The M&E Dispatch // 099

A crash course in Latvia, Ketchup Chips, Raccoons and loads of opportunities to be wrong.

Author

Lee Tengum
August 22, 2025

Hello Everyone,

Well the pets are adjusting to life on Eastern Standard Time (thank you, WestJet), and the Latvian billet has discovered ketchup chips, Costco Hotdogs and door dash Starbucks (last one thanks to my son). We’re settled in fair well and now the uniqueness and opportunities begin to present themselves.

Coming from small town BC being able to stumble upon a french patisserie while out for a walk with my wife makes spontaneous dates easy. Even the traffic is easy once you get past the fact that you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic, everything just flows.

What there is here though is life. Everywhere you go there are people, business and culture.

We were at the mall the other day and it would not be too hard of a stretch to imagine that every hour or so it turns over the population of the city we left behind.

It’s easy to see how being in a center like this can lead to innovation, there’s 10000 ways to be wrong fast, with just as many opportunities to be right.

I love my small town BC life, its just that far too often we forget while living there that the world spins fast and full of people who have no concept of our way of life.

B.C. Life: You can squeeze our project in 3 weeks from now? Great, that’s fast!

G.T.A: Can’t get here until tomorrow? No worries, I already have another guy on the way today.

You have to move fast out here, maybe a remote office here for your sales/IR/Marketing team is just what the doctor ordered…

// The Dirt

🔥 Top 3 Headlines to Watch

  1. 🌍 Rare Earth Supply Chains Under Pressure — A new deep-dive outlines China’s dominance and the scramble in the U.S., EU, and India to build alternative corridors.
    https://www.reddit.com/r/mining/comments/1mwbnyz/we_just_published_a_deepdive_on_the_rare_earth

  2. 🛑 Trevali Settles $2.8M Perkoa Disaster Lawsuit — The now-defunct Canadian miner finally agrees to pay out after the Burkina Faso tragedy that killed eight workers.
    https://www.reddit.com/r/mining/comments/1musa5a/old_trevali_mining_finally_agreed_to_a_28m

  3. ⛏ PPX Mining Hits 18.91 g/t Au & 1,420 g/t Ag — standout drill results from Peru’s Callanquitas Breccias.
    https://ppxmining.com/ppx-obtains-wide-thicknesses-exploration-results-in-callanquitas-breccias-with-up-to-18-91-g-t-au-and-1420-0-g-t-ag

🛠 Exploration & Development Highlights

💰 Financings & Market Moves

🧬 Corporate & Policy

🌄 On the Horizon

  • Nickel Momentum in Sudbury — Magna Mining’s strong intercept keeps nickel in the conversation, adding to a week of steady nickel news.

  • Battery Metals Keep Attracting Cash — From American Lithium’s oversubscribed raise to smaller graphite financings earlier this week, investor appetite remains high even as spot prices fluctuate.

  • Global Supply Chains in Flux — Between rare earth strategy reports and companies chasing copper across continents, there’s a clear trend: securing supply is now as important as discovering it.

I’ve got three things on my list for today:

  1. Find the source of the overwhelming packing tape smell, I suspect it’s cast off from the GM plant in Oshawa, but it’s… impressive.

  2. Hit up the IKEA that’s on the main level of a former Sears store and pick up a desk for the billet

  3. Build a tool for a site about raccoons, more about this next week.

Have a great week all,
- Lee