Fox Meyer

Like if you just go Google the price histories of vanadium, for example, look at how volatile that is and then compare it to something like gold, which granted does go up and down as well, but not nearly to the same degree as something like vanadium or lithium even.

which is useful in batteries.

So it's a question of how secure the miner can feel.

And the reason people haven't been doing this historically is because there is another player in this that Jamie might have talked about, China, who has been doing this for years and is able to keep the prices of these things low enough that it doesn't make sense to mine it somewhere else.

But with this U.S.

deal, they're coming in and they're trying to set price floors so that miners know that if you do pull this out, it will be worth at least this much and that's enough to make them do it.

And then that'll shake up the market.

That's the theory anyway.

But, you know, if it's not worth it to go through all this problem to get like two grains of sand out of a bucket, why would you do it?

Possibly.

But I think because of the way geology works, if we happen to have a world renowned deposit of something like potentially we do with vanadium or potentially we do with antimony, someone's going to want it eventually.

You know, like they might go to all these other countries first and strip mine their iron sands and get through everything they can.

they're going to need more eventually and if we haven't signed a deal we can sign it then you know i think it's a matter of if you are going to make a new gold miner if you are conducting a gold mining operation you might as well get everything right and i think as i said earlier that's something that the environmentalists and the miners will agree with because it's better product for the miners and fewer mines for the greenies you know that that seems like a win-win

We are wise to take stock of our mineral wealth and we are wise to assess how valuable it is to others and know when to pounce when conditions are right to get maximum return for us in the country and minimal harm to the environment.

But this all comes as we also need to discuss our mineral royalty rates.

You know, the more money we can retain versus sending offshore will make a lot of these arguments a lot easier to swallow for people who might

be opposed to them if they can see genuine and significant kickbacks to their communities and