Ramaco Resources is excavating its new Wyoming critical minerals find. CEO Randy Atkins doesn’t want the Pentagon’s money, but he does want a U.S. strategic reserve.
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amaco Resources broke ground last month on a new coal mine in Sheridan, Wyoming, the first one in the state in 50 years. By last week, Ramaco had excavated 100 feet down, exposing a 20-foot wide coal seam, and was holding an official ribbon cutting, with Energy Secretary Chris Wright and retired West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin in attendance. But despite their shared enthusiasm for fossil fuels, it wasn’t old-fashioned, electricity generating coal that attracted those big shots to the Brook Mine.
Ramaco Chairman and CEO Randall Atkins expects the 2.5 million tons of coal he plans to extract over the next 12 months will contain within it some of the world’s most sought-after rare-earth elements and other critical minerals. Specifically, dysprosium, neodymium, scandium and gallium — vital stuff for making powerful magnets, semiconductors, night-vision goggles, hypersonic missiles, and much more.
Ramaco CEO Atkins.
Louise Johns/Ramaco
“Critical minerals and rare earths are to this century what oil was to the 20th century,” declares Atkins, a 69-year-old lawyer and Ramaco founder whose resume includes stints in private equity, investment banking, and real estate development.
Publicly traded Ramaco (up 80% year-t0-date to a $1 billion market cap on $11 million in earnings and $670 million in sales) says that once its pilot processing plant is completed, as early as late 2026, it will be able to meet more than 10% of America’s 10,000 tons per year of total rare earths demand, nearly all of which is currently sourced from China.
The Trump Administration is leaning heavily into domestic production of rare earths. Last week, the Pentagon announced that it would invest $400 million into Ramaco’s rival, publicly traded MP Materials, which operates America’s only currently producing rare earths mine at Mountain Pass, Calif. The federal cash injection will go in part to build a new magnet factory ten times the size of the one MP recently built in Fort Worth, Texas. (MP shares jumped 45% on the news, giving it a $7.3 billion market cap.)
But Atkins says his Brook Mine resource is far superior to MP’s. Mountain Pass yields mostly the “lighter” rare earths (especially cerium, used in water treatment). MP also has to contend with radioactivity in its ore, not present at Brook. Ramaco, he says, will be the sole domestic supplier of the heavier, more valuable, rare earths. MP points out that although “heavies” make up only 2% of its Mountain Pass output, that does add up to several hundred tons of heavy oxides per year.
The geology of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin is rich with fossil fuels. The nation’s biggest coal mines, some extracting 100 million tons a year, are there. Oil production in the region is growing quickly. But no one knew there were rare earths there until a few years ago.
“It’s not that these elements are rare, they’re just not often found in concentrations that are economic to develop,” explains Atkins. At Brook, with the help of engineering work by Fluor, they’ve found rare earth concentrations as high as 10,000 parts per million, which so far appears to be unique among coal accumulations anywhere on Earth. Atkins attributes this to ancient volcanic activity that pushed up mineral-laden magma.
Most of the 2.5 million tons of excavation Ramaco expects to do a year aims to get regular old coal out of the way to reach about 500,000 tons a year with high rare earth concentrations. “We’re ultimately trying to be surgical,” says Atkins. “We won’t have gigantic pits.”
Atkins grew up around fossil fuels. His father, Orin Atkins, while running Ashland Oil in the 1960s and 1970s, launched what later became Arch Coal. Young Randall had no intention of getting into that business. After law school, he developed real estate in New York and Florida, then ran a joint venture with the billionaire Lauder family privatizing energy assets in eastern Europe. Working in private equity in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, Atkins couldn’t pass up bargains in coal.
“I thought, why not start a coal company? The business was so beaten, you could control assets at a low price,” he recalls. Still, he adds, “we didn’t want to start buying someone else’s problems” such as old, mothballed mines with big environmental and pension liabilities. Instead, he focused on finding virgin prospects, especially deposits in Appalachia of high-value metallurgical (or coking) coal–a special type used in steel production.
Ramaco opened its first mine in 2016 and went public through an IPO in 2017, with the cooperation of met coal export prices, which shot up from $90 a ton to $160. (It goes for around $135 a ton today).
Ramaco acquired the Wyoming assets about 13 years ago, simply intending to get a new mine permitted “and then move on.” But with coal becoming enemy No. 1 of the anti-carbon crowd, “We realized a new thermal coal mine was not going to happen. That began the quest: what else can you do with this stuff?”
Ramaco started investigating its Wyoming holdings and noticed anomalies that suggested it might have bought something more than plain old thermal coal. Recalling how decades ago his father’s company had worked with federal laboratories seeking to convert coal into liquid fuels, Atkins reupped the partnerships. Separately, Ramaco is working with Oak Ridge National Lab and the National Energy Technology Laboratory to make other high-value products out of their coal, such as synthetic graphite, carbon fiber, and battery anodes. With scientists at MIT, the company is even seeking to train proteins to selectively adsorb rare earths right out of a coal slurry. “It’s the ultimate heterogeneous material, a kaleidoscope of constituents, too valuable to burn,” says Atkins, who has been trying to popularize “carbon ore” as a new moniker for coal. Good luck with that.
It’s good to dream. Unlike MP, Ramaco doesn’t need Uncle Sam to help finance what Atkins describes as a “bolt-on operation to a profitable met coal company”—with the profits coming from its mines in West Virginia and Virginia. As icing on the cake, the massive tax and budget bill President Trump signed July 4th includes a tax credit for metallurgical coal producers of 2.5% of revenues. (The credit was slipped into the bill in the Senate thanks to the efforts of near-bankrupt coal tycoon Sen. Jim Justice and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, both of West Virginia, as well as Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming.)
Yet a big question remains: How much can it get paid for rare earths, once it starts mining and refining them? There’s no free market; China’s state-controlled rare earth monopolies manipulate supplies and prices to the rest of the world, a key impetus for the Pentagon’s move to invest in MP. Atkins says he appreciates government support, but that Ramaco can finance its own expansion.
While Atkins insists he isn’t looking for a direct investment from Uncle Sam, he is hoping for some price support. He’s looking to establish a base U.S. pricing index for these exotic materials, and encouraging his friends in Washington, D.C. to backstop demand by setting up something similar to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. “The U.S. will need a national strategic reserve of rare earths and critical minerals,’’ he declares.
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