Officials with Butte’s lone active copper mine said it has a commercially-viable process to extract rare earth minerals from the contaminated waters of the Berkeley Pit. The company is hoping the U.S. Department of Defense will provide funding to get the project off the ground.
Mark Thompson is a vice president at Montana Resources. He told Montana’s Environmental Quality Council Thursday that federal officials have expressed interest in the copper mine’s pilot method for extracting minerals from water in the Berkeley Pit.
The test showed the pit water has very high levels of rare earths. But Thompson said extracting them wouldn’t be economically feasible without an on-site facility to process the minerals into a usable form.
“We made about 140 tons of really nice stuff. But it's not – you can't do anything with it. Because one of the things we lack domestically is – we don't have a complete supply chain,” Thompson said.
Rare earths are minerals used in advanced technologies like electric car batteries, as well as many modern weapons systems. The majority of the global supply of those minerals is produced and processed in China.
The U.S. Department of Defense claims it is a national security risk and is spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to help companies establish a secure domestic supply chain.
Thompson said the cost of building a processing facility could be as much as $200 million, meaning Montana Resources would need the Department of Defense to foot some of the bill.
