Wyoming discovery could be America's first new source of rare-earths since 1952 | Hacker News Reader

Wyoming discovery could be America's first new source of rare-earths since 1952

wsj.com

137 pointsjseliger87 comments

My understanding is that these rare-earths are not actually rare - what's rare is:

1. A country that will let you mine them

2. Refinery capacity

Right now I believe the only refineries are in Australia and China but for obvious reasons the US is quickly trying to figure out how to build on here along with semi conductor fabs.

When I first read the headline China immediately came to mind. Just recently the US started investing in ports in other countries, just like China has done. And now the US will probably start competing on another front that China has taken a lead role in.

It’s weird, because the USA had done that investing long before China started belt and road, what was innovative about belt and road were the risk increase of the projects the Chinese took on, investments that western countries wouldn’t go anywhere near.

I think the take generally is that China was fairly naive about its investments. Thats the belt and road projects would easily payoff as this has historically been working inside of China.

I do think the US/EU could learn a bit from China here. My take is that the Chinese way has been something along the lines of, here take this loan, we will build some infrastructure, and at the same time move in some mining equipment, port or whatever is needed. The loan terms are way over ambitious but China is not trying to tell them how to govern. When the US goes in, its all about cleaning up the politics/human rights/something other clauses that all get tied to the money.

This works for China ATM because they have a lot of excess labor (migrant workers) that they can send abroad, like India does (though on their own accord, not via SOEs). It also gives their SOEs something to do other than keep over investing in domestic infrastructure. So I get why they do it (and why they won’t be able to do it in a coupes of decades). But they take risks, like lending money to an unstable dictator who is unlikely to last more than a few years, it isn’t politics/human rights or whatever else, it’s simply that the countries are poorly governed and risk citizen revolts. China always has a shocked pikachu face when the unstable dictator they’ve been supporting gets overthrown/arrested/killed/etc… but anyone could have predicted it when they made the investments.

Finding a place to mine ore containing rare earth metals is easy, it's purely the refinery capacity that's the bottleneck with environmental laws being the limiting factor to building them. The vast majorities of countries will let you mine them but they're always in such low concentrations (hence "rare" earth) that it's not economical to haul massive amounts of crushed rock to a refinery in another country. Due to their chemistry they don't form very concentrated veins like a lot of other minerals do - the key is just collecting lots and lots of crushed rock.

All of the methods use extremely nasty liquid-liquid extraction [1] techniques that require massive pools of toxic and corrosive extractants that are difficult to dispose of afterwards because they're quickly used up in the chemical reactions but remain very toxic. Anyone who allows cheap refineries pays a very heavy price long term [2]. Several other countries are actually pretty well set up to refine them on short notice but that infrastructure is reserved for refining uranium and other considerably more valuable metals.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid%E2%80%93liquid_extracti...

[2] https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-wrestles-with-the-toxic...

Indeed,

The thing I'd want to add is that it's not technologically impossible to build a safe Lithium mine (or a safe nuclear power plant or a safe oil transportation infrastructure). It can be much more costly and so in these days of cost-cutting, unsafe operation is common. But one should still keep in mind safety isn't theoretically impossible.

That yale.edu article needs additional context. It's verbatim repeating the PRC's talking points on the US-China trade dispute, the one over China's rare earth tariffs that was litigated before the WTO. The US position is that the export tariffs are a tactic to subsidize Chinese consumers of rare earths—their manufacturing sector—by giving them preferential prices for Chinese rare earths, the raw inputs. That's illegal under WTO rules. The PRC's position, what e360 is legitimizing (and amplifying), is that the West *morally deserves* to compensate China for the ecological costs of China's own mining industry, because we are its end consumers; and that these tariffs should be permitted under WTO rules as an environmental measure, not a protectionist one.

e.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earths_trade_dispute

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-trade-idUSTRE6B...

https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-...

It's jarring to suddenly be reading CPC foreign policy talking points in a random environmental article!

Ironically, the article also says that when the US won its case at the WTO, the Molycorp rare-earth mine in the Mojave Desert went bankrupt soon after! Something of a monkey's paw.

Well sounds like something the people of Wyoming will love. They hate big bad government trying to tell them what to do. Let them drink the slurry.

