The Trump administration is looking to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Greenland and Ukraine to supply the United States’ demand for prized metals China controls.

But some of the richest deposits ever discovered of key metals over which Beijing commands near monopolies sit buried under a snow-covered tract of land a roughly 40-minute drive north from Helena, Montana.

The results of new independent analyses of the mineral concentrations at the site heralded good news for U.S. Critical Materials Corp., the Salt Lake City-based exploration company that owns the mineral rights to the tract of National Forest Service land.

The amount of lanthanum – a silvery-white malleable rare earth metal used in batteries and lighting – found at the Sheep Creek mining site exceeds by fourfold the concentrations of the mineral at the second-richest deposit in the U.S., the Bear Lodge project in Wyoming. The find is more than 100 times greater than the third-richest deposit, the Bokan Mountain site in Alaska.

The data – compiled from company documents and Securities and Exchange Commission filings, and shared exclusively with this newsletter – compare the potential rare earth oxides that could be produced from seven largest commercial mineral deposits so far identified inside the U.S.

Neodymium – a rare earth used in magnets and lasers – is nearly twice as concentrated at the Sheep Creek site as in Wyoming, and 45 times what’s available in Alaska.

Praseodymium – a rare earth used to make high-strength alloys, aircraft engines and wind turbines – is available in deposits nearly thrice as concentrated as in Wyoming, and 33 times greater than the Alaska deposit.

Like Sheep Creek, those other projects are not yet producing any metals. Compared to the one mine that is digging rare earths out of American soil – MP Materials’ Mountain Pass project in California – Sheep Creek may hold three times as much mineral potential.

The Montana tract contains more than just rare earths. Sheep Creek has gallium concentrations averaging over 300 parts per million, and reaching up to 1,370 parts per million. While not a rare earth element, gallium – a soft, silvery metal – is crucial for producing semiconductors, advanced radar systems and satellite technology.

As with rare earths, China produces the vast majority of the world’s gallium supply. Trailing far behind is Russia as the world’s No. 2 producer of the metal. Japan and South Korea combined generate roughly the same amount of gallium as Russia. The U.S. has no gallium production.

In July 2023, China slapped new restrictions on exports of gallium. Last December, Beijing tightened its ban on exports to the U.S.

“The Chinese supply 99% of the gallium in the world. And the Chinese are not our friends,” Harvey Kaye, U.S. Critical Materials’ executive director, told me over the phone on a recent afternoon. “The only thing we have is an emergency stockpile. We just started to draw down that emergency stockpile and there is no supply available in the U.S.”

Unlike other rare earth projects in the U.S., he said, “we have gallium.”

“We believe that we are the answer to critical mineral sovereignty for the protection of the homeland,” Kaye said.

Adding to the project’s tailwinds is the recent finding that the concentrations of radioactive thorium, which is often near rare earths, are unusually low, allowing the company to avoid the extra hassle of obtaining special permissions from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

“We have a very high grade, but very low thorium,” Kaye said. “That’s what makes it a geological unicorn.”

The discovery could be even bigger than previously thought. The company had only surveyed about 800 of the 6,700 acres of land it controls in Montana. But U.S. Critical Materials hired an Israeli company that used artificial intelligence models to extrapolate from geological images how far the deposits go throughout the other parts of the property. The AI predicted with 95% confidence that similar rock formations ran through 30 additional areas around the property.

U.S. Critical Materials wouldn’t be the company to start mining at any large scale. The firm is an exploration company, meaning it would partner with a mining giant such as Rio Tinto or Glencore to do the actual digging.

To cut a deal with a major in the industry, the Salt Lake City startup would need to line up the permits first. While he cautioned that opening a mine “takes years,” Ed Cowle, U.S. Critical Materials’ executive chairman, told me he thinks the bipartisan support for shoring up domestic supplies of critical minerals means “we could fast track” the project.

“We’re optimistic that the climate is right for everything to be sped up,” he said by phone.

In the meantime, the company is working with researchers at the Idaho National Laboratory to develop a new, cleaner method for using only electricity, water and nitrogen to extract critical minerals from ore without the need for toxic chemicals. If that can work, it would give the U.S. a potential leg up against China, which depends on highly-polluting refineries to process rare earths from rock.

The one problem for U.S. Critical Materials is that gallium is “ultra, ultra niche” because it’s needed in such small quantities even compared to rare earths, said Milo McBride, a fellow who researches mineral supply chains at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

“The first question is, who’s going to buy this? Obviously the Department of Defense is very interested in stockpiling and putting up funds, and has been proactive at putting up funds in domestic and Canadian mining projects,” McBride told me by phone. “But that doesn’t always mean the mine is going to work out.”

The U.S. military helped fund a project in Idaho to mine cobalt, the bluish battery metal primarily sourced from the war-torn, slavery-prone Democratic Republic of the Congo. Yet the project went under in 2023.

While defense spending might not be enough to spur high demand for minerals in the U.S., some of the green technologies for which the Trump administration is now reversing federal support would, McBride said.

“If you want rare earths, you want to get that online to incubate an industry and process materials, offshore wind is probably the best thing you can do to give a demand signal,” he said. “Electric vehicles as well. That’s the rare earth market.”

Absent that strong demand at home, the U.S. can still easily get around the Chinese trade restrictions by buying gallium from third-party countries that aren’t subject to Beijing’s ban.

“It’s going to be really hard for the Chinese Ministry of Commerce to extraterritorially enforce that those shipments are not getting resold at a premium into the U.S. through circumvention,” McBride said. “The assumption is that that’s probably what will happen. The Chinese don’t have a stringent sanctions regime the way the Americans do where they could perhaps go after that.”

In an email, Daan de Jong, a rare earths analysts at the London-based metals consultancy Benchmark Minerals, said the market for gallium is “significantly smaller than rare earths — but no less important from a geo-political standpoint.”

But Cowle said the need to shore up supply chains isn’t going away.

“Just remember, there’s only one producing rare earth mine in the whole Western Hemisphere,” he said. “Our goal is to have this area mined. It’s not tomorrow. It’s not next year. We’re being careful and we’re doing it right.”

PROGRAMMING NOTES: I published my debut piece with Heatmap last week. It was a scoop on the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office closing the portal for accepting new applications – in violation of federal law.

I had another piece in Canary Media on how Florida became the No. 2 state for both utility-scale and rooftop solar.

Over at GZERO Media, I published several pieces over the past two weeks on South Sudan being on the brink of renewed civil war, Venezuela’s ratcheting up of tensions over Guyana’s Essequibo province, why Greenland’s election results were a snub to Trump, and how France is pushing European countries to quit buying American matérial.

Meanwhile, Mother Jones and Factor This! republished last month’s newsletter on Costa Rica’s semiconductor industry.

I was in Puerto Rico reporting a story coming out next month, so the soundtrack to this newsletter is “Rebota Bootleg,” a reboot of the Boricua rapper Guaynaa’s hit by the Chilean remix DJ Bruno Borlone.

Signing off from pre-dawn Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where we are mourning the death of Mike Neamonitis, who founded the delicious and always excellent Mike’s Donut Shop on Fifth Avenue 49 years ago. An immigrant who came here with “no money and no English,” he became a “proud Bay Ridginal,” according to his family. May his memory, like his doughnuts, be a blessing.

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