The U.S. government is highlighting a huge Wyoming rare earth project as nationally important in the best way it knows how — with money. A lot of it.
The Export-Import Bank of the United States has pledged up to $456 million in financing for the Halleck Creek Project in southeast Wyoming. The pledge is not binding, and will depend on sufficiently moving the project forward.
Repayment of the loan would take place over 15 years under EXIM’s Make More in America Initiative, under which EXIM has been directed to take steps to reduce the competitive impact of export support that countries like the People’s Republic of China provide their industries.
Halleck Creek has the potential to be one of the largest rare earth deposits in the United States.
The project not only includes a mine with vast resources, but a future plant to process those resources in America, instead of having to send them to China. It could play a key role in ensuring a 100% domestic supply of rare earth magnet metals, which are used to make everything from cellphones to jet engines.
Halleck Creek is under the American Rare Earths umbrella, but was recently spun off into its own subsidiary. It’s now called the Wyoming Rare Earth Project.
The subsidiary is still wholly owned by American Rare Earths, Wyoming Rare Earth President Joe Evers told Cowboy State Daily, but the change makes it a little easier for strategic investors in the United States to become part of the project.
The spinoff is a signal of the growing momentum for an important project located in Wyoming.
“I think on any given day, our market cap — the value of the company — is around $100 million on the stock exchange, and the project we need to build is around $500 million,” Evers told Cowboy state Daily on Friday morning. “So, as other investors come in and say, ‘Well how are you going to finance that?’ We can say, ‘EXIM Bank is going to finance that.’ This brings some certainty to how this could get constructed.”
Fighting Back Against China’s Monopoly
The loan, however, is not just money to help get the project off the ground, it’s also a signal that the Wyoming project is seen as nationally important in fighting a Chinese monopoly when it comes to rare earths.
China’s has dominated the rare earth market, controlling 70% of the output and 90% of the refinement.
China has recently taken several actions to protect that dominance.
Late last year, Beijing announced it is restricting technology related to rare earths, which will make it much harder to develop a rare earth industry outside of China.
The country also raised its mining quotas for rare earths in 2023 and 2024 to produce more than the market actually needed. The resulting oversupply has driven down prices for rare earths, making the economic proposition for an American rare earth supply chain more difficult to achieve.
That’s part of the reason why the assistance from the EXIM Bank has become so critical for this project to get off the ground. The federal financing follows on the heels of a $7.1 million matching grant from Wyoming Energy Authority.
“Wyoming is investing in the future of the energy industry and exploring new opportunities,” WEA Executive Director Rob Greater said at the time the grant was awarded. “The American Rare Earths mine supported through the Wyoming Energy Authority and the state of Wyoming will give us greater insight into potentially one of the largest deposits of rare earth materials in the United States. And like previous grant recipients, we look forward to what this project will bring our state and nation.”
Keeping The Value Chain At Home
With the grant and the EXIM funding in hand, that gives American Rare Earths the certainty it needs to approach third-party investors, which the company will also need to stand its project up on the Wyoming map.
“Our next step is proving out the concept, and then the other thing we can do to de-risk the project is talk to potential end users or strategic partners,” Evers said.
The predominant product from the Halleck Creek site will be the rare earth magnet metals neodymium and praseodymium. These are used in some of the strongest rare earth magnets, Evers said.
“Those can be used for everything from like our cellphones — as I’m talking on my cellphone there’s little, tiny, rare earth magnets in our cellphones that move the diaphragm across the microphone and the speaker so you can hear me and I can hear you,” he said. “And those rare earths can go into everything all the way up to an F-35 fighter jet.”
Halleck Creek also contains a few other kinds of rare earths in smaller amounts, such as terbium, the least available rare earth, which is often used as a green emitter in fluorescent light displays; and dysprosium, a rare earth often used in neodymium-based magnets as a heat-resistant stabilizer.
Gaining a plant that not only can capture these rare earths, but turn them into products, keeps more of the value chain in the Cowboy State. That will make it one of the few resources Wyoming mines that doesn’t get sent outside the state for the majority of its value chain.
“When we get the material from the mine, that’s a lower value on the supply chain,” Evers said. “By being able to process that ore into what becomes magnet metals — a usable product in the industrial sense — it will allow Wyoming to capture more of the value.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
