00:00Joining us now on this is one of the most recognized figures in the mining sector.
00:04It's Robert Friedland, and he has helped drive major mineral discoveries around the world
00:07for the past 30 years and is now the chairman of Sunrise Energy Metals,
00:11along with a few other important companies.
00:14Robert, great to have you on. Thanks for coming back. Great to see you.
00:16Pleasure to be back.
00:17And I'm sure you have your eye keenly on this.
00:20An agreement that would be productive between the U.S. and China over rare earths.
00:24What can we hope for? What would be a good outcome in this circumstance?
00:27Well, we still need each other. Our two major economies are deeply intertwined.
00:33The last agreement expires in November. It was a one-year agreement,
00:36which is crazy for economies as big as the United States.
00:40So I think both sides might want to reach an agreement that extends to the end of the Trump administration.
00:46Well, it's reporting right now, according to The New York Times,
00:48that U.S. officials are just looking for a six-month kicking-the-can agreement.
00:52I wonder what you make of that kind of discrepancy in what the Chinese want
00:55versus what this White House is seeking.
00:57That's short. It's short.
01:00But all the copper is coming to the United States
01:02because of a very intelligent policy of threatening tariffs.
01:05So all the physical metal for copper is here,
01:08and the Chinese hold all these critical metals
01:10that you refer to as rare earths.
01:12They're a family of metals.
01:15And it's a big game of poker.
01:17And we sort of need each other for a long time.
01:20And we're hoping for a favorable outcome.
01:23Just on that, I mean, one of your companies, Sunrise,
01:26we were just talking about this in the break,
01:28holds this vast store of what the highest grade of scandium.
01:32And I think it's a critical metal that not many people will have heard of.
01:36But we did in February hear from Reuters that U.S. semi-firms were running low on it,
01:41that China had halted all exports in April of 2025.
01:45Again, this is a market you know extremely well, Robert.
01:48Have there been circumstances where we've been like teetering on the edge
01:51of national security crises because of these disputes over rare earths?
01:56Precisely.
01:57So there are 17 rare earth elements in the periodic table.
02:01And of those 17, scandium is probably the most expensive.
02:06It's the only element in the periodic table named after Scandinavia.
02:11There's another one named germanium, which is named after Germany.
02:15And it's extremely expensive.
02:17A long, wide bed pickup truck full of this metal would be worth about $30 million.
02:21And it's critical across a host of high-technology applications.
02:26So if we have China pulling back, can you, can Sunrise, can you fill in the gap?
02:31Is Western permitting enough for you to really come in and full force,
02:35give the market the supply which you currently hold?
02:38This one can supply the entire world for generations.
02:41It's that big.
02:42So we've filled in, we're filling in that one square of those 17.
02:47There's still problems with a lot of other metals.
02:50Well, again, just given that, I mean, Robert, throughout your career that spans three decades,
02:55you're kind of known for being able to find these various deposits, to get them out of the ground.
02:59In a variety of countries, whether it be Mongolia or South Africa or the DRC, now the Western world is
03:07asking for this.
03:07And you've been tasked with building in Arizona, in New South Wales.
03:11Is the Western world there with permitting to allow this to happen, to fill in the rest of those squares?
03:16I think this is going to become bipartisan.
03:19During the Biden administration, they were starting to see the light, that you need copper if you want to green
03:24the world economy.
03:25People that were worried about electric cars or the reduction of global warming gas started liking copper.
03:31This administration is more concerned with national security, but it's the same metals.
03:35And I think over time, these two tribes they have in the United States will both realize that this studio
03:43depends on these metals.
03:44We couldn't talk to the world on the Internet or use AI or feed and clothe 8 billion people on
03:51these planets without these critical metals.
03:53Is it just how different are the conversations this time around?
03:56And I know you were in the room on August 7th when President Trump announced actions for two of your
04:02companies for both Sunrise and the Ex-Im Bank also committing to Ivanhoe Electric.
04:07What has it been like working with this administration on this goal?
04:10I'm very happy with this administration's view on mining.
04:13Right.
