Ucore found its substitute in 2014. The replacement was not new: Ucore described it as "based on Nobel Prize-winning technology (1987)", older than the SPE patents it displaced, which were granted between 1993 and 2007.. What was new was applying it to rare earth separation.

Ucore's own account of IBC's track record is worth quoting exactly, because it is Ucore's description of a private counterparty and none of it has been independently confirmed. The release states that IBC's products are "used worldwide by premier metals refining and mining companies such as Tanaka Kikinzoku K.K. (Japan), Asarco Grupo Mexico (US), Impala Platinum Ltd. (South Africa), and Sino Platinum (China)." Separately, it states that the Japanese government, through Mitsubishi Research, awarded IBC a subsidy grant for a "Demonstration Project for Seawater Purification Technologies", concerning the selective separation of strontium and caesium from contaminated seawater at Fukushima.

A Different Company

On 3 March 2015, Ucore agreed with IBC to acquire the exclusive worldwide rights to IBC's SuperLig molecular recognition technology for rare earth separation and recycling, and for tailings processing, at a one-time licensing fee of US$2.9 million. The fee was conditional. It fell due once IBC delivered a fully operational pilot plant and Ucore completed its own due diligence. Ucore's audited balance sheet later named what the company held for the money it had paid, and called it a "Non-refundable advance on technology".

The unit IBC was to deliver is described as "a test mule, capable of accepting Pregnant Leach Solution and bulk concentrates from multiple prospective REE feedstock locations around the world".

The interesting part is where Ucore's chief executive confirms that the company had entered into agreements with various rare earth feedstock providers, and would be securing test material from a variety of locations over the next six months. Bokan appears in that sentence as one high-priority source of pilot-scale test material.

He goes further. The portfolio, he says, "now includes fully developed and customized separation molecules for almost all of the burgeoning clean energy and technology metals, specifically REE, lithium, cobalt, tungsten and PGM's". The release then continues in his voice: the comprehensive portfolio represents a broad field of vision and a remarkable potential for rapid growth across multiple metals sectors, via a hub and spoke growth platform, and that vision will apply to a potential multi-metal co-venture with IBC, as contemplated by the Company's March 3, 2015 press release.

Against the preceding business model, that is a different company. Through 2013 and 2014, the entire proposition was a mine in Alaska with a separation circuit. Here, the separation unit is the asset, and the ore is an input that could come from anywhere.

The management discussion confirmed the strategy:

"Ucore Rare Metals Inc. is a junior exploration and technology company listed on the TSX Venture Exchange (the "Exchange"). Ucore's corporate strategy is to build shareholder value through the exploration and development of economically viable rare earth element ("REE") properties and the processing of third party concentrates using Molecular Recognition separation technology ("MRT")."

The company is a rare earth developer holding a heavy rare earth deposit, and here its own chief executive describes the future as a platform serving lithium, cobalt, tungsten and platinum group metals.

The Money

Ucore had no revenue. What it had was the financing machinery described in parts one and two, enough to keep a junior exploration company alive year after year, and nowhere near enough to build a separation technology of its own. So it tried to buy one. The price was US$2.9 million, payable once IBC delivered a working pilot plant, and Ucore did not have the money.

The markets that had funded its drilling were not built for this. Two point nine million dollars for a technology license, with no revenue behind it, and the company's own releases still stating the technology was unproven at commercial scale, is venture capital territory. Ucore was a mining company on the TSX Venture Exchange, not a startup on Sand Hill Road. It needed a different kind of investor.

Investors

On 20 May 2015, Ucore announced that a "high net worth US-based investor", unnamed, would pay US$4.0 million for a royalty on production from its first molecular recognition installations: 5 per cent of gross sales until the investment was recaptured, then a 2 per cent net smelter royalty on the first client generating more than CAD$50 million a year.

Then came a "Second Royalty Agreement" with "a high net worth US-based investor" for a further US$1.0 million, on terms close to the first.

And on 14 December 2015, a third investor, a foreign investment fund, agreed to pay US$5.0 million for a royalty on production from the same installations.

Investors

On 20 May 2015, Ucore announced that a "high net worth US-based investor", unnamed, would pay US$4.0 million for a royalty on production from its first molecular recognition installations: 5 per cent of gross sales until the investment was recaptured, then a 2 per cent net smelter royalty on the first client generating more than CAD$50 million a year.

Then came a "Second Royalty Agreement" with "a high net worth US-based investor" for a further US$1.0 million, on terms close to the first.

And on 14 December 2015, a third investor, a foreign investment fund, agreed to pay US$5.0 million for a royalty on production from the same installations.

