Trump Secures U.S. Critical Mineral Supply Via Coal

Forbes

31-03-2025

(COMBO) This combination of pictures created on May 14, 2020 shows recent portraits of China's ... More President Xi Jinping (L) and US President Donald Trump. (Photo by Dan Kitwood and Nicholas Kamm / various sources / AFP) (Photo by DAN KITWOODNICHOLAS KAMM/POOL/AFP/AFP via Getty Images)
In June, coal producer Ramaco Resources will open the mother of all mines in Wyoming.
But coal isn't what the company is after.
The mine has three of the country's 50 most sought-after critical minerals—gallium, germanium, and scandium—used in semiconductors, EVs, smartphones, fiber optic cables and warheads, among other things.
'We have discovered we have the world's only primary source mine embedded with gallium, germanium and scandium,' Ramaco Resources' chief executive, Randall Atkins, told Forbes.
The U.S. has relied on Chinese imports for these critical minerals, but China stopped exporting them to the U.S. last year.
Ramaco's new Brook Mine project is on 16,000 acres in Sheridan County, Wyoming, on the western edge of the Powder River Basin.
Finding rare earths there is like 'somebody handed us the Permian Basin on a platter,' Atkins said, referring to the primary bastion of U.S. oil and gas production in West Texas and Southeastern New Mexico.
It will give the U.S. 'an important strategic advantage,' Atkins said.
And it creates a critical minerals market in the U.S. where there hasn't been one.
The U.S. consumed 8,880 tons of critical minerals last year, according to Statista. Most came from China.
Global demand for critical minerals is expected to double by 2040.
Atkins said he thinks he has about 1.7 million tons of minerals in the mine, which would provide the U.S. with years of supply.
Using a nice round 10,000 ton/annually figure, he said 'Do the math, 10,000 into 1.7 million tons gives you a rather long period of time we could supply a lot of these rare earths,' he said.
Next month, Fluor Corp. will release a detailed report on the mine's mineral concentration, grade, approximate tonnage of the minerals, how much could be recovered from processing, and 'general economics regarding cash flow and capital expenditures,' according to Ramaco's investor relations team.
Though there is no processing plant for these minerals in the U.S. now, Ramaco will determine how much processing to build based on the Fluor report.
The company plans to construct a pilot processing facility in August, which will be operational by early 2026, at which point the company will begin looking for third-party customers that will sell the minerals to end users.
The company has already been in discussions with 'high-level groups within the defense community,' Atkins said.
Construction of a commercial processing facility will begin in late 2026 or early 2027.
Atkins said it would take the second coming of President Trump to resurrect U.S. coal and accelerate U.S. dominance in critical minerals.
'Trump came in at the right time,' Atkins said. 'China knows the U.S. is vulnerable. We use these critical minerals for hypersonic missiles.'
The Trump administration is working to address that.
In his first term, President Trump issued an Executive Order that defined critical minerals.
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has deemed a collection of 50 metals and elements found in the Earth's crust as 'critical minerals,' which include four rare earth elements, all of which are essential to national security but also vulnerable to supply chain disruptions.
Early in this second term, President Trump issued another Executive Order emphasizing the role of these elements in American prosperity, national and energy security. He ordered the USGS to figure out where the U.S. has mineral deposits to meet the growing U.S. demand.
USGS released those findings in its first World Minerals Outlook on March 11.
On March 20, President Trump issued a third Executive Order on the subject. It directs his Cabinet agencies to inform his National Energy Dominance Council of 'all mineral production projects for which a plan of operations, a permit application, or other application for approval has been submitted to such agency.'
How Atkins, a Kentucky-born son of an energy entrepreneur turned West Virginia coal executive, became a minerals wildcatter is practically providential.
He bought an old coal mine in 2011 in Wyoming, just as President Obama was waging his war on coal in the name of climate change. Ironically U.S. coal exports to China grew during Obama's tenure.
When he bought his $2 billion mine, now said to be worth $37 billion, Atkins said he had a hunch there were alternative uses for his coal.
Turns out, there are.
A research institute in Wyoming led him home to Ashland, Kentucky where he worked with a lab to convert his coal into carbon fiber for cars. He thought, 'the hand from above is trying to tell me something,' Atkins said.
'That kind of started us on the odyssey of reverse engineering what coal could be used for to make alternative products and materials.'
DEWALAK, AFGHANISTAN — SEPTEMBER 1, 2022: Large rocks containing chromite, is crushed into smaller ... More bitesize chunks, before to goes through a process to refine and extract the ore that yields chromium, a vital component of stainless steel, at the Mughulkhil mine in Logar Province, Afghanistan, Thursday, Sept. 1, 2022. (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES)
The shift that set Ramaco on its bountiful path happened in 2017 during President Trump's first term when the Energy Department's National Energy Technology Lab (NETL) invited Atkins to submit coal samples for a research project.
The Trump administration suspected critical minerals could be found in coal mines, he said.
