Ramaco Resources’ Wyoming rare earth project gets $6.1M grant  

Kentucky-headquartered Ramaco Resources (NASDAQ: METC) announced Monday it has received a $6.1 million matching grant authorized by Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon and issued by the Wyoming Energy Authority for Ramaco’s Carbon Ore Rare Earth (CORE) Brook mine project.  The funding will match Ramaco’s future investment in building a rare earth and critical minerals pilot processing facility north of Sheridan, Wyoming, the company said.  In 2023, Ramaco acquired a patent from the US Department of Energy’s research institution, the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), for the commercial development of its coal-to-products technology. The US government has already begun to look at coal ash, coal waste, and acid mine drainage as feedstock for rare earths. In the same year it set aside $450 million to advance clean energy projects on current and former coal mine sites, giving special attention to those that can provide new economic opportunities for coal communities. Ramaco’s process, which the company calls ‘revolutionary’ uses coal as feedstock to help create vehicle batteries, construction and infrastructure materials, and a range of consumer products. The company said it is pioneering rare earth and critical minerals processing and carbon ore-to-products research, with a state-of-the-art park to be constructed adjacent to the 16,000-acre Brook mine property in northern Wyoming. Ramaco’s proposed new rare earth elements and critical mineral Brook mine would be the first new rare earth mine opened in the United States since 1952. There is only one active mine for magnetic REEs in the United States — Mountain Pass in California.Coal country to carbon innovation: Wyoming rare earths discovery could be a game changer for USRamaco seeks to extract REE and critical minerals from unconventional coal and carbonaceous ore deposits contained at the mine. The Brook mine has been called one of the largest unconventional deposits of these elements in the world by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory. “Our approach is to use the commodity as a low-cost carbon feedstock to make high-value advanced carbon products and materials that we call “coal to products.” We have coined the phrase “carbon ore” to refer to coal used in this manner,” Ramaco CEO Randall Atkins said in a testimony to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in 2021, which he called “The New Carbon Age”. “The recent discovery that our state’s rich coal resources also contain the rare earth and critical minerals our country so desperately needs, now puts Wyoming at the center of delivering on our nation’s energy and national security requirements,” Atkins said in Monday’s news release. The planned facility will be an enclosed structure located on Ramaco owned property which is industrial zoned- I-2 with initial construction scheduled to begin in the Fall of 2025, the company said. Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Mining.com Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Mining.com