Who were these investors?

Three royalty agreements, and two of the three parties were eventually named. Canadian securities legislation requires a public early warning report once a holder crosses 10 per cent, and that is what produced the first name. The second came voluntarily.

The first to cross it was Orca Holdings LLC, "an Alaska-based enterprise controlled by Ucore Advisory Board member Randy Johnson". The second, Concept Capital Management, named itself in a press release in March 2016, when it converted part of its royalty and raised its commitment at the same time, three months before it filed an early warning report of its own.

The third is not named in any of the filings. When the first two royalty investors converted together in January 2016, Ucore described them only as "two high net worth US-based investors". Orca accounted for 81 per cent of the shares issued. The holder of the remaining 19 per cent, roughly a million dollars, stayed below the 10 per cent threshold.

Two things the releases say and are easy to read past. First, the money is not equity, but it is convertible: the investor may convert the whole investment into common shares, at which point the royalty obligations cease.

Second, the cautionary note at the foot of both releases states that molecular recognition technology "has yet to be proven, at a commercial scale, for the separation of rare earth elements", that no economic assessment of it has been released, and that the company "does not yet have any specific contracts" for it.

So the royalty is sold on future revenue from a joint venture that had not been formed, using a license whose US$2.9 million fee had not been paid, and the company said as much in the same document. Why did they invest?

The Next Gas Man.

We can only guess, but back in 2015 major wins in resource extraction seemed to depend on unconventional methods. Shale oil, gas and fracking had generated legendary wealth for investors. Everyone was looking for the next big boom.

In 2015, two investors paid Ucore for a royalty. They were paid off the top, before profits and before anything else. They were buying the technology's revenue. In January 2016, seven weeks before the plant was completed, they converted the royalty back and took shares instead.

Both positions were bets on different things. A royalty pays only if the plant sells something. A share pays if the share price rises, and a share price rises on sentiment.

Hold the innocent readings, because it is tempting to conclude the technology was not working. Shares are liquid, and a royalty on one private plant is not; shares have unlimited upside where a royalty is capped by sales volume.

Two investors had bought exposure to what the technology would earn. Before it earned anything, they swapped it for exposure to what it would be worth.

And IBC could be worth a lot more. But how much exactly?

Utah

Ucore and IBC agreed to constitute a joint venture. Its general purpose was to hold IBC's proprietary separation and recovery technology on a royalty-free basis and apply it to the rare earth, recycling and tailings processing markets worldwide.

The contract behind it covered the research, the pilot plant, the separation plant and the prospective joint enterprise all at once.

Ucore's own explanation is consistent and available throughout: the joint venture was conditional on the payments being completed.

The pilot plant was supposed to be built in Houston, at IBC's subsidiary SepraMet. It went up in Utah instead, beside IBC's own facility, completed in March 2016 and accepting its first Bokan material that April.

Through 2016 it delivered results: scandium at 99 per cent recovery and better, the heavy and light classes, dysprosium and holmium sub-groups, dysprosium at 99.99 per cent purity, and an outside verification. These were pilot plant results, and Ucore's own standing caution on every one of them was that the technology "has yet to be proven, at a commercial scale". So what about industrial scale?

Capacity

The capacity Ucore published for its pilot plant was a forecast made before the plant existed. In November 2015, the company said it expected a flow rate "in the range of 160 liters of pregnant leach solution per day, capable of generating multiple kilograms of REEs, as separated rare earth carbonates, per week".

Take the most generous reading of "multiple kilograms", ten a week, and the plant makes about half a tonne a year. In March 2018 the company published its production schedule: 1,000 tonnes a year from 2020 to 2021, rising to 5,000 by 2023 to 2024. The first target is roughly two thousand times the throughput Ucore had ever claimed. The second is about ten thousand.

A pilot plant is meant to be small, and scaling from a test unit to a commercial plant by a factor of hundreds is ordinary in this industry.

Ucore's chief executive gave the basis himself, in one word: the schedule came "by extrapolating the knowledge gained from the SuperLig One rare earth pilot plant". By the end of 2017, the plant had not been recommissioned to accept outside feedstock, and Ucore's own audited accounts recorded it as "not considered available for use".

They never reached commercial scale. But something else could run the technology at industrial scale.

The Strategic Metals Complex

In November 2016, the Strategic Metals Complex was formally announced, and its feedstock is not Bokan. It is recycling and industrial scrap from the automotive and rare earth permanent magnet industries. In December, the design firms up: two phases, platinum group metals from recycled material first, rare earths from magnet manufacturing refuse, swarf and end-of-life electronics second. Bokan is the feedstock for neither. Ucore was diversifying completely, and it seemed eager to take the technology out for a spin on anything it could get its hands on. Anything.

