Rare Element Resources Ltd. is advancing its Bear Lodge rare earth project in northeastern Wyoming on two critical fronts: federal permitting for the mine and demonstration of proprietary rare earth processing and separation technology that could help establish a domestic supply chain for magnet rare earths.
Smooth and predictable permitting under the federal FAST-41 program means the clock is ticking for crews to iron out operational challenges for a plant built to demonstrate a proprietary rare earth separation technology developed by Rare Element Resources and General Atomics.
Located about 25 miles north of the town of Upton, Bear Lodge hosts 541 million pounds of rare earths in 6 million metric tons of measured and indicated resources averaging 4.1% rare earths. The high-grade deposit is particularly enriched with neodymium and praseodymium, along with dysprosium and terbium, the rare earths used in the high-strength magnets for electric vehicles, wind turbines, medical imaging, defense systems, and consumer electronics.
The permitting front took a major step forward in March when Bear Lodge was accepted into FAST-41, a federal initiative designed to improve transparency, coordination, and predictability for strategically important infrastructure and resource projects.
After coordinating with the U.S. Forest Service, the lead federal agency overseeing permitting of the project, the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council established a roughly two-year timeline for permitting the rare earths mine.
“Our initial permitting progress has been seamless,” said Rare Element Resources CEO Ken Mushinski.
As permitting advances, the company is working to demonstrate and optimize the rare earths processing and separation technology developed in partnership with General Atomics.
The demonstration plant in Upton is designed to produce high-purity neodymium-praseodymium oxide, or NdPr, the primary rare earth product used in manufacturing neodymium-iron-boron magnets. These high-strength permanent magnets are essential to the automotive, defense, energy, and technology sectors of the economy.
With China continuing to dominate global rare earth processing and separation capacity, the Upton demonstration plant and the commercial plant slated to follow are not only important to Bear Lodge but also to reinforce mines-to-magnets rare earth supply chains in the U.S.
To gather the engineering, operational, and economic data needed to support construction of a commercial-scale facility, Rare Element Resources plans to operate the demonstration plant for approximately 12 months.
Steady operations, however, have been delayed by supply chain and operational issues.
According to Rare Element Resources, challenges encountered during commissioning are precisely the type of issues the demonstration plant was designed to identify before construction of a commercial facility.
“The primary objective of a Demonstration Plant is to systematically uncover and resolve mechanical and operational challenges before scaling to a commercial facility,” said Mushinski.
With most major systems commissioned, crews are focused on modifications and operational adjustments needed to efficiently produce rare earth concentrate for the plant’s separation circuits.
“By fine-tuning our primary processing circuit and resolving these filtration inefficiencies now, we are effectively de-risking our commercial trajectory,” Mushinski added. “Once this front-end optimization is complete, the primary circuit will continuously feed our completed separation circuits to yield high-purity NdPr.”
The high-purity NdPr produced during the demonstration will provide potential customers with samples for testing.
Rare Element Resources expects filtration issues to be resolved and the facility to achieve steady operations by late summer.
That timeline places increasing importance on achieving the planned 12-month demonstration campaign before the Bear Lodge rare earths mining and processing operation completes federal permitting under FAST-41.
By – https://www.metaltechnews.com/story/2026/06/10/tech-metals/bear-lodge-permitting-seamless-demo-slowed/2791.html