Wyoming poised to be rare earth sacrifice zone

Ores containing lithium are hideously carbon intensive to mine and the General Mining Law of 1872 allows foreign companies to exploit public lands instead of sharing the pecuniary rewards with landowners. But some decommissioned coal fired power plants are being remediated in part by harvesting needed minerals from coal waste. 

In January of 2016, the US Forest Service suspended the Draft Environmental Impact Study for a Wyoming Black Hills mountaintop-removal mine that would extract more minerals containing lanthanides like neodymium and praseodymium from the Belle Fourche watershed. In 2017 Rare Element Resources said its mine just upstream of the South Dakota border in the headwaters of the Redwater River, a tributary of the Belle Fourche/Cheyenne, announced financial backing from General Atomics and applied for enough water for the mineral separation process despite widespread contamination in Crook County wells. 

Without further permitting from the Forest Service Europe’s GA Umwelt-und Ingenieurtechnik GmbH (UIT) proposed to use a $22 million award from the US Department of Energy to move rare earth oxides mined in 2015 and stored in tanks near Sundance. A demonstration-scale separation and processing plant is expected to cost $35-40 million and a site in Upton, Wyoming near the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway (BNSF) was confirmed in 2021 as the location for the facility.

The company, a U.S. subsidiary of Australian exploration company American Rare Earths, acquired Halleck Creek a little over a year ago. It figured, from surface data, that the deposit’s roughly 350 million metric tons of mineralized rock contained up to a million metric tons of rare earths. If all goes to plan, the very high concentration of rare earths and very low levels of radiation could enable Western Rare Earths to secure fewer permits, take fewer precautions and process smaller volumes of rock compared with many of its competitors. [Rare opportunity: Albany County rare earth deposit shows promise]