A separation technology genuinely does want more than one feedstock, and Ucore said so openly rather than concealing it.

Oil

On 18 July 2016, Ucore announced that it had partnered with an undisclosed major Alberta oil sands producer to recover rare earths and other technology metals from oil sands tailings. This is an odd decision on both sides.

Two separate pressures were pushing Alberta's producers toward it. The first was price. In a downturn, oil companies reach for unconventional methods to pull more value from the same reservoirs, and extracting rare earths from tailings is unconventional.

The second was Directive 85, Fluid Tailings Management for Oil Sands Mining Projects, released by the Alberta Energy Regulator in July 2016, the same month as the announcement. Directive 85 sets thresholds for the fluid tailings a project may hold and gives the regulator a range of regulatory and financial tools if those thresholds are exceeded.

The money behind the partnership was $220,000 from the Government of Canada's Industrial Research Assistance Program, paid as cost reimbursement for eligible expenditures, with Ucore and the unnamed producer absorbing the remaining net costs equally. The separations ran at IBC's facility in Utah.

The producer has been unnamed in every release since 18 July 2016, but the release of 6 March 2017 gives an identifying detail the earlier ones did not: the input material comes from "a froth treatment plant located at Fort McMurray, AB".

If oil was unconventional, then the next one was even more bizarre.

Coal

Kentucky River Properties owns about 367,000 acres of coal-bearing ground across Kentucky, Illinois and Indiana, dozens of working and worked-out mines, and more than 400 million tons of recoverable coal.

In March 2018, the two companies signed a memorandum of understanding to form a joint venture: Kentucky River Properties would bring the land, the data and the candidate sites, and Ucore would bring "REE and strategic metals processing and refining technologies". A month later, the partner bought the building as well, a former engineered wood plant in Perry County with 250,000 square feet under roof and thirty acres of open-air storage "capable of accommodating several hundred thousand tons of ore and processing feedstock". In the same release, the joint venture was still described as pending.

Aggressive

In eight years of Ucore's public documents, the word "aggressive" appears three times. In November 2016, the company had "followed an aggressive development cycle with SuperLig", the technology, which belonged to IBC. In June 2018 it was applying its new money to "a very aggressive design/build process in Ketchikan", a plant on land it had not yet bought. In September 2018 it was "aggressively pursuing the development of technologies that will beneficiate coal ash", on a landlord's ground, in a partner's building, under a memorandum that had not yet become a joint venture.

What the money did instead

In the first nine months of 2017, Ucore spent about three hundred thousand dollars on the Alaskan deposit it owned. On the line in its own accounts marked Feasibility Study, it spent nothing at all, and a feasibility study was the stated precondition for the due diligence that would release the hundred and forty-five million dollars Alaska had authorised for the Bokan project.

The feedstock for its flagship programme was another company's waste, from a producer it would not name. The leach process that turns the feedstock into a workable solution belonged to Ucore, designed by an outside consultant it retained. The separation technology belonged to IBC, the Utah firm Ucore had been trying to buy since March 2015 and had not finished paying. The coal belonged to Kentucky River Properties. The refinery's first product line was other people's scrap catalytic converters. And that summer the pilot plant, the one physical thing proving any of it worked, was sold to the company's largest shareholder and rented back at fifteen per cent a year.

The company famous for owning an Alaskan rare earth deposit had, by the end of 2017, designed a refinery that does not process it, using a technology it does not own, running on a plant it had just sold, from feedstock belonging to other people, and in nine months it spent nothing at all on the study that would have funded the mine.

Two things should be said against that. A feasibility study costs millions and Ucore held about $1.7 million in cash, so spending nothing on it may be a consequence of being broke rather than a choice, though in the same nine months the company found $641,484 for the plant. And none of the borrowing is improper in itself: a company with no revenue partners, licenses and outsources, and a government-funded research programme is prudent rather than evasive. And the bonds may well have covered it. AIDEA's own letter describes the legislation as authorising up to $145 million for the infrastructure and construction costs of the Bokan-Dotson Ridge project, and describes the Ketchikan plant as the first step in Ucore's development of that same project. On the agency's own reading, the plant sits inside the authorisation rather than outside it.

It matters because a better-funded competitor could pull each supplier and each partner away from Ucore one at a time.