Atkins also developed a cooperative agreement with Oak Ridge National Lab to examine the viability of converting coal to synthetic graphite--a critical mineral essential for EV batteries--and activated carbon to absorb CO2.
Then-Energy Secretary Rick Perry also asked Atkins to join the National Coal Council, an arm of the Energy Department that advised the Secretary of Energy on coal policy. He became chairman in 2020, but President Biden eliminated the Council in 2021 by allowing its charter to expire.
'Biden's Energy Department had a dictum that they would do nothing that could encourage new mining of coal,' Atkins said.
Conversely, President Trump has developed an energy policy that prioritizes all types of U.S. energy production for national security, including coal production for critical minerals, Atkins said.
Ramaco is now involved with another NETL research project to explore for rare earth elements using AI. 'We're going to use AI for mine planning and some process dynamics,' Atkins said.
Most critical minerals are found in existing hard minerals. That makes them hard to extract and by extension, test and process.
They must be dislodged from the existing hard mineral, crushed and chopped to get any kind of concentration or volume.
Scandium, for example, is typically processed as a byproduct of other metals such as cobalt, nickel, titanium, and zirconium, so it's difficult to obtain.
Plus, many critical minerals are found in association with radioactive minerals, which means to separate them you have to use extremely caustic acids, Atkins said.
'That is why the United States and all these other countries have been shipping rare earths to China to process. They don't care about pouring caustic acids on anything,' Atkins said.
Ramaco deposits have virtually no thorium or uranium or other radioactive deposits, he said.
Testing is also complicated.
'Good heavens you find coal and you can test it in an afternoon,' Atkins said. 'For rare earths, you have to go through months and months of testing the chemical composition and even more testing about how to separate rare earths, which are measured in parts per million.'
Ramaco is exploring what Atkins calls 'novel techniques' like lasers or microbes, which can eat away at material surrounding the rare earths allowing them to be collected, crushed and processed for end use.
The company is working with MIT on sulfidation, a process to loosen and extract rare earths from hard minerals.
'We hope we can be the first new kid on the block to be able to use a lot of these emerging technologies as well as some that have been around for a while,' Atkins said.
For example, rare earths could be mined with unconventional drilling.
'If that works, that may open up a whole new horizon for the U.S. to be able to expand its rare earth and critical mineral profile,' he said.
'We have dozens of people in various labs in Canada and the U.S. working on the chemical separation and recovery techniques, and it's a mind blow,' he said.
'You have to use highly calibrated electronic instruments to determine the chemical compositions of these. Then you have to do multiple different testing of alternative amounts of agents and reagents to separate the material and refine it.'
Transporting the minerals is the easiest part because the size of the processed elements is relatively small. 'You could practically use FedEx' to transport the elements to the end user, Atkins said.
Atkins, who sits on the International Energy Agency's Coal and Critical Minerals Board, told lawmakers on Capitol Hill and Trump administration officials in February he recommends a critical minerals reserve, something akin to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, developed in 1975 to store U.S. crude in the wake of the 1973 Arab oil embargo.
Republican Congressman Rob Wittman of Virginia, who chairs the U.S. Critical Minerals Working Group of the China Select Committee, plans to re-introduce his SECURE Minerals Act to create a Resilient Resource Reserve, or stockpile, of critical minerals but also a fund that would support U.S. companies trying to 'grow and scale critical minerals mining, processing, and production free of Chinese control.'
Congressman Wittman told Forbes that ideally the new Reserve would help stabilize prices by creating an allied marketplace of minerals but also 'build up stronger friendly supply chains free from China's domination.'
Daniel Pickard, the international trade and national security practice leader at the law firm, Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, has uncovered the seldom-used Material Retardation provision embedded in the antidumping statute, as a way to counter Chinese price manipulation.
'About a year ago, it dawned on me that it's perfect for critical minerals,' he said.
Private companies have abandoned mining projects after Chinese companies have flooded the market with critical minerals and tanked the price.
'They do this intentionally,' Pickard said. 'That makes the investment no longer economically feasible. Many mining operations have been abandoned, and it allows China to maintain global dominance.'
'You have this cycle,' Pickard said.
Using the Material Retardation provision, Pickard in December 2024, got a big win for U.S. critical minerals.
The Commerce Department ruled that 'China unfairly subsidizes its tungsten industry.'
'We have 300% tariffs that have now been placed on Chinese tungsten,' Pickard said.
He filed a similar case in December relying on the same provision but for Chinese graphite for EVs.
'There is no other legal tool out there,' Pickard said. 'This little-known statute could be the savior of the U.S. critical minerals industry.'