The President of USA Rare Earth, Inc. based in Stillwater says the company’s recent $73 million acquisition of Texas Mineral Resources Corp. will “secure our defense industry and our, frankly, the technology industry as well.”
It’s what Barbara Humpton, CEO of USAR, explained Wednesday in an interview on Fox Business Channel’s Mornings with Maria. As part of the agreement, USAR will acquire all of the outstanding shares of EMRC for 3,823,328 shares of USAR common stock. It will also make USAR the sole operator of its Round Top Project in southwest Texas where rare minerals are being mined.
Earlier this year, USA Rare Earth managed to obtain government funding for the mining project. It gave up a potential 8% to 16% ownership stake in exchange for more than $1 billion in federal funding and loans, a move aimed at accelerating domestic production of rare earth minerals critical to semiconductors, permanent magnets, defense systems and advanced manufacturing.
Since then, USA Rare Earth has reached an agreement to lease and have prospecting rights on another 9,345 acres around the 950-acre Round Top project. The Stillwater company expects that by 2030, it will extract nearly 40,000 metric tons a day of rare earth and critical mineral feedstock.
“What we’ll be doing this year is rapidly moving through the steps that are typically done over a multi-year period in order to prove out the feasibility of the whole deposit and establish the infrastructure needed,” said Humpton on Fox Business News.
She explained the minerals were known to exist at Round Top for some time but companies had not been able to unlock the chemistry in order to separate the heavy rare earths. Humpton credited her company scientists in Wheat Ridge, Colorado with finally accomplishing it.
“What this provides us is one of the most productive sources of heavies available anywhere.And this is how USA Rare Earth is building the leading rare earth mine-to-magnet value chain.”
She described it as a “fluorite” which is being mined in a simple way.
“All we need to do is extract the rock, crush it, put it into a heap, leach a liquid out of it that will carry the heavy rare earths, and then do the classic solvent extraction process to separate the heavy rare earths from other minerals that are in the deposit.”
In October of last year, USA Rare Earth also announced the acquisition of Less Common Metals Ltd., a move that beefed up the Stillwater magnet production ability.
“Our managing director for less common metals, our subsidiary, is in Stillwater, Oklahoma today, scouting out the area where we’ll be expanding metalmaking in the United States. And then further, he’s working with our magnetmaker there. We have already begun to build out the rest of our magnetmaking facility. And I’m very proud to say that on plan, we are finishing commissioning of our very first line.”
The rare earth magnets being manufactured by the company in Stillwater are needed for semiconductors, and other products such as missiles, fighter jets, EV motors, wind turbines and AI hardware.
As a result of the company’s success in the south Texas project as well as acquisitions, trading has shot up more than 40% in the past several months. On Tuesday, shares jumped more than 9%.
USA Rare Earth Inc
20.45
USD+1.74