🔥 @BenStiller with the @nbafinalstrophy!

🇺🇸🏭 The US Department of Energy just awarded $67 million to turn a 30-million-tonne pile of industrial waste in Louisiana into a domestic rare earth and critical mineral supply chain. The feedstock? Bauxite residue — "red mud" — from the last operating alumina refinery in the United States. And this one is unlike any other red mud deposit on earth. 🧵 🎬 Watch the ElementUSA video 👇 🎯 The Project — Straight to the Point ElementUSA (formerly ElementUS Minerals LLC), in partnership with the Colorado School of Mines, has been awarded a $67 million DOE grant to design, construct, and operate a rare earth and critical mineral processing facility at St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana — targeting the legacy bauxite residue stockpiles at the Gramercy alumina refinery. Total federal commitment across both agencies: 💰 $67M — U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), in partnership with Colorado School of Mines 💰 $29.9M — Department of Defense, Defense Production Act (DPA) Title III, specifically targeting gallium and scandium recovery for Pentagon supply chain needs 💰 $850M — Louisiana Economic Development investment decision to cement the facility in St. John Parish, projecting 200 direct and 550 indirect jobs Also ⚗️📷 $66 million. U.S. Department of Energy. Phoenix Tailings. June 3, 2026. 🧲The @ENERGY selected @PhoenixTailings for a $66 million grant — part of a $147.8 million program — to deploy next-generation rare earth separation and refining technology at commercial scale, partnered with MIT and the University of Minnesota. Further Reading here👇 x.com/roblun1/status/2062571… Back to ElementUSA Funding This is not a single agency bet. Both the DOE and the DoD have independently assessed this project as strategically critical — through an energy security lens and a defense readiness lens simultaneously. Groundbreaking for Phase 1 is expected to commence mid-2026. 🌋 Why This Feedstock Is Different Red mud is one of the most abundant industrial waste streams on earth — global stockpiles exceed 4 billion tonnes. Most of it is essentially worthless for REE recovery, averaging 800 to 900 ppm total rare earth elements globally. The Gramercy deposit is fundamentally different. The Gramercy refinery has been processing Jamaican karstic bauxite since 1957. Jamaican karstic bauxites are globally unusual — they are naturally enriched in rare earth elements, yttrium, and scandium due to the lateritic weathering processes in tropical environments that formed them. When the Bayer process extracts alumina from this ore, the entire REE suite concentrates into the residue, roughly doubling its grade relative to the original ore. The result: 30 million dry tonnes of surface-stockpiled material, expanding at approximately 1 million tonnes per year, characterised by: 🔬 Gramercy REE Basket — Key Elements: ⚗️ Total REE (TREE) — 3,000–4,000 ppm | ~4× global red mud average 🧲 Neodymium & Praseodymium (NdPr) — ~20× crustal average | Core NdFeB permanent magnet metals 🛡️ Dysprosium & Terbium (Dy/Tb) — ~20× crustal average | Critical HREE dopants for EV motors & defense ⚡ Yttrium (Y) — >20× crustal average | Major heavy rare earth phosphate fraction 🔩 Scandium (Sc) — 130–390 ppm | Exceeds global red mud avg of 45–150 ppm — highest value per kg in the basket 💡 Gallium (Ga) — Up to 200 ppm | Critical semiconductor input, severely limited in Western supply 🔋 Vanadium (V) — Up to 800 ppm | Grid-scale battery storage & high-strength steel alloying 🏗️ Iron matrix — ~50% of total mass | Extracted as commodity pig iron — funds the operation More than 95% of the metals across the iron, rare earth, and critical mineral fractions are characterised as payable. 🧪 A Note on Grade — and Why the Basket Price Is the Real Number 3,000–4,000 ppm is objectively low grade compared to primary hard-rock REE deposits. Mountain Pass in California grades at approximately 89,932 ppm TREO (~9%), with NdPr concentrations exceeding 23,810 ppm (~2.4%). But the Gramercy economics do not rest on absolute grade. They rest on three things: 1. The basket composition. Most conventional REE deposits are light-rare-earth dominated — rich in lanthanum and cerium, which have low commercial value and create persistent oversupply problems. The Gramercy basket is heavily weighted toward high-value heavy rare earths, yttrium, and scandium — the elements that matter most for magnets, defense systems, and aerospace. 