Rare earth elements exploration and development: gaining ground in Southeast mining venture.

• Author: Sharpe, Margaret
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Mining

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. One lucky company is poised for success in Southeast Alaska with an extremely lucky discovery on Prince of Wales Island.

Enter Ucore Rare Metals, Inc., a mining exploration company headquartered in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. They may be lucky, but their preparation has positioned them in the best of all worlds: largest deposit of high grade heavy rare earth metals in the United States; anomalous skew toward three critical, high-demand rare earth metals; green technology for extraction; excellent logistics for accessing and exporting; and a small environmental footprint.

Concentrated REEs

Rare earth elements (REEs) are actually not that rare. They are abundant in the earth's crust and ubiquitous the world over. What is rare is finding them in economic concentrations. "You need a really select set of circumstances to mine rare earth," says Jim McKenzie, CEO of Ucore. "They have to be concentrated and you need to skew toward the valuable ones in order to make things work economically."

Those circumstances, and then some, exist at their Bokan-Dotson Ridge site at the southern end of Prince of Wales Island.

"When Ucore originally got into business eight years ago, we were looking for uranium," McKenzie says. "So we optioned the Bokan Mountain site from the prospectors with a view to exploring the former Ross-Adams mine." The Ross-Adams mine produced the highest-grade uranium on US soil from the late 1950s until the early 1970s, when demand for uranium waned. Ucore began exploring south of the former mine in 2008 and found the area was teeming with REEs.

"With most discoveries, it is not a matter of the discoverer saying 'eureka,' but rather the discoverer saying, 'Hmm, that's funny.' We just kept pulling REEs out of the ground and thinking, 'Jeez, it's too bad there wasn't more demand for that right now.' It turns out that we had all these assays that were very high grade REEs for Dotson Ridge."

High Grade Deposit

Then in 2011, China announced cutting back exports of REEs to the international community, and the values of REEs escalated significantly. "We thought the timing was sort of a mixture of good fortune and good exploration skills. We sort of stumbled across a very high grade REEs deposit with the discovery at Dotson Ridge," McKenzie says.

So Ucore shifted their attention from uranium to rare metals, which includes REEs and other metals, such as niobium, zirconium, and scandium...