Ucore had to drill more holes, and drilling costs money. But the money was easy to find. You ask, and investors pay.
Junior mining is a special business. You need money to be in it. But not a lot. You can have the listing before you have the mine. Ucore did it. It was A shell company in 2005, which Part 1 laid out. Then you can find traces of a mineral. That doesn’t make it an economically viable business. Part 2 showed that at Bokan. All of their estimation were classified as inferred. The economics were not demonstrated, plus a going concern opinion from the auditor.
But two things change that, and a junior controls neither. A fight between two nations. And a smart guy who can make your mine attractive. We all know the story of the geopolitical fight between China and the rest of the world. Everyone had that part.
Ucore had to drill more holes, and drilling costs money. But the money was easy to find. You ask, and investors pay. So who was the smart guy
A New Life
IntelliMet LLC was founded in 2009 by Richard Hammen. In 2010, he had listed seven United States patents in his name: The first is Chromatographic material, granted in 1993. Then Tethered polymer ligands, in 2004 and again in 2007. Then Composite matrices with interstitial polymer networks, in 2005 and again in 2007. John Hammen is co-inventor on four of them.
Those last two matter to our story because of what happened in 2014. A marketing deck went out, written by John, Chris, and Richard Hammen. IntelliMet invented a solid phase extraction process, and Metals US builds the columns that run it. The two companies share an address, a telephone number and a surname.
Now read those patent titles next to how the deck describes solid phase extraction:
An ion exchange process using “metal-selective binding agents tethered inside nano-composite materials.
He was describing his own patents.
The chemistry was patented years before, and IntelliMet did not exist when a single one of those patents was granted.
Solid phase extraction.
Hammen defines the technology this way:
Solid Phase Extraction (SPE) was developed as a logical improvement on Ion Exchange resin technology.
An ion exchange column selects some elements and lets others through, and what it grabs depends on the binding agent built into it. Hammen’s invention is the binding agent and the material it sits in. His description is easy to follow. You can read it here.
But the deck says something interesting:
The engineering of ion exchange columns and systems is a mature business, and processes with Metals US SPE columns are in fact scaled-down ion exchange plants.
Which is true, but the application of SPE on rare earth separation was new, and Ucore said so itself, in the risk factors of its annual information form for 2012:
The Company intends to use SPE for the separation and purification of the REOs at the potential Bokan Mountain Project mine site. This is not the current industry standard and has never been undertaken in a commercial application for REOs.
Why was SPE an attractive choice? IntelliMet claims the following in the same presentation:
Customizability: We can synthesize, tweak, and optimize ligand chemistry to make columns that have greater selectivity factors for individual elements.
Ucore’s objective was aligned with this feature.
What Ucore held in the technology
Ucore planned to use solid phase extraction for separation “pursuant to agreements with IntelliMet LLC (“IntelliMet”) dated November 6, 2011 and October 16, 2012.”. Those agreements “relate to the testing of the SPE process on samples of material sourced from the Bokan Mountain Property.”
But the ownership clause is important:
Any technology developed in this Project will be the exclusive property of Ucore Rare Metals Inc., for applications with Bokan ore.
What Ucore owned was whatever came out of that particular work, for its own rock.
However, the way the technology was described kept changing. Sometimes it was a “Process invented by Intellimet together with Ucore.” Other times it was “proprietary bench and pilot scale Solid Phase Extraction (“SPE”) nanotechnology research.“ In the end, IntelliMet was “the developer of this technology.“
Ucore’s use of “proprietary“ is vague. It can be read two ways: proprietary to IntelliMet, or proprietary to Ucore.
So who owned the technology?
IntelliMet was there before Ucore. There was a whole suite of agreements and projects, before and after Ucore.
In August 2010, Rare Element Resources Ltd. reported that IntelliMet was running extraction and separation tests on its Bear Lodge material in Wyoming. Ucore’s solid phase extraction work dates to 2011.