The plant comes back

In the spring of 2019, the company bought back its plant. It terminated the lease with its largest shareholder. It exercised its option to repurchase the pilot plant for exactly what it had sold it for two years earlier, and three days later announced where the money came from: a loan from that same shareholder, at twelve and a half per cent rising to fifteen, secured by a first charge on everything the company owned. The machine every purity claim rested on was back on the books. It had also gone two full years without being recommissioned to accept outside feedstock, which is what the audited accounts said, in the same sentence they had been printing since 2017: not considered available for use.

Two Assessments

Alaska's development agency had authorised up to $145 million for the Bokan project. In October 2018 its chief executive wrote to Ucore, copying the Governor of Alaska, the state senator who had moved the bond legislation, and both Ketchikan mayors. Ucore announced the letter ten days later as a letter of support. Its subject line reads "AIDEA Review", and its language is conditional throughout: the agency "is in the process of examining methods to provide funding", and the plant and the mine "are the types of natural resource developments that AIDEA may consider financing". The letter also contains this sentence: "Development of the Alaska rare-earth element mine is currently on hold until prices improve enough to make the investment worthwhile". That is the assessment of the state agency that would have provided the money, put in writing, to the company, with the Governor copied.

Eleven months later a second assessment appeared, from a very different source, and the circumstances matter. On 30 August 2019, Ucore filed a Notice of Action in the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia alleging that IBC Advanced Technologies had defamed it in earlier press releases. Four days later, on 3 September, IBC answered with a release of its own, setting out findings by an expert it had retained, Dr. David Hammond of Hammond International Group. In IBC's account, Hammond concluded that the Bokan project was not presently economically feasible and would not be feasible for the foreseeable future. The release states that his updated analysis of the 2013 assessment puts the project's net present value at negative $819 million at an after-tax nominal discount rate of 12 per cent, and that his sensitivity analysis indicates rare earth oxide prices would have to rise by a minimum factor of seven to eight for the mine to achieve a nominal after-tax return of 12 per cent. It states that the 2013 assessment relied on price predictions based on a three-year average incorporating the mid-2011 price bubble, and that the prices Hammond used, taken from Asian Metal for April 2019, were on average 80 per cent lower than the values in that assessment. It also states that the site includes land designated by the United States government as a Superfund site, carrying financial liability and remediation costs of an unknown total.

All of this is IBC's published characterisation of its own retained expert's work, issued by a party in dispute with Ucore and three days after being sued over its earlier statements. The underlying report is not public and none of it has been independently verified here.

The two sources had opposite interests and no reason to agree. One was considering financing the project; the other was suing the company and being sued by it. Both described the same condition: at prevailing prices, the mine did not pay. Through the same period, Ucore continued to publish the $577 million valuation from its 2013 assessment. And in its own management discussion for the period ended 30 June 2019, the company printed the standard caution that travels with that number: "Mineral resources that are not mineral reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability."

The Man Who Understood It

There is a question underneath all of this: who inside Ucore understood the technology?

On 2 August 2016, Ucore announced the sudden death of Ken Collison, its chief operating officer and the man credited with generating the process flowsheet for Bokan. His duties were divided into two. Bokan went to a Ucore vice president. Molecular recognition technology went to the president and chief executive of IBC Advanced Technologies, described in Ucore's own release as "the Company's partner". He was already the Qualified Person on Ucore's technical announcements, the individual who takes personal responsibility for the accuracy of their scientific content, while running the company that owned the technology. He was also a member of Ucore's Advisory Board. It seemed Ucore never had a person of its own who could develop it, and when its one operating executive died, the function crossed the table to the other company's chief executive. And soon their paths diverged.

Back to Solvent Extraction

The day after IBC published its expert's findings, Ucore's chief executive wrote to shareholders.

On 4 September 2019, he set out what was still missing after four and a half years. "A singular remaining 'deliverable' of the Alaska SMC plan remains outstanding," he wrote: "the sourcing of a competent and permittable separation platform". He gave as the reason "the likelihood that MRT will not be available for the near-term engineering advancement of the Alaska SMC". The plant would therefore be built on solvent extraction, "without the involvement of IBC": the industry standard method, and the method the company's own filings had for years described its technology as a clean and cost-effective alternative to.

The reason is the customer, and this is Ucore's own account of it. Washington, the company says, had given "indications to the Company that an already commercially proven REE extraction technologies would receive the highest consideration for USG funding", so solvent extraction configurations "would be given front-of-the-line status" under the Defense Production Act Title III programme. Six days later, the shift went public under a new name, the M Cubed Plan, MINE to METAL to MARKET, with the plant to be built "on the basis of a Solvent Extraction platform".

In 2020, Ucore bought a company called Innovation Metals Corporation, and with it a separation process called RapidSX. Where that technology came from is the next part.

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