then we also have mountains of fly ash in this country.

Fly ash is the inorganic residue from coal burning. So you burn coal, carbon burns away, you’re left with the inorganic materials. It’s aluminum, calcium, silicon, and then it has other metals in it. So we can get these metals out. We’ve demonstrated it.

Now, I would rather work off of electronic waste because it has a higher percentage of the metals that I want, but we’ve demonstrated it. So you have these huge waste facilities that are there. We could run for a long time based on having to supplement with these wastes; we might use ores, but I would rather get their tailings because the tailings for me are useful.

With lithium mining, again, lithium is a critical metal. We need it for all our lithium-ion batteries. Every electric vehicle, every cell phone has lithium. So the tailings, a lot of times, have particles that are too small for them to deal with. That doesn’t affect me at all. I can run off the small particles. So I can take the things that have no value to them and use them.

There are other mines that have what they call rare earth elements, but not as oxides in these mines. They’ll be in the form of phosphates. That’s useless to them. It’s hard for them to process the rare earth element phosphates. It doesn’t bother this process; we can take what is to them useless material and turn it into good material, and so it takes off the table this idea of having to get our elements because if we can’t get these—if we really can’t get these—there will be wars fought over this; I can guarantee you that.

The one thing that strikes me here is that, you know, this is also something that Americans could actually be rallied around because there is a lot of this electronic waste at home, for example, right? And I mean, I think these export controls, which the Chinese Communist Party threatened America and, frankly, the entire West with, kind of were a crystallizing moment; at least I hope that they were a crystallizing moment. So I wonder if this doesn’t even have a kind of patriotic element to it.

Yes. If you could tell people that if you take your electronics that you’re getting rid of and you put them in a certain container to be carted off, this is patriotic. I mean, that would be a further incentive for people to do it. So, these things are there, but also, what we’re getting from the Trump administration is a guaranteed floor price.

So they’re saying we will pay you X amount for your rare earth elements because what will happen is this is the way some countries operate: they lower their price in a way that we could never compete and drive us out of business. As soon as we’re out of business, they will raise the price back up.

So what the U.S. government is already doing, preemptively, is saying we will guarantee you this price. And it’s not really the U.S. government supplementing it; that’s the price that it’s going to ultimately be sold for. And so by doing this, they will allow us to get this start, that we won’t be driven out of business.

So we’re actually getting a lot of help and consideration from the U.S. government to say, hey, we really have to do this. This is an important thing for the country. And we offshored so much of our manufacturing. We’re trying to reshore a lot of that because we see what can happen.

And President Trump went and he recently, as you know, made a deal in China, saying, okay, we’ll start selling this to you again. I wonder how much of that was just out of the goodness of their hearts or because they saw these other technologies coming online. Because when you make it difficult for somebody to get something, they will figure out another way. It always happens.

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How a Little Known Technology Can Break China’s Rare Earths Stranglehold | Dr. James Tour