Medallion Resources Ltd. announce signing of an exclusivity agreement with a private North American research company to provide a three-month period to undertake additional due diligence on proprietary rare earth element metallization and rare earth magnet recycling technologies. If the technical due diligence is successful, Medallion will seek to negotiate investment terms to acquire or partner on all or part of the underlying technologies. The Research Partner is the exclusive owner and developer of an innovative rare earth element metallization technology.

Metallization involves the conversion of REE compounds to REE metal, a crucial step in the production of high strength REE permanent magnets. There are few entities outside China that have this metallization capacity. The REE metallization technology owned by the Research Partner is derived from a similar process employed for other critical metals.

The novel and innovative technology would enable conversion of REE compounds to metal in a continuous process, requiring less energy than incumbent processes and without toxic fluorine chemistry. The metallization technology is equally applicable to primary and recycled REE feedstock. It presents the opportunity for substantial value add to Medallion's existing technology portfolio including the Medallion Monazite Process and Ligand Assisted Displacement Chromatography.

Furthermore, the Research Partner is the exclusive owner of technology and knowhow that combines a novel pyrometallurgical process with a hydrometallurgical process to efficiently preprocess, extract, recover and separate rare earth elements from end-of-life recycled REE permanent magnets. The key enabling technologies have been tested at bench scale; Medallion believes the technologies may have rapid commercialization potential with appropriate commercial support. REE permanent magnets, comprised of neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium play a fundamental role in the efficient generation of renewable energy and its use in electric vehicles.

They are vital in the automotive, aerospace, robotics, electronic, and wind energy industries due to the combined high magnetic strength and low weight. REE magnet materials are currently recycled at a very low rate due to technology barriers in magnet recovery, demagnetization and processing and the past use in applications such as consumer electronics which involve a large number of items each containing a small quantity of REEs. In contrast, the EV and wind turbine applications are well suited to end-of-life recycling.