First U.S. Rare Earth Mine in 70 Years Opens in Wyoming

RANCHESTER, WY—A mine in Wyoming is drawing national attention to what is otherwise a high plains flyspeck with a single gas station, dollar store, and four bars along the Tongue River.

Tumbling out of the Bighorn Mountains, Brook Mine will be the first new coal mine to open in Wyoming in 50 years, as well as the first critical mineral and rare earth mine to open in the United States in more than 70 years. Miner Ramaco Resources is to produce at least 2 million tons of coal per year for electricity and extract more than 450 tons of elements annually. “This one mine can break our reliance on China,” Ramaco Resources CEO and Chairman Randall Atkins said at a July 11 ceremonial ribbon-cutting. The nearest town

is Ranchester, Wyoming, which has 1,064 residents. It is less than 10 miles south of the Montana state line and about 180 miles east of Yellowstone National Park.

“Not every day do you get to see history being made, but that’s exactly what we’re doing here today,” he told the roughly 300 people gathered, recalling that a decade ago, the coal industry’s prognosis was grim.

“They said coal was dead and gone,“ Atkins said. ”Today, we’re breathing new life with a commodity America has an abundance of. This is just the beginning. If we can do it here in Wyoming, we can do it everywhere.” Ramaco Resources, based in Lexington, Kentucky, operates four metallurgical coal mines in West Virginia and Virginia. It purchased the 4,500- acre Brook Mine north of Sheridan, Wyoming, in 2011 for $2 million to produce coal for local electrical generation, Atkins said during a tour of Ramaco’s Ranchester plant.

Opened in the 1880s, the mine had been shuttered for decades. At the time of Ramaco’s purchase, there nation’s coal.

That 2 million tons of coal, once processed, will yield an estimated 1,242 tons of critical minerals and rare earths per year. This would include 456 tons of the highly sought gallium, germanium, scandium, terbium, dysprosium, neodymium, and praseodymium. Critical minerals and rare earths are crucial in the manufacturing of modern technologies, from electric vehicles to wind turbines to military electronic systems.

“Anything in your life that has a button—you start your car with a button, or your dishwasher, or

your refrigerator, your washing machine, your F-35 fighter jet, all of those things—have rare earth elements,” Wright said. Rare earths are 17 metallic elements that are not necessarily rare but that are dispersed in ores and minerals, making it difficult and expensive to extract and process them without the capacity to dig a lot of dirt and rock. At least seven are present at Brook Mine: Dysprosium and neodymium are needed for high performance magnets in electric vehicles, turbines, and iPhones; scandium is used in aluminum production; lanthanum is needed for car batteries; and yttrium and terbium have military applications, including in targeting devices.

Right now, the United States is almost entirely dependent on imports for the 10,000 tons of rare earths its manufacturers consume per year, according to 2023 data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

More than 70 percent of those rare earths came from China, the U.S. Geological Survey said, noting that China controls roughly 85 percent of global production in processed elements for use in manufacturing. Brook Mine and Mountain Pass California would be U.S.’s only critical mineral and rare earth processing operations.

Barrasso said it is no surprise that an Appalachian company has found a new home and common cause with “the cowboy culture” of northern Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains. “People here still believe the future is ours to shape and that is what we’re seeing here,” he said. “A good mine has to mature like whiskey,” he said. “Today, we pop that cork.”