What is the purpose of this comment other than to express hate and ignorance? Please add to the conversation or respectfully stfu, and find elsewhere to slander yourself.

It's called "just deserts". Wyoming has been sending people to congress and making my life measurably worse with their votes. Only by drinking the slurry will they have a chance to wake up (but they still probably won't).

> Right now I believe the only refineries are in Australia and China

and Malaysia, with a new spodumene conversion facility being built in Texas by Tesla.

isn't Spodumene a source of lithium instead of rare earths?

Right - brain fart - I was thinking of rare-metal pegmatites found at (say) Greenbushes W.Australia that gets mainly mined for Li for batteries, but additionally for Be, Cs, Ta.

Wrong class of 'rare'.

That said, Malaysia stands - Mt. Weld here in W.Australia refines there:

https://lynasrareearths.com/

    The Lynas Mt Weld mine in Western Australia is acknowledged as one of the world’s premier rare earths deposits. Lynas also operates the world’s largest single rare earths processing plant in Malaysia where it produces high-quality separated rare earth materials for export to manufacturing markets in Asia, Europe and the United States.

I'd have to check but IIRC the industry release re: Tesla also outlined including rare earth processing - which makes sense, pooling all the toxic by product processing to a single location to avoid multiple hellscapes.

The US' other major known deposits are in California. This discovery might actually be consequential, because Wyoming's an unregulated mining state (coal and stuff), while California's... the opposite of that.

For historical background: California formerly extracted the majority of the world's rare earth elements,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Pass_mine#History

Those regulations seem well-founded: California has a population density of 258.21 per mi² compared to 5.9 per mi² in Wyoming. And that doesn't even start to account for agricultural production for human consumption (versus livestock). Those limitations are reasonably founded if human wellbeing is the metric.

Thus: This is good, despite any feelings about regulatory burdens.

Sure, but this is in the Mojave desert.

You know that population isn't uniformly distributed across the states right?

I had no idea!

But I do know that water sheds in California frequently transit through heavily populated areas and/or feed into key reservoirs.

To be clear: this is a generic comment about regulation in proportion to number of lives impacted, not the details of this find.

Also to note: I essentially live surrounded by Superfund sites that brought about the entire silicon revolution. I'm acutely aware of the actual generational impacts.

This is a non sequitur. The mines were very far from populated or agricultural areas. They were situated in some of the least habitable parts of the US. It has nothing to do with the actual well-being of people.

The US is blessed with incredible mineral wealth that is rarely exploited anymore because so many people harbor these kinds of naive assumptions, which manifests as regulations. Consequently, we depend on countries like China to supply these minerals since they are not held hostage by these misconceptions.

Wyoming’s advantage over California is that they have a reality-based perspective on mineral resource extraction, instead of outsourcing it to China so that they can pretend to be environmentally virtuous.

Regulations cover the general case not just each individual case separately .

It’s reasonable to offer exceptions for mines in the Mojave, but baking that into the regulations requires even more complexity.

> This is a non sequitur. The mines were very far from populated or agricultural areas.

The Mountain Pass mine in the link above is just off I15, maybe a 45 minute drive from Las Vegas. That's not right on top of a housing development, but it's hardly "remote".

You’re kidding right? That is very much the definition of ‘middle of nowhere’. [https://maps.app.goo.gl/wV1K9HSgnbBN6Ye58?g_st=ic]

Groom Lake and the National Test Site (where the US set off literally hundreds of nuclear bombs) is roughly the same distance from Las Vegas, just in a slightly different direction. [https://maps.app.goo.gl/oKc83mrnptUSPVJ2A?g_st=ic]

That area is about as remote and in hospitable to human life as anyone can find in the lower 48 once you get off the highway. The only way it would get more remote is if someone kept driving and took a turn somewhere along there. I’ve spent plenty of time out in those deserts.

It’s very easy to not show up on someone’s radar ever again [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Valley_Germans].

Exactly this. 45 minutes at 65mph is plenty far away for just about everything mining related with the sole exception of considering watersheds.

Watershed impacts are actually what killed gold mining in the California foothills - there's still plenty of gold there, we just can't get it with current technologies.

Mixing drinking water, mines and mineral resources doesn't end well for anyone.

Most of those areas have pocket reservoirs/don’t share groundwater meaningfully. Lots of isolated areas due to the geology.

