The U.S. government is highlighting a huge Wyoming rare earth project as nationally important in the best way it knows how — with money. A lot of it.
The Export-Import Bank of the United States has pledged up to $456 million in financing for the Halleck Creek Project in southeast Wyoming. The pledge is not binding, and will depend on sufficiently moving the project forward.
Repayment of the loan would take place over 15 years under EXIM’s Make More in America Initiative, under which EXIM has been directed to take steps to reduce the competitive impact of export support that countries like the People’s Republic of China provide their industries.
Halleck Creek has the potential to be one of the largest rare earth deposits in the United States.
The project not only includes a mine with vast resources, but a future plant to process those resources in America, instead of having to send them to China. It could play a key role in ensuring a 100% domestic supply of rare earth magnet metals, which are used to make everything from cellphones to jet engines.
Halleck Creek is under the American Rare Earths umbrella, but was recently spun off into its own subsidiary. It’s now called the Wyoming Rare (USA) project.
The subsidiary is still wholly owned by American Rare Earths, Wyoming Rare (USA) President Joe Evers told Cowboy State Daily, but the change makes it a little easier for strategic investors in the United States to become part of the project.
The spinoff is a signal of the growing momentum for an important project located in Wyoming.
“I think on any given day, our market cap — the value of the company — is around $100 million on the stock exchange, and the project we need to build is around $500 million,” Evers told Cowboy state Daily on Friday morning. “So, as other investors come in and say, ‘Well how are you going to finance that?’ We can say, ‘EXIM Bank is going to finance that.’ This brings some certainty to how this could get constructed.”
