An executive order by President Donald Trump has rare earth mining companies in Wyoming pitching to investors as mining and refining projects in the state move forward.
A recent marketing video for American Rare Earths Limited — which is developing the Halleck Creek rare earth project near Wheatland — asserts that it’s “well positioned with Trump talking about critical minerals every other minute on the news.”
A week later in his Thursday executive order, the president sounded an alarm about the nation’s “reliance upon hostile foreign powers’ mineral production. It is imperative for our national security that the United States take immediate action to facilitate domestic mineral production to the maximum possible extent.”
The Mountain Pass Mine in California’s Clark Mountain Range is the only established active rare earth mine in the U.S. This positions Wyoming to move into a marketplace that appears poised to expand given Trump’s push to accelerate production.
The order sets 10- and 15-day deadlines, directing the head of each federal department and agency involved in the permitting of mineral production to provide a list of all mineral production projects.
“It does name critical minerals and rare earth specifically,” Kelli Kast, general counsel and chief administrative officer for Rare Earth Resources (RER), told Cowboy State Daily on Monday.
“That is absolutely one of the areas that the president is trying to shine a light on to bring our resources forward to secure the source from Chinese dominance.”
RER is the company behind the Bear Lodge Project in northeast Wyoming near Upton.
“And hats off, right?” said Kast, praising the Trump administration.
Kast recently returned from a trip to Washington, D.C., to meet with some of the federal agencies named in the March 20 executive order. These include the Departments of Defense, Energy and Agriculture, which oversee national forest land where Rare Earth Resources plans to develop and process ore deposits.
“It’s an important thing for not only our national security and defense, but our high-tech technologies as well,” added Kast.
Sense Of Urgency
Trump is right to light a fire under the urgency of the United States mining and processing its own rare earth elements, said Holly Krutka, executive director for the University of Wyoming School of Energy Resources.
“I think it is an emergency,” she told Cowboy State Daily on Monday. “China produces the vast majority of rare earths. And China has said they're not going to export these materials because they're strategic to them.”
In Wyoming, there are “domestic feedstocks” found across the state that must be separated and refined into usable concentrations of rare earth elements, Krutka said.. Many have science fiction-sounding names, like dysprosium and praseodymium.
“You know, we don't necessarily want to ask China every time we go buy material to be used in national defense applications,” added Krutka.
One big takeaway from the recent executive order is that Wyoming is well positioned to become a place where rare earth elements are mined and refined, said Fred McLaughlin, director of the UW Center for Economic Geology Research. McLaughlin emphasized this is a challenging marketplace.
“It takes a lot of energy to get them into their separate elemental concentrations,” said McLaughlin. “And sometimes along the way, that cost exceeds the cost of the metal.”
Still, “It’s exciting news,” he added. “We are actually really far ahead in the Rocky Mountain West. There's another mine in Texas that's making some strides.”
The company behind the Texas mine — USA Rare Earth — went public this month on the Nasdaq.
Praise From Wyoming And D.C.
“These are exciting times for the Wyoming mining industry,” Travis Deti, executive director of the Wyoming Mining Association, wrote in an email to Cowboy State Daily in response to Trump’s executive order. “It is apparent that the Trump administration is taking domestic production of rare earths and critical minerals seriously.”
Deti said he and others in the field are pleased to see the Trump administration embrace the priorities of the mining industry: improving permitting efficiencies, ensuring land access and incentivizing production.
“With the implementation of the executive order, Wyoming operations should be well positioned to take advantage of it to ramp up our domestic production of these vital resources,” said Deti. “At the state level, this will mean more jobs and revenue to Wyoming."
U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis was equally bullish.
“Unleashing America’s vast mineral resources is a welcomed change to the previous administration’s overbearing federal regulations that have eroded our nation’s production capabilities and made us dangerously dependent on foreign adversaries for the minerals that power everything from our smartphones to military equipment,” she said in a statement.
David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.