Same reason that the nuclear test site hazard is mostly blown dust, not water contamination despite literally hundreds and hundreds of nuclear detonations. They have their own isolated watershed and water table, like most of those valleys.

Dude, there's a golf course just up the road. This is exurban Vegas in 2023. It was "remote and inhospitable" in WW2, before anyone bothered to put a city there. That's an extremely high traffic interstate highway a mile south.

The LA/Vegas corridor may look pristine and empty (owing in no small part to significant regulation that keeps it that way!), but it's not remotely a "low density" population area.

> owing in no small part to significant regulation that keeps it that way

What regulation keeps it that way?

We're literally in a subthread discussing a mine that shut down because it couldn't expand...

Anything on the California side has to deal with extensive environmental impact regulation, and deserts are fragile. That mine is in California.

If you go exploring in Balarat or around Death Valley, it’s easy to find intact mines that are 70+ years old with everything nearly intact (except for the rat nests anyway).

As to if that regulation is appropriate given its remote location, etc. that’s up to the California state legislature.

Notably, mining is a much larger part of the state economy in Nevada, on the other side of the border.

By just up the road you mean 20 miles? Of open desert?

I-15 is high traffic, but once you get off it, you’re in the middle of nowhere for most of its length. Like ‘if you get out of your car and stop walking, no one will find your body for decades’ kind of middle of nowhere. Have you driven I15?

That it is regulated to prevent building definitely helps preserve that - but doesn’t change that nature?

Not that anyone would likely be building in those alkali lake beds anyway.

> The LA/Vegas corridor may look pristine and empty (owing in no small part to significant regulation that keeps it that way!), but it's not remotely a "low density" population area.

So, you are saying that there is a dense urban strip city hidden under the regulated, pristine desert?

Or... what?

Here’s a nice photo essay about what you are wishing on California.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...

Yikes. Absolutely devastating.

Silicon Valley was a superfund site supporting this news heavy industry of silicon transistors before it was paved over for the computer industry.

Environmentalists and scaremongering. Name a better couple.

America is not China. The EPA still exists.

To be fair without environmentalists the EPA would not have existed and would also cease to exist in the future. Hth

> The EPA still exists.

Less and less of it the more a certain party is in power.

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4291864-house-...

The EPA is largely useless. Businesses, driven by consumer demand and public reputation, have incentives to adopt environmentally friendly practices. Moreover, the legal system can handle disputes and damages related to environmental harm, thus making a specialized agency like the EPA redundant.

I don't think anyone is wishing this on California. The counter argument is that while mines in America still might not be perfect for everyone, they are much better than outsourcing those materials from lots of countries. Consumption is not stopping and we need supplies for raw materials.

What is wrong with those photos? Does California not have any industry of any sort? Those are typical industrial scenes that I expect you could find in most cities.

Unless I've been sorely mislead, California isn't a tropical jungle. There are colours other than green out there. If the haze is Chinese smog rather than just haze that is a problem, but visually there is nothing there that is problematic.

Laws and regulations increase dramatically with population density in a jurisdiction. It's not a US thing - it's a "civilization thing". More people per square mile and the blast radius of reckless profiteering and all kinds of criminal mischief explodes. This is why Alaska has even more liberal gun laws than Texas - it has more bears than people - literally.

Especially in the US, where these regulations lag severely, waiting until the abuse and damage gets completely out of hand.

The problem with mining is generally the externalities are not fully priced into the costs associated with the mines. Coal is a very messy business, and its aging so we get to see the after effects on the environment from all of its by products. The companies go bankrupt leaving states with massive cleanup concerns. To properly factor these things in and make it safer to mine in the US would make it unprofitable compared to less regulated countries.

Saying it’s in the middle of no where doesn’t mean it has no impact on others. Coal slurry spills and similar have washed downstream in creeks and rivers causing drinking water issues in places like West Virginia in recent years.

Here’s a simple thing with chemicals for cleaning coal where basic eye sight inspections meant anyone could have seen and recognized the issues and done something, but instead were allowed to fail, causing mass poisoning concerns for 300,000 people, https://grist.org/politics/no-rules-governed-tank-that-leake...

Alaska has a sizeable rare earth and uranium deposit that has been at some level of development since 2007 by UCORE.