2. Scandium as an economic multiplier. Scandium can represent up to 95% of the theoretical economic value of REEs in red mud. The 130–390 ppm Sc concentration at Gramercy means the site functions, from a unit economics perspective, as a high-grade scandium deposit that also produces a lucrative REE basket. Scandium prices have historically reached $3,000 per kilogram due to supply constraints from politically complex jurisdictions. 3. Zero mining cost. The material already exists as a surface-accessible, ultra-fine particulate slurry. There is no drilling, blasting, hauling, or primary comminution. The largest capital outlays of a conventional mine simply do not apply. ⚙️ The Flowsheet — Why Pyro First, Then Hydro This is the engineering decision that makes the entire project viable. Directly applying acid to raw red mud would be catastrophic. The Gramercy material is approximately 50% iron by mass. Direct leaching would consume enormous volumes of acid dissolving bulk iron rather than the target critical minerals, and create an iron-saturated pregnant leach solution from which extracting trace scandium, gallium, and HREEs would be chemically unmanageable. ElementUSA's solution — developed with Enervoxa — is a two-phase integrated flowsheet: Phase 1: Pyrometallurgical iron valorization 🔥 The dry bauxite residue is fed into a high-temperature smelting furnace using a continuous carbothermal reduction process. The ~50% iron fraction is chemically reduced and extracted as saleable commodity pig iron — converting the largest waste component into a continuous revenue stream that subsidises the baseline OPEX of the entire facility. The residual slag, now thoroughly depleted of interfering iron, contains the concentrated aluminosilicates, calcium compounds, and the entire inventory of REEs, scandium, and gallium — at effectively double or triple their original concentration in the feed. Phase 2: Hydrometallurgical separation ⚗️ The iron-depleted slag proceeds into aqueous leaching circuits. The flowsheet is engineered to first extract individual high-purity gallium and scandium streams — reflecting the DoD's specific strategic priorities — followed by precipitation of the remaining REEs as a mixed rare earth oxide (MREO) basket characterised by its heavy rare earth and yttrium weighting. This MREO product targets downstream offtake in magnet, semiconductor, aerospace, and medical imaging applications. 🎓 The Academic Partnership: Colorado School of Mines The $67M DOE award explicitly pairs ElementUSA with Colorado School of Mines — leveraging its renowned Waste-to-Value Center under the leadership of Dr. Elizabeth Holley. This brings an interdisciplinary team covering technical validation, mineral characterisation, scale-up fluid dynamics, and flowsheet optimisation. ElementUSA also operates the Critical Resource Accelerator — a 30,000-square-foot R&D hub in Cedar Park, Texas — staffed with hydrometallurgists and pyrometallurgists and equipped with full analytical laboratory and pilot-scale development capabilities ranging from 500mL to 20-litre bench reactors. 🌍 Zero-Waste Architecture A core design objective of the ElementUSA flowsheet is zero solid waste closure. By fractionating the red mud into pig iron, critical mineral products, REO basket, and a neutralised aluminosilicate residue, the facility is designed to eliminate the entire historical environmental liability of the Gramercy site. The depleted aluminosilicate bulk — stripped of heavy metals and iron — is suitable for use as supplementary cementitious material, clinker substitute, or geopolymer concrete input. The 3,300-acre Gramercy site currently accumulates 1 million additional tonnes of new residue per year. This facility is designed to process that incoming material while simultaneously treating the legacy stockpile — converting an ongoing environmental liability into a strategic supply chain asset. 