Energy Department funds Louisiana, Oklahoma projects to recover rare earths from waste

Rare earths hidden in mine tailings, red mud and industrial waste are now part of a bigger national-security push. The Energy Department on Tuesday selected two projects in Louisiana and Oklahoma for $134 million to prove that the United States can recover and refine the minerals that power defense systems, electric motors and advanced manufacturing without leaning so heavily on China.

The awards are aimed at more than mining. Energy officials cast them as a bid to pull more of the rare-earth value chain inside the United States, from separation and refining to materials that can actually feed manufacturing. The department said the projects will test whether unconventional feedstocks, including electronic waste and other waste materials, can become a commercial source of critical minerals rather than a series of one-off demonstrations.

In Louisiana, the Colorado School of Mines and ElementUSA plan to build a demonstration facility near the Gramercy alumina refinery to process red mud, the bauxite waste left behind after alumina production. That waste still contains valuable minerals, and the project is designed to show whether they can be recovered at scale. The Oklahoma project, led by Phoenix Tailings with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will build a demonstration plant that turns industrial waste into high-purity rare earth metals.

The promise is clear: turn discarded material into a domestic supply that is more secure and less exposed to foreign chokepoints. But the hard questions remain. Projects like these must prove they can move beyond pilot-stage headlines, operate cheaply enough to compete with imported ore and unfinished materials, and do so cleanly enough to avoid creating new waste burdens while solving an old dependency problem. For Washington, the bet is that domestic recovery from waste can help blunt China’s dominance of the global rare-earth supply chain. Whether Louisiana and Oklahoma can deliver meaningful volumes fast enough will determine whether this becomes an industrial turning point or another small step in a much larger race.