I used to assume that California is generally anti-mining, but I can't explain that an open-pit gold mine was established in Napa County in the 1980s, well into the CEQA era. Maybe it's not so anti in practice.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/McLaughlin+Mine/@38.837955...

The cynic in me, just based on how many active drilling sites exist in the middle of Los Angeles (particularly the county but also the actual city), says that getting CEQA approval for a mine/dig/drill site is… probably easier than building anything more than a 10plex in California

It's plenty hard to build a SFH in California. Getting a 10-plex permitted is like getting an Olympic medal.

Yeah I would have thrown a party if my duplex proposal in Berkeley had been approved.

#3 would probably be government subsidies. China spent a lot of money to drive competitors out of business.

Rare earth refining traditionally generates a lot of toxic waste of various sorts. This could likely be mitigated but it would raise the cost of the finished product well above current market norms, so unless universal standards were applied, it would become unprofitable relative to China. There's a good overview of the difficulties involved (and some alternative approaches and replacement materials) here:

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2023/04/05/the-energy-tran...

I don't think competing with China will be a major concern domestically in the US in a few years as I anticipate a renewal and resurgence of the trade war.

> well above current market norms

which just indicates that the cost is externalized, and the current market price is too low.

But it would take international cooperation to force such externalized costs back into the supply chain, and no gov't wants to do if not doing so is advantageous geopolitically and economically.

> Rare earth refining traditionally generates a lot of toxic waste of various sorts.

Could someone explain why? It certainly seems obviously easier than radioactive waste. All that has to happen is a stable solid. Why are there liquids?

> All that has to happen is a stable solid.

What does that mean?

Rare earths are "rare" for two reasons - they are spread about and don't appear in high concentrartions - at least one is "as common" in the crust as copper but it doesn't form in massive lumps of "quite a lot together" in the manner of copper (which forms in several types of clumps, eg [1]).

The other reason they are rare is that they are mostly geochemically bound to other things in the way that silver and gold are not - a strong chemically reaction is required to free them and make them appear - that's a lot of wetwork with acids | reactive gases | etc [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porphyry_copper_deposit

[2] https://www.britannica.com/science/rare-earth-element/Proces...

Additionally (each ~ an hour)

The Chemistry and Geology of the Clay Rare Earths: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFwrg4wWsm4

Options for the separation of Rare Earth Elements: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMbsOjj_hls

(or search and find a lecture | paper of your preference)

The push to roll out new semi fabs is only to add redundancy for defense purposes. They absolutely will not be rolling out cutting edge consumer ICs and they'll be perpetually running under capacity without ever turning a profit.

What if defense wants cutting-edge ICs?

Generally speaking, defense prefers older, reliable, and well understood technology rather than the cutting edge stuff. It’s cheaper, easier to mass produce, and less likely to fail under extreme conditions.

They don't and they haven't since the 80s. The military needs reliability in harsh conditions above all else and modern processes can't deliver that. The military also doesn't care about the economic benefits of die shrinks so that driver is missing.

Front-line needs reliability, but the military has a lot of backend too, and they may well be interested in a secure supply of powerful GPUs running all kinds of AI-type workloads that don’t need to be on the battlefield. Something like continuous satellite surveillance of enemy territory with automated flagging of suspicious activity.

The 'rare' comes from the fact that the ore is not at all concentrated. The material is 'rare' within your earth.

Refinery capacity, big problem.

There's a lot of talk. Here's a rare earths refinery site in Fort Worth, TX, supposedly under construction for MP Minerals, the Mountain Pass mine people. Press release from 18 months ago.[1] Current view in Google Street View.[2] Some heavy equipment, and a billboard with the same picture as the press release, but they haven't even excavated the foundation as of that 2023 picture. US DoD put $35 million into this project.

[1] https://mpmaterials.com/articles/mp-materials-begins-constru...

[2] https://earth.google.com/web/search/Independence+Parkway,+Fo...

Yes, "rare" in this context doesn't mean the materials are rare geographically, but rather that they occur in very low concentrations which requires processing large volumes of ore. This is environmentally very destructive so in recent decades the world has been happy to let places like China do it.

> but rather that they occur in very low concentrations which requires processing large volumes of ore.

