RER hires new top staff, confirms demo plant schedule

Rare Element Resources (RER) last week announced that it has developed a timeline for its rare earths demonstration plant that should see construction complete within around two years and the test itself done around a year later. Meanwhile, the company has appointed a new chief financial officer.

RER scaled down its staff considerably after the Bearlodge Project was put on hold in 2016 due to financial woes. Aside from its boards of directors, management has been handled by President, CEO and Director Randall J. Scott.

With the demonstration plant project on the near horizon, RER has announced that Wayne Rich joined the company as Chief Financial Officer on Friday. A financial executive with over 20 years of experience in the resource industry, he has worked with companies including Star Mountain Resources, Prospect Global Resources and Thompson Creek Metals.

The demonstration plant is now in the design phase, which includes engineering, licensing and permitting. RER has estimated that construction of the plant, which will be located in Upton, should be complete in 18 to 26 months.

Once complete, the plant will be used to process and separate rare earth elements from materials that have already been sourced and stockpiled from the Bearlodge Project area. This, according to the company, will take between 12 and 14 months.

“The rare earth processing and separation demonstration plant, incorporating the company’s proprietary technology, is progressing through the first budget period of the overall project. The total timeline of approximately 40 months includes project decision points along the way, the first being in late September 2022,” said Scott.

“This first budget period includes the finalization of the engineering and design of the plant and progression of permitting and licensing, along with identification of materials to be procured that require longer lead times. With our project partner General Atomics in the lead, the team is focused on meeting each milestone, especially in light of the current environment of supply disruptions and higher costs.”

Around half the funding for the demonstration plant came from an award RER received on October 1, 2021 from the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewal Energy. The remaining $21.9 million was raised at the end of last year through a rights offering.

The demonstration plant will produce commercial-grade neodymium/praseodymium, which is used in high-strength permanent magnets that are components in such technologies as electric vehicles and wind turbines. It will do so using the company’s proprietary processing and separation technology, which RER describes as a, “closed-cycle process with fewer steps, resulting in expected attendant environmental benefits and lower costs compared with current technologies”.