As summer 2025 winds down, Wyoming finds itself at the center of America's push to break China's grip on rare earth element production.
Three separate rare earth projects are now underway across the state, representing the most concentrated domestic development effort in decades.
"The state of Wyoming is at the forefront of this kind of developing area of mining," said Joe Evers, president of Wyoming Rare USA, the subsidiary advancing American Rare Earths' Halleck Creek project. "But it's something that's important for the nation."
American Rare Earths' Cowboy State Mine offers a case study of what these companies face — transforming Wyoming dirt into materials that power everything from fighter jets to wind turbines.
As Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said during his swing through Wyoming in July, "Anything in your life that has a button, you start your car with the button or your dishwasher or your refrigerator, your washing machine, your F-35 fighter jet — all of those things have rare earth elements playing a critical role in the design and the operation of those products."
That's one reason the Trump administration has made domestic rare earth production a national security priority as China controls about 85% of global rare earth processing.
This summer, rare earth operations near Ranchester, Upton and American Rare Earths' mine outside Wheatland made big moves to cut into that business, but many hurdles lie ahead.
Step One: Prove The Chemistry
American Rare Earths began the summer by trying to tackle a fundamental question: Can it actually extract rare earth elements from its Wyoming ore at commercial levels?
In July, the company announced results from 25 different laboratory tests in Ontario, Canada. Think of it as finding the right recipe — researchers tried different combinations of acid strength, temperature and processing time to see what pulled the most valuable materials from crushed rock.
The results showed promise, according to the company. The company reported achieving 85% recovery of praseodymium and 84% recovery of neodymium — both essential ingredients in the powerful magnets that make electric car motors and wind turbines work.
Even better, according to American Rare Earths, the team managed to dramatically reduce unwanted materials like iron and aluminum that would complicate later processing steps.
The breakthrough came from adding an extra cleaning step before the chemical extraction. Instead of just using magnetic separators to pull out valuable minerals, they added gravity spirals that remove heavy, contaminating minerals first — like panning for gold before using the magnet.
"That's a good analogy," Evers said. "The gravity spiral is really simple and elegant in that regard. It's a 30-foot spiral. It's exactly what it sounds like. But when you run the ore... we basically crush and grind the ore. And all we need to do is add water and gravity to it, and similar to the old prospector in the stream that's panning for gold, what you're doing is separating the geologic material by density."
Questions Raised
David Hammond, a Colorado-based mineral economics consultant with over 50 years in extractive industries, told Cowboy State Daily he's pleased to see rare earth development ramp up in Wyoming.
But he's not convinced all laboratory success translates to real-world viability, especially given the rare earths at the Halleck Creek site near Wheatland are locked in allanite.
"Allanite is just one of the hardest minerals on planet Earth," Hammond said, who worried any attempt to process allanite would be "extremely costly."
Hammond praised American Rare Earths for working with expert mineral analytical companies, noting the analysis put out about the Halleck Creek deposit, "Was not churned out by some fly-by-night assay lab."
But Hammond also expressed concerns, stating, "Key points to keep in mind are that these tests almost certainly involved small amounts of selected high-grade rock, which are likely not reflective of the deposit overall.
"And there's always a lot of differences in what recoveries can be achieved in a full-scale or even pilot plant, contrasted to what the initial bench-scale metallurgical work indicates."
Step Two: Big Equipment, Bigger Tests
Confident in its laboratory results, American Rare Earths moved to the next phase in July: ordering equipment for a demonstration plant.
This represents a major financial commitment — the company brought in magnetic separation equipment and announced plans to test three different rock-crushing methods.
Evers used a culinary analogy to explain the progression from laboratory testing to demonstration plant: "The first starting point is you have to prove that you have the resource, then you have to prove that you can get the metal out of the rock in the simplest forms ... it's almost like a test kitchen of sorts."
He compared early laboratory work to, “If you were working on one of those Easy-Bake Ovens when you were a kid ... you made a cupcake. And then you give it to your parents and they're kind of like, ‘Good for you.’ You did that.
"And then we say, ‘All right, we're going use your oven, mom and dad, and maybe make a real batch and everybody taste it.’"
The demonstration plant represents that next level.
"That's where you can really hone in and you say all right, this is how much flour we need sugar. And if we mix it together at these scales, this is how many cupcakes we can make,” said Evers. “And then that's the basis to kind of make the business case, if you will, to the market."
As Hammond explained, the typical progression goes like this: "You will run a pilot plant for a period of time. And that's not a few weeks. It should be like, well, for most cases, it's a year, maybe more."
Step Three: Getting Ore
The most visible milestone for American Rare Earths came in mid-August when the company began test mining operations.
They detonated their first blast, fracturing weathered surface material to about 12 feet deep, then used excavators to dig out mounds of ore.
This isn't full-scale mining — it's essentially collecting a large sample under a state exploration permit.
The material will feed a demonstration plant and provide samples for potential customers who want to see what the final product looks like, according to the company.
"The test mining program will extract approximately 3,200 tons of ore, which will serve as feedstock for a demonstration plant," the company reported.
The weathered material they removed will eventually be used to fill the test pit back in.
Step Four: Compliance
Blasting and ore processing might stand out as the flashier steps along the way to launching a rare earth mine, but less flashy work like groundwater pump testing remain an essential piece of the process.
American Rare Earths completed this kind of testing in late August, after conducting a 24-hour test measuring how much water could be pumped from a monitoring well and how that affected nearby wells.
"The 24-hour pump test provides hydrological data about flow-rate and groundwater volumes at Cowboy State Mine, as well as data to determine if adjacent water monitoring wells are hydrologically connected," American Rare Earths explained.
The test represents months of preparation and regulatory coordination. Wyoming's Department of Environmental Quality requires this baseline data before issuing mine permits because without understanding how mining might affect local water supplies, no permit gets approved, according to the company.
Processing Challenge
Beyond extraction lies the fundamental challenge of processing Wyoming ore into finished products. Evers compared it to Wyoming's oil industry.
"In the Powder River Basin of Wyoming right now they produce oil from eight different formations," Evers said. "But at the end of the day, it still gets turned into gasoline."
Likewise, different rare earth ores can all be processed into valuable concentrations, but that processing represents a major hurdle.
"The goal and what we're working towards would be to have a processing facility in the region," Evers said. "We need to be able to process that and end up with what they call an oxide at the end."
In its July 18 press release, the company stated its ultimate goal is to "produce rare earth magnet oxides from Halleck Creek ore."
The company also aspires to, "showcase and fine-tune the process at a larger scale."
Scaling up rare earth processing is something Hammond and others have been calling for since the early 2000s.
"You have to remember it took 15 years for people to wake up in Washington, that hey, we got a big problem here," Hammond said, recalling how slow policymakers were to recognize America's rare earth dependency on China.
Now, said Hammond, eager, up-and-running companies like American Rare Earths are confronted with another reality.
"Remember, rare earths are not rare," said Hammond, noting that trace amounts of rare earth elements like Lanthanum and Praseodymium might be found in many places.
"But exploitable commercial, economic concentrations of rare earths are exceedingly rare," said Hammond. "And that's the bottom line."
Sean Schaub with the Wyoming Energy Authority has been following the Halleck Creek project and sees the summer's activities as part of a crucial evolution.
"They've been doing a lot of work this summer, drilling and installing groundwater monitoring wells, starting some test mining activities, and then working on the process flow," Schaub said. "Really putting forth a lot of effort to basically de-risk that project and move it forward."
De-risking, Schaub explained, is critical because "you're not going to go spend tens of millions of dollars to develop a project without having a pretty solid idea that it's going to amount to something great."
David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.
