Several patriotically named miners operate outside the United States
The pattern of confusion surfaces in concrete ways. Tomasz Nadrowski, a portfolio manager for the Amvest Terraden Critical Minerals Fund, said the proliferation of similar names creates real problems for investors. “How are you supposed to know which is which?” Nadrowski said. While he has never accidentally bought the wrong company’s shares, he said he has had to constantly clarify his subject when speaking to others in the industry: “Oh, this one? You mean that one?” Part of the problem, Nadrowski said, is that mining companies are run by geologists. “Where do you think they keep their head most of the time? Underground, like ostriches,” he said. “They are not poets.”
Mix-ups have followed. Mining executive Tony Sage faced an unusual problem on a call with investors: one investor accused Sage of not knowing where his company’s deposit of rare minerals was located. It is in Greenland, but the investor was sure the deposit was somewhere else. The cause was the names — Sage leads New York City-based Critical Metals Corp., while the investor thought the call was with Critical Metals PLC, which has a copper and cobalt project in the Democratic Republic of Congo. “When you’re trying to describe your company in a couple of words, there’s not much you can do in the rare-earth space other than using the name rare earth, critical minerals, critical metals,” Sage said. His Greenland project, called Tanbreez — a neologism referencing tantalum, niobium, rare-earth elements and zirconium — has received a formal letter of interest from a U.S. funding agency. “We could have called the company Tanbreez,” said Sage, “but no one knew what the hell Tanbreez was.”
Several of the U.S.-named companies are headquartered or operate outside the United States. US1 Critical Minerals is based in Australia, and a major asset is the right to look for uranium in southern Tanzania. The company says it hopes to focus on the U.S. Its red-white-and-blue website shows the Statue of Liberty and a person wearing a cowboy hat striding with a partner through amber waves of grain. Australia’s Trigg Minerals, which is focused on tungsten and antimony in the Western U.S., last year decided to rename itself to align with “U.S. national security interests and U.S. federal government procurement objectives.” There were already companies called United States Tungsten, American Tungsten, United States Antimony and American Antimony. Trigg now calls itself American Tungsten and Antimony.
Some companies push back on the characterization. American Tungsten says it isn’t following marketing trends and their names simply describe what their companies do. At U.S. Critical Minerals, CEO Jesse Edmondson says his company adopted the name during Trump’s first term and was the “first mover with our naming convention.”
Donald Swartz, the former CEO of American Rare Earths, which plans to mine critical minerals in Wyoming, is now CEO of Rare Earths Americas based in Manchester, Ga., a different company that listed its shares in the U.S. in May. “I can say that I didn’t name either one of them,” Swartz said. A third company, USA Rare Earth, has been offered $1.6 billion in government support, the Journal reported.
Alex Grant, a chemical engineer from Toronto, took a different approach in 2022 when he started a magnesium-smelting company and named it Magrathea — after a planet in Douglas Adams’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” whose inhabitants build other planets. Grant said the name was apt because his company aimed to rebuild a metals supply chain for America with a smelter planned for Arkansas. He acknowledged that some in the industry have struggled to spell and pronounce Magrathea and have even called it Margherita. Grant said it was possible that five or 10 years down the road it will be time to change the name. If so, he already has a name picked out: Magnesium Company of America.