In April 2011, Mesa Exploration hired IntelliMet to design the metallurgy for a lithium brine project. Not rare earths at all. So IntelliMet was a contract metallurgy consultancy selling process design across commodities.
On 2 April 2013, a Texas company, Texas Rare Earth Resources, announced it had hired IntelliMet to design the refining process for its Round Top deposit, using solid phase extraction.
In December 2013, NunaMinerals of Greenland announced that IntelliMet had done its metallurgical test work using solid phase extraction.
IntelliMet was already doing rare earth separation a year before Ucore showed up. Ucore joined an existing business.
Which answers the question the word “proprietary“ left open. A technology being sold to a Wyoming rare earth deposit, a mineral brine project, a Texas rare earth deposit and a Greenlandic one, across four years and four separate clients, is proprietary to the firm selling it. Ucore’s own risk factors say so:
The developer of this technology” and its own agreements say so, by reserving to Ucore only what came out of the Bokan work, for Bokan ore.
So the SPE was not the moat, and investors couldn’t count on it.
Ucore was a junior uranium explorer. Then it was a rare earth explorer. Now it was building a separation plant, a chemical processing business, running on a technology it did not own, in an industry it had never operated in.
Why did they venture into separation?
The answer starts outside the company. But ends in the company. By the end of 2011, there were strong incentives to bring this material (REEs) inside American borders and reduce the dependency on China. Prices had moved violently in some cases, by the Department of Energy’s own account, increasing tenfold in a single year.
Inside the same report:
To manage supply risk, multiple sources of materials are required. This means taking steps to facilitate extraction, processing and manufacturing here in the United States… In all cases, extraction, separation and processing should be done in an environmentally sound manner.
And it named the technology it wanted:
Research into more efficient and environmentally friendly separation and processing technologies have the potential to boost supply from new and existing sources.
Extraction and processing, inside the United States, done cleanly. A domestic heavy rare earth deposit with an on-site separation circuit that skipped solvent extraction answers that sentence almost word for word.
So the macro tailwind was real, and it was regulatory and commercial at once. The government wanted domestic processing, and prices said the market wanted the metal. A junior explorer sitting on the right elements could see both.
What Ucore did next was attach itself to it.
The Next Sentence
In June 2013, Ucore issued a release about a proposal before the House Armed Services Committee to spend $41 million stockpiling six metals, two of them heavy rare earths found at Bokan. Inside the release, it offers a link as evidence that the Geological Survey recognises Bokan as “the most significant heavy REE deposit on US soil.“
Yes it checks out, the report indeed says so. And the next sentence:
The most significant heavy rare earth element deposit in the United States is Bokan Mountain, Alaska. The mineralogically complex deposit is still poorly studied and little detailed reporting is available for it.
The rest of the report says: No adequate description of the Dotson vein-dike mineralogy published. The fluid inclusions “have not been studied (despite being abundantly present). The geochronology has not been done, and the intrusive is still poorly mapped.
Follow it one step further. Of the three studies the page cited, the 1998 Geological Survey report ends this way:
The small widths of the vein dikes lessens their likely value as potential resources unless peculiarly attractive beneficiation properties could be identified.
The federal science named beneficiation as the open condition on which the deposit’s value depended.
The same report also records the United States Bureau of Mines finding from 1989:
significant resources identified, but the data insufficient for description of reserves.
No reserve in 1989, none in 2013, still none in 2026.
A tailwind is not a business. Building a separation plant needs capital, and a great deal more of it than a company with a $71 million market value (DOE estimate 2011) and no revenue can raise by selling shares.
To carry out the company year on year, they implement the same financing maneuvers as the previous years, and in 2014 their auditor KPMG signed the 2014 accounts in April 2015 and attached an Emphasis of Matter, drawing attention to a company with "no sources of revenue" that "does not expect to have sufficient working capital to fund its operations beyond the fourth quarter of 2015."
So where does that money come from?
The Bond
State of Alaska: On 18 February 2014, a senator moved an amendment to a bill that had been written the year before. The amendment would let the state’s development bank issue long-term bonds for Bokan, up to a principal amount of $145,000,000.
What the legislation did was permit the authority to consider lending, subject to its own due diligence and its own board’s approval. And Ucore’s own release named the thing that would put the question to that board: the financing was “to be completed subsequent to the release of the Bokan-Dotson Ridge feasibility study on the project.”
A month later the quarterly filing said it again: “AIDEA will undertake its due diligence subsequent to the completion by the Company of a feasibility study on the Bokan-Dotson Ridge property.”
So the state’s condition rested on a document Ucore had to produce. And a feasibility study needs a mineral reserve, and a reserve needs the deposit measured to a confidence the deposit had never been measured to.
Which is why, within three months of the vote, the deferred drills went back to Bokan.
Inferred, Indicated and Measured
The drilling results moved the category from Inferred to Indicated, and by 2026 a small part of it was Measured. However, the tonnage barely changed.
What never appeared was the reserve. Below is every estimate Bokan has ever had, at Ucore’s own cut-off, taken only from signed technical reports.
Sources and method
What is drawn. The ground surface line, the deposit outline, the drill traces and the mineralized intersections are traced from Figures 21 and 22 of the Updated Summary Report, Bokan Mountain, after J. Robinson, 2013. The coloured bars running off each trace are the intersections: the depths at which that hole actually cut rare earth bearing vein. They are the only marks in the figure that record a physical fact, and they are identical in every year. Those figures show the 2007 to 2011 diamond drilling only. No figure of the later drilling is published, so the traces cannot grow between years even though the drilling did.
Scale. The field is a vertical longitudinal projection of the Dotson Zone, looking north: about 2,140 metres of strike from west on the left to east on the right, with the ground surface falling from roughly 300 metres of elevation in the west to near sea level in the east. The vertical scale is exaggerated a little over twice against the horizontal. The intersection bars are drawn at exaggerated length, as they are in the source figures, and their lengths are not true intersection widths. The faint dashed line is the base of the 2011 deposit outline, carried through every year so the deeper 2015 outline can be read against it.
What is not drawn. No published figure shows where Measured, Indicated and Inferred material sits within the zone. The proportions of colour here are the reported tonnages; the individual bars are not identified by class in any published figure. Each class is scattered evenly across the whole field so that any local patch shows roughly the same mix as the whole. No cluster, no region and no depth band belongs to one class. The outline grows and shrinks with the reported total tonnage, which is why the 2015 estimate reaches deeper: 1,050,000 tonnes of new Inferred material was added at depth by deeper holes.
The sort. Hovering or tapping the field sends the heavy rare earth fraction to the bottom and the light fraction to the top. The sorted state is a proportion, not a map. Heavy and light oxide are not separated in space anywhere in this deposit, and no published figure places either. The split is the reported grade split by year, and the bars travel from their real positions only so the ratio can be read.
Figures. Dotson Zone only, at the 0.40 per cent total rare earth oxide cut off, Ucore’s base case. 2011 from the 2011 technical report, Table 19-4. 2013 from the March 2013 technical report, Table 25.1, which restates the April 2011 estimate, so that year is identical to 2011 by design. 2015 from Table 79, re-issued unchanged in 2019 with an effective date of 3 October 2018 to add co-product metals, which is not a separate estimate. 2026 from Tables 82, 83 and 84 of the Updated Summary Report. Years are labelled by effective date, not announcement date. Year grades are tonnage weighted across classes and are therefore derived arithmetic, not figures printed in any report. Nothing here is drawn from a press release.
Reserve. No mineral reserve has been estimated for the project, in any year, at any confidence level. A mineral reserve is the economically mineable part of a Measured or Indicated Mineral Resource.
The Next One
Around 2014, solid phase extraction was not getting traction. Few companies mentioned it anymore. Ucore did not walk away from SPE, and it kept mentioning it on filings. But it found another technology. Older than the first one, and more robust. Molecular recognition, running for years at Tanaka, Asarco and Impala Platinum.
On 2 March 2015, Ucore announced it had separated Bokan samples into individual elements at over 99% purity. The next day it agreed to buy the worldwide rights for $2.9 million. Neither announcement mentioned solid phase extraction.
Again, they needed money. This time a new class of investors turned up, buying something the company had never sold before. That is what carried Ucore into the midstream of rare earths, where it is today.
From 2015, it seemed for the first time Ucore had a real chance, but IBC’s path diverged. Who else could do it? Someone who had been where the real separation happens.
References
Bentzen, E. H., III, Ghaffari, H., Galbraith, L., Hammen, R. F., Robinson, R. J., Abdel Hafez, S., & Annavarapu, S. (2013, March 4). Preliminary economic assessment on the Bokan Mountain rare earth element project, near Ketchikan, Alaska (Rev. 03.1; Report No. 1196000100-REP-R0001-03.1). Tetra Tech.
Hammen, J., Hammen, C., & Hammen, R. (2014, April 29). Ucore rare earth mine development in Alaska: Using SPE technology to develop a new rare earth production paradigm at Bokan, Alaska [Conference presentation]. Mine Design, Operation & Closure Conference, Butte, MT, United States. Metals US, Inc. & IntelliMet LLC.
Hammen, R. F. (2010). Conservation Team application for Transportation Sector member [Application form with biographical sketches]. City of Missoula, Montana.
Mesa Exploration Corp. (2011, April 19). Mesa Exploration engages IntelliMet [Press release].
NunaMinerals A/S. (2013, December 6). NunaMinerals signs a joint exploration agreement with Korea Resources Corporation (KORES) for the Qeqertaasaq rare earth element-niobium project, West Greenland (Announcement No. 20/2013). GlobeNewswire.
Philpotts, J. A., Taylor, C. D., Tatsumoto, M., & Belkin, H. E. (1998). Petrogenesis of late-stage granites and Y-REE-Zr-Nb-enriched vein dikes of the Bokan Mountain stock, Prince of Wales Island, southeastern Alaska (Open-File Report No. 98-459). U.S. Geological Survey.
Robinson, R. J., Power, M. A., & Barker, J. C. (2011, April 21). Technical report on the exploration program and mineral resource estimate for the Bokan Mountain property, Prince of Wales Island, Alaska. Aurora Geosciences (Alaska) Ltd. & Cathedral Rock Enterprises LLC.
Robinson, R. J., & Schulze, C. (2026, April 9). S-K 1300 summary report and NI 43-101 technical report on the Bokan Mountain property, southeast Alaska, USA. Aurora Geosciences (Alaska) Ltd.
Texas Rare Earth Resources Corp. (2013, April 2). Texas Rare Earth Resources engages IntelliMet for metallurgical study [Press release]. GlobeNewswire.
Ucore Rare Metals Inc. (2013, April 29). Annual information form for the year ended December 31, 2012.
Ucore Rare Metals Inc. (2013, June 13). Ucore comments on House Armed Services Committee dysprosium stockpile initiative [Press release].
Ucore Rare Metals Inc. (2014, April 28). Alaska Legislature unanimously approves $145 million bond funding legislation for Bokan-Dotson Ridge [Press release].
Ucore Rare Metals Inc. (2014, May 29). Management’s discussion and analysis for the period ended March 31, 2014.
Ucore Rare Metals Inc. (2014, June 25). Ucore reports on 2014 Bokan summer field program [Press release].
Ucore Rare Metals Inc. (2015, March 2). Ucore successfully separates entire suite of individual rare earth elements at high purity [Press release].
Ucore Rare Metals Inc. (2015, March 3). Ucore secures rights to SuperLig molecular recognition technology for rare earth recycling and tailings processing applications [Press release].
U.S. Department of Energy. (2011, December). Critical materials strategy.
U.S. Geological Survey, Central Mineral and Environmental Resources Science Center. (2013, March 4). Bokan Mountain rare earth element deposit, Alaska [Project page].