IIRC those concentrations are similar to copper and other metals

A team at West Virginia University is trying to scale a process which extracts rare earth elements from coal mine "acid mine drainage". The hope is that the process helps to clean up AMD - itself an environmental hazard remaining after coal mining - and produce rare earth elements from what would otherwise be waste.

https://wvutoday.wvu.edu/stories/2023/04/05/wvu-researchers-...

https://wvwri.wvu.edu/divisions/critical-materials

Rare-earth elements are important to the green energy revolution. China controls a lot of rare-earth elements as well as rare-earth refining. This is worth enough money they are considering building a refining site locally, which would be a good thing.

Wyoming is the least densely populated state in the continental US. The only state more sparsely populated is Alaska. So I'm not surprised there are things we don't know about what is there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories...

Technically, Alaska is still part of the continental US as it's still part of North America. In Alaska, we would call the "contiguous US" as "the lower 48."

Thank you.

Mistranslation of military speak.

I actually think of it as conus.

Personally, I prefer distinguishing between the lower 48 and the freak states

How would the massive pollution from the refining be handled if it occurs locally?

The important thing is that the source is an existing coal mine, meaning that they don't have to destroy/acquire any new land, so most (all?) environmental objections don't apply.

I still remember reading about people getting really sick living near tailings of a uranium mine, so there might still be things to watch out for.

It’s also in Wyoming, which means it will actually get built.

They will have to have room to refine as well as store most likely toxic tailings and byproducts. Coal is easier, just fill the hole back in (or don’t) and leave when it plays out. Rare earths, still have a massive clean up needed. Which based on western states’ history the cleanup seems to be funded by superfund, not the profiteers.

https://archive.ph/Aawzz

For those with CAPTCHA loop and Apple News -- https://apple.news/AujQtUvL-R9am2u1SlBgbrA

New Longmire plot just dropped.

Edit: kind of surprised that got some attention... didn't think the HN set overlapped that much with the Longmire set.

Rare Earths seem to be at the center of a misinformation perfect storm due to

a) the connection to China

b) the connection to renewables

c) their confusing name

And WSJ is a prime contributor to that.

Just someone I vaguely trust doing a series of blog articles by checking some sources and providing context to the Wikipedia article without an agenda would be nice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element

Some random highlights:

> Through the 1960s until the 1980s, the Mountain Pass rare earth mine in California made the United States the leading producer.

> Searches for alternative sources in Australia, Brazil, Canada, South Africa, Tanzania, Greenland, and the United States are ongoing.[68] Mines in these countries were closed when China undercut world prices in the 1990s, and it will take a few years to restart production

> Significant quantities of rare-earth oxides are found in tailings accumulated from 50 years of uranium ore, shale, and loparite mining at Sillamäe, Estonia.[104] Due to the rising prices of rare earths, extraction of these oxides has become economically viable. The country currently exports around 3,000 tonnes per year, representing around 2% of world production

> Ce and La are important as catalysts, and are used for petroleum refining and as diesel additives.

Diesel additives!

Rip Wyoming wildlife, the land will get ravaged and rivers will get contaminated

I don't know why your comment is being invalidated. Even in the best of cases when we try to protect wildlife preserves, there is undoubtedly collateral damage, and it ebbs over 40-90 years.

It’s an existing coal mine. In east Wyoming, well away from critical habitats. And rare-earth mining isn’t dirty, it’s the refining that pollutes.

Correct the mining itself isn’t too terrible. But is it not likely a local refinery will follow? I don’t think shipping ore to Australia or Malaysia will be cost effective.

It might be cost effective if you can export the externalities of rare earth refining. It is a deeply toxic process.

The only reason we don't want to rely on China is geopolitical. Besides that everyone would be happy to have China take the pollution it takes for the rest of the world to transition to electricity.

There are a bunch of steps in the refining process. One of the first step is pulverizing/grinding where you can separate out the constituent components based on density. This step can done locally and will cut the volume of the ore by 75-90 percent.

However, given the regulatory environment in the US surrounding refinement, there is likely a huge opportunity for innovation in this space.

He bought an existing old mine for 2 million.

Did a rare earth test and it's now worth 37 billion $

---

Rare earth doesn't seem to be that rare

rare earths are rare the same way common sense is common.

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