🗺️ The Scale of the Commercial Ambition Phase 2 targets a 1-million-tonne-per-year commercial throughput, backed by an estimated $1.1 billion capital expenditure — with construction commencement targeted as early as 2027. The strategic objective: supply between 45% and 385% of current annual US demand for various critical elements from this single facility — positioning the US toward net-exporter status for specific defense-critical metals. 📋 What to Watch: The Scale-Up Journey The Phase 1 demonstration groundbreaking is targeted for mid-2026 — and the Phase 2 commercial facility at 1 million tonnes per year has a construction commencement target of 2027. That is an ambitious timeline by any measure in extractive metallurgy, and the engineering community knows it. Here is what the milestones actually mean and what to watch for: ⏱️ The timeline reality Transitioning a complex pyro-hydrometallurgical flowsheet from bench-scale validation to mega-scale commercial operations has historically taken 5 to 10 years of iterative optimisation. Phase 1 groundbreaking in mid-2026 and Phase 2 construction starting in 2027 means both phases are effectively running in parallel' Silica management at scale — Bauxite residue contains reactive silica that can polymerise in acid leach circuits, forming viscous gels that clog filtration and solvent extraction units. HREE separation circuit performance — Separating dysprosium, terbium, and yttrium from a low-ppm pregnant leach solution at industrial throughput requires hundreds of sequential solvent extraction stages running with very precise fluid dynamics. The low tenor of HREEs in solution means large liquid volumes must be processed to yield commercial quantities — putting reagent management and phase separation under sustained pressure. ✅ What gives confidence The dual federal mandate (DOE DoD), the Colorado School of Mines academic partnership, the 30,000 sq ft Critical Resource Accelerator R&D hub in Cedar Park Texas, and the $850M Louisiana Economic Development commitment all provide an unusually robust infrastructure for absorbing the engineering learning curve. 🔗 Connecting the Dots: The DOE's Emerging Secondary Feedstock Strategy Regular readers will recall the recent post on Phoenix Tailings receiving a $66M DOE grant to build a demonstration facility in Oklahoma for high-purity rare earth metal production from industrial waste, partnering with MIT and the University of Minnesota. ElementUSA now joins Phoenix Tailings in a clear DOE thesis: secondary feedstocks — industrial waste, tailings, legacy residues — are not a niche. They are a central pillar of the US domestic critical mineral supply chain strategy. The reasons are straightforward: ✅ No greenfield mine permitting required ✅ Material is already liberated and surface-accessible ✅ Environmental remediation and critical mineral production become the same project ✅ Federal capital absorbs the technology development risk that private markets won't fund yet 🔗discoveryalert.com.au/rare-e… 📎 Sources: 🔗 DOE Award Announcement — Colorado School of Mines & ElementUSA $67M minesnewsroom.com/news/color… 🔗 DoD Defense Production Act Title III Award — $29.9M Gallium & Scandium war.gov/News/Releases/Releas… 🔗 Louisiana Economic Development — $850M Investment Decision opportunitylouisiana.gov/new… 🔗 ElementUSA — Official Company Website elementusaminerals.com #ElementUSA #ColoradoSchoolOfMines #DOE #DepartmentOfEnergy #DefenseProductionAct #DPA #CriticalMinerals #RareEarths #REE #BauxiteResidue #RedMud #Gramercy #Louisiana #Scandium #Gallium #Vanadium #Dysprosium #Terbium #Neodymium #Praseodymium #Yttrium #NdFeB #PermanentMagnets #HeavyRareEarths #HREO #MREO #Hydrometallurgy #Pyrometallurgy #SolventExtraction 🇺🇸🏭⚗️🔥⚡🧪🌍🎓💰🔗♻️

Elon is not the problem… There are 193 countries in the world and 177 of them receive US taxpayer money from Congress. 177 of 193. Thats 91.7% of the world. Its not Congress’s money. Its your money, my money, our kid’s money etc. Americans are being screwed. Not by Elon…