Mine project confidence grows

CASPER – It’s all coming up roses for the rare earths mining project in the works outside Laramie.

A few weeks after announcing that its Halleck Creek find could be the largest known deposit of rare earth elements — a modern manufacturing staple — in North America, American Rare Earths released a formal resource estimate on March 31 that suggests a mine at the site could prosper for decades to come.

Its findings confirm “a strategically significant rare earth asset … which should enable the largest economy in the world to reduce its dependence on China or other imported rare earths,” American Rare Earths CEO Chris Gibbs said in a statement.

The U.S. has just one active rare earths mine and currently sources the vast majority of the rare earths it consumes from China. The results of the company’s early drilling campaigns back up its previous findings that the rocks there seem to be consistently rich in the most sought-after rare earths, not only across a wide stretch of land, but deep into the ground.

“We’ve pretty much graduated from being an exploration company to the developmental phase, and all of the associated studies and non-geologic work that goes along with moving towards eventually permitting and beginning to construct a mine,” said Mel Sanderson, American Rare Earths’ president of North America.

The resource estimate, which identified almost 5 million tons of rare earth oxides across 949 acres, only covers two of the seven areas that American Rare Earths believes it could eventually mine within Halleck Creek: the Overton Mountain and Red Mountain resource areas. Upwards of 7,000 more acres have yet to be explored.

“The reason we started with those two areas is because the historical data was the best,” said Sara Stotter, a geologist working on the project. “It was the most well-known, and there’s the most information about it out there. And the land access was relatively easy.”

Defining a resource takes a long time — and involves a lot of terminology. It typically starts with promising but poorly understood deposits, like Halleck Creek was a couple years ago.

Over time, as a company conducts round after round of exploratory drilling and begins to map out the results, that deposit can be reclassified as an indicated resource, then as an inferred resource, and then as measured resource. Only once a site is thoroughly understood and makes it through all those earlier levels of certainty can it be considered a reserve. For American Rare Earths, Stotter said, that stage of development is still a ways away.

“At least having these first numbers is the jumping-off point for us,” she said.

As the company moves forward with the lengthy permitting process that a commercial rare earths mine will require, it will also conduct more drilling campaigns at the remaining five areas to get a better sense of what’s really out there.

Meanwhile, it expects to release its preliminary assessment of the project’s economic impacts — encompassing factors like geography, water access, infrastructure needs and environmental considerations — in the first quarter of 2024.

“By this time next year, hopefully we’ll be talking about how many people we will be hiring and what kinds of people we will be hiring,” Sanderson said. “We’re really entering into that phase where a lot of pragmatic considerations are going to come into play.”

For now, she added, “Watch this space.”