elements until it does some additional analysis
of the latest data. It will take several months to
complete that review.
“If our rare earth content is found to be high
enough to economically justify extraction of
individual rare earths as a byproduct of our
planned niobium, scandium, and titanium
production, the Elk Creek project could ultimately
emerge as a U.S. producer of the magnetic rare
earths,” NioCorp CEO Mark Smith said.
Analyst David Abraham, who wrote a book
about rare earth production, said NioCorp will
benefit if it can expand what it will produce,
but investors shouldn’t be surprised that the
company is now also trying to produce rare
earths. After all, the company used to be named
Quantum Rare Earth Developments.
The key will be determining whether it is cost
effective to produce the rare earths.
“There’s a lot of minerals in the ore body,” said
Abraham, who runs the Technology, Rare and
Electronics Materials Center. “The question is
what is actually economically feasible to recover
and realistic to process.”
The potential shift back to producing rare earths
shows how these mining projects evolve over
time in response to the market, said professor
Rod Eggert, deputy director of the Critical
Materials Institute at the Colorado School
of Mines. Now that interest in rare earths is
increasing once more, NioCorp is again looking at
producing them, but it won’t be simple to do so.
“While recovering multiple materials from a
single deposit increases revenues from