Chairman and CEO Randall Atkins sits down with Global Finance to discuss the company’s entry into the sector.
When Nasdaq-listed, Kentucky-headquartered metallurgical coal developer Ramaco Resources announced in 2023 that it discovered rare earth elements in its Wyoming coal mine—where they weren’t expected—the developer became the latest participant in the estimated $7.2 billion rare earths market. The company, which posted $11.2 million in net profit on $666.3 million in revenue in 2024, plans to begin pilot production and processing of rare earth metals later this year.
Global Finance: It sounds like Ramaco Resources had a happy accident discovering rare earth elements in its Brook Mine project in Wyoming.
Randall Atkins: It was certainly a surprise. The way that the discovery evolved is that we were doing various research with the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) on carbon products that could be made from the carbon within coal.
And part of NETL’s directive, I guess it goes back to about 2017 or 2018, was that the [US] Department of Defense had tasked them to discover where rare earth and critical minerals might be able to be found in the continental US because the Defense Department is concerned about supply lines of rare earths based on China’s dominance in the space.
They had asked us for coal core samples from our mine in Wyoming and, of course, from mines in West Virginia and Virginia. They did the same for several other mining groups, certainly not us specifically.
About a year later, they came back saying, “We’ve analyzed these [samples] pretty thoroughly, and we think we have discovered that you, in your deposit in Wyoming, may have some of the highest concentrations of medium and heavy rare earths that we’ve seen anywhere outside of Western China.”
GF: Has the latest round of tariffs changed the economics of developing this site?
Atkins: Well, it certainly has in the short term and likely will in the longer term. So, since the tariffs were announced, China has imposed an embargo on selling all rare earth elements that might have potential dual civilian and military use to the US.
We have about seven rare earth elements and critical minerals at the top of our list, and five of those seven have now been banned from export by China. As part of that ban, their prices have increased because people can’t get their hands on them.
GF: Ramaco is focusing on the heavier metals that China no longer exports to the US?
Atkins: We’re focusing on the medium and heavy rare earths. I mean, I’ll give you some names: neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium. Those are the four primary rare earths; the primary critical minerals are gallium, germanium and scandium. Those are the seven that we have and that we’re focused on. However, we have about 11 additional rare earths. Things like cerium, gadolinium, yttrium, et cetera, that are not as valuable as the seven that I first named.
GF: Can private industry develop the necessary infrastructure to process these ores independently, or is a public-private partnership needed?
Atkins: We were involved with NETL in discovering this. We have had conversations with the [US] government about other ways that they might get involved as we go further up the development chain, either from partnering with us in some fashion financially as we develop the processing or getting involved somehow in the procurement through the Defense Department, which is trying to establish new supply lines.
GF: Does this give you pause to see if you have thrown away rare earths from other mines?
Atkins: Yeah, great point. And indeed, NETL and others have looked at various coal seams across the country, and there has been discussion about finding rare earths in coal ash from power plants or acid mine drainage, without the need to extract new coal. Of course, the short answer to your question is no, we did not find rare earth in our other deposits back in the East … nor has anybody else, in sufficient concentration in those coal seams to make it economic.
GF: Where does Ramaco fit in the mine-to-magnet supply chain?
Atkins: Think of the supply chain as a food chain: once the ore is extracted from the ground in its raw form, it’s then beneficiated and processed into a concentrate. The concentrate then has all the elements mixed together. The next step is to separate the rare earth from the concentrate to make oxides, which are used to make metals.
The long answer is “Yes.” We will look at the possibility of taking this from mine to magnets because of the size of the overall deposit. We could also potentially go from mine to semiconductors because we could make semiconductor wafers. In addition to the rare earths, we have three critical minerals, which are now banned from exporting by China, gallium, germanium, and scandium, that can be used in the semiconductor process. So, given the size of what we’ve got over some time, certainly not on day one, we will try to take it as far up the value chain as we can.
GF: How long will it take to develop the necessary processing capabilities?
Atkins: We have been working on this with the Fluor Corporation for about a year and a half to identify the appropriate flow sheet and the refining models that would be used. And indeed, they’re in the process of designing the pilot plant.
So, what we will do from a development standpoint is we’ll start large-scale mining in June, and the larger material will then be used in a pilot plant, which we will start in August or September. Hopefully, we’ll have the pilot facility start the initial processing by the end of the year. That will run for a better part of a year. We plan to transition from the pilot to a full-scale commercial facility by the end of 2026. That would probably take about a year and a half to construct. So, we’re looking at probably the second half of 2028 before we would be in commercial production. Still, given the magnitude of what we would be building, that’s a reasonably quick timeframe.
