American Resources Corporation (NASDAQ:AREC) subsidiary ReElement Technologies announced that it has gained a controlling interest in the former RCA Thomson plant in Marion, Indiana to be its second rare earth and battery material refining facility.
The site comprises 425,000 square feet of manufacturing capacity on a 42-acre campus, allowing ReElement to expand to 675,000 square feet of purified rare earth and critical mineral production.
It will produce ultra-pure battery elements, namely lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese, and rare earth elements like neodymium, dysprosium and praseodymium for electric vehicle (EV) battery and permanent magnet supply chains.
Initial target production is two metric tons per day of purified rare earth elements sourced from end-of-life magnets, such as those found in high-efficiency motors, EVs, wind turbines, power tools, and hard drives, and 50 metric tons per day of lithium-ion battery input material sourced from end-of-life batteries and manufacturing waste, like that found from EV batteries, power tool batteries and specialty batteries.
“The critical minerals refined in this facility will power products as diverse as the EV on the road to the F-35 fighter jets defending the US overseas,” American Resources CEO Mark Jensen said.
Marion, Indiana was chosen after months of careful analysis and the examination of several potential sites in the Midwest, American Resources said.
The facility is anticipated to support 30 jobs with no city and state incentives, scaling up to about 300 jobs with full anticipated incentives.
“This community lost nearly 4,000 jobs when the RCA Thomson facility shut down, and our redevelopment of this site is an incredible opportunity to become a major hub in the growing electrified economy for generations to come,” Jensen noted in a statement.
"In addition to the buildings themselves, the community possesses all of the key attributes we were looking for in a location including onsite infrastructure and the workforce to be able to further scale our world-leading, critical mineral refining solutions to feed the domestic manufacturing of electrified and cleantech goods.”
ReElement Technologies is redefining how critical and rare earth elements are both sourced and processed while focusing on the recycling of end-of-life products such as rare earth permanent magnets and lithium-ion batteries, as well as coal-based waste streams and byproducts to create a low-cost and environmentally-safe, circular supply chain.
American Resources is a next-generation, environmentally and socially responsible supplier of high-quality raw materials to the new infrastructure market.
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