Molycorp Stresses Mountain Pass Won't Shut Down

The Wall Street Journal reported that US rare earths producer Molycorp (NYSE:MCP) has insisted that its Mountain Pass operations in California won’t come to a halt, despite the company’s recent bankruptcy filing.
As quoted in the publication:

Molycorp is due in court next week for a final hearing on bankruptcy financing that has been something of a moving target. After agreeing to a loan from secured bondholders, Molycorp switched and decided to accept financing from its senior lender, affiliates of Oaktree Capital Group .
Oaktree originally demanded Mountain Pass be placed “in a state of care and maintenance,” which lawyers translated as meaning mothballed, by mid-October. The timing was geared, in part, to avoid triggering liabilities for failure to give notice of a mass layoff.
Now Oaktree has dropped that requirement and is calling on Molycorp to come up with a “limited operations plan” instead, court papers say. “No form of any limited operations plan contemplates a complete ‘shutdown’ or ‘mothballing’ of Mountain Pass,” Molycorp said in court papers. But there will be a scaling back of the operation, an environmentally-sensitive matter given the toxic chemicals in use at Mountain Pass, the company said.

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