RER says it's still working towards Bearlodge mine

All has been quiet on the rare earth front this year, but that doesn’t mean the folks at Rare Element Resources (RER) have been twiddling their thumbs.

According to the latest report from the company that has spent the last decade attempting to open a mine in the Bearlodge, 2020 has so far been spent perfecting the technology that separates out those coveted rare earth minerals.

“We’re still working hard, because there’s nothing like this project at this stage and none of our other peers have the technology capabilities [to separate the elements],” says George Byers, RER Advisory Board.

RER’s mine has been relatively dormant since 2016, when the permitting process was placed on hold just a week after the Draft Environmental Impact Study was released. The company announced that it was running out of funding and would be downscaling for the time being.

In 2017, an affiliate of General Atomics by the name of Synchron purchased 33.5% of the company’s issued common shares, totaling around $4.5 million. Synchron purchased an additional $5 million of shares in 2019 and now owns 49% of the outstanding shares.

This cash influx allowed RER to get back to work on its proprietary technology through a pilot plant test in Germany, which met with success. RER now feels it necessary to build a scaled-up demo plant before moving ahead with a full-scale plant operation.

According to Byers, there are companies outside of China that have tried a pilot plant and immediately moved on to a full scale plant at costs somewhere in the region of $300 million.

“It failed. We don’t want to fail, so from the pilot plant we’re going to build a demonstration scale plant,” he says. “When you scale up, you’ve got different sized pumps and pipes and pressures and things break, and that’s what happened to these other companies and we don’t want to get this close now and fail.”

The demo plant is expected to cost around $35-40 million.

“That’s what we’re trying to get funding for now,” Byers says. “We’re looking for a home where we put the demo plant. Wyoming is preferable, Upton is preferable, but we’ve got to get the funding first and then we are going to finalize the site selection.”

For the rest of this year, the German company that conducted the pilot plant test will continue to optimize the separation process and scale up the design for the demo plant.

The demo plant will then process 900 tons of high-grade ore that has already been stockpiled from the Bearlodge deposit. RER anticipates that, once funding has been secured, the design of this demonstration plant will be finalized and followed by construction within a period of 18-24 months, with processing operations for an additional 12 months.

While this work has been ongoing, the federal government has placed more of a focus on rare earths and the importance of removing China’s monopoly on this resource. RER is hopeful this will impact the company’s ability to tap into the significant amount of high-grade ore believed to be present at the planned mine site.

“We are pleased that over the last several months, the U.S. Department of Defense and Department of Energy have announced significant funding initiatives to advance domestic rare earth production as well as rare earth-containing permanent magnet manufacturing. The overwhelming dependence of the U.S. and allied nations on China as the principal rare earths producer and supplier is comparable with Chinese dominance of the medical supply chain that has been highlighted by the COVID-19 global crisis,” said Randall Scott, CEO and President, in a statement.

“America’s dependence on Chinese rare earths poses a grave economic, energy, and technology threat and must be urgently addressed. We are pleased that our government has recognized this. It is our goal to play a key part in these initiatives to bring rare earth production to the U.S.”

At this time, according to Byers, RER is not moving ahead with restarting the NEPA process for the mine itself.

“We’ve got to get the demo plant funded and then built and then operated,” he says. “That will tell us about what the plant in Upton will look like.”

This in turn will determine how much ore needs to be produced and at what rate, which may reduce the scale of the mine.