04:13Because we haven't done any mining in this country in a long time.
04:16We haven't built nuclear power plants or oil refineries.
04:19And we lose our sovereignty if we don't have our basic industrial underpinning.
04:23If we get to where everything you buy in Walmart, say, is made in China, then America's kind of on
04:29the back foot in a long-range chess game.
04:32And so we need a rebalancing.
04:34And the whole world is looking at it this way.
04:36Japan is worried about its supply chain.
04:38The two Koreas both worry about their supply chain.
04:41India is worried this way.
04:43Europe is waking up.
04:44But it takes a long time.
04:45You know, I had a serious, very important person in the administration tell me that when he first started speaking
04:52to the Chinese, they came on angry and said, they said, you're not selling us the aircraft engines we need
04:58for our Boeing fleet.
05:00And this administration said, well, you're not selling us the metals we need to make those aircraft engines.
05:06So the American and China's economy are still quite interlinked.
05:11And there are a lot of tensions that have to be resolved.
05:14But I'm not a fan of war.
05:16I think we need to find a way to play by a mutually acceptable set of rules.
05:22And if China and the United States make some progress later this week, that would be good for all of
05:28us and our kids and our grandkids.
05:30Yes, peace is good.
05:32But it does feel, again, like this world is fragmenting.
05:35Supply chains are fragmenting that you're discussing.
05:38But you kind of operate in all of these worlds, Robert, whether it be Ivanhoe Mines and the DRC and
05:44selling to China, whether it be what you're doing in the Western world.
05:48Just as a business leader of a business that is truly global and has truly global supply chains, how do
05:53you navigate and hold on to all of these places when it feels like a world is asking you to
05:58pick a side?
05:58It's an extremely difficult business, and it's not for intelligent people, because it's just inherently difficult to find a mine,
06:07to engineer a mine and bring it on stream.
06:09Most of our mines take 10, 20, 25 years to come into production.
06:15It's not quick.
06:17If you're exploring for oil and you drill a well and you find oil, that well is the mine.
06:22It just starts producing.
06:23But in mining, you have to go to very remote places to where the metal actually is.
06:28We don't get to choose the location of that particular commodity.
06:33China has been very, very intelligent in going around the world for the last 30 or 40 years and ignoring
06:41net present value models and buying up a lot of the Western mining companies to the point that China controls
06:47the critical supply chain that built this studio.
06:49And now it becomes a huge poker chip.
06:52We have oil.
06:54They have metals.
06:55And so the game is getting rather intense as governments around the world are concerned about war.
07:02Just think about how much metal it will take to rebuild Ukraine, for example, if and when that conflict ends.
07:08And so it's very good that Bloomberg is paying attention to this very important issue.
07:14Thank you for the plug, Robert.
07:15We're doing our best and you're helping us with that.
07:18Look, we don't have enough time to fully get into this, but I'd be remiss if I didn't at least
07:21brush the surface of the other thing that's different in this cycle currently, and that is AI and what it's
07:27doing to things like demand and copper.
07:29Again, you've lived and worked through a few commodity cycles in your time.
07:33Just how different is this one?
07:34Does this feel structural, the demand that we're seeing from AI and metals?
07:38This is a vuja day phenomenon, the overwhelming feeling, we've never seen this before, the energy demand at the margin
07:45to bring on these data centers is astronomic.
07:48And you can start seeing some blowback or opposition because it's driving up energy costs to the average American.
07:55You need astronomic amounts of copper, but you need many other metals in these data centers.
08:00A typical server rack has 20 or 30 critical metals in it.
08:04And so these metals are in astronomically important demand.
08:08And as we walked in the studio, copper is again flirting at an all-time high.
08:13And copper is a proxy for all these other critical metals.
08:16That's what makes these screens and these lights.
08:18It's copper, copper, copper, copper, copper.
08:20And then the rare metals for semiconductors or for making your aircraft lighter, more fuel efficient.
08:26That's what we're talking about here.
08:28I think in the last century it was oil, oil, oil, oil.
08:31And now it's becoming more and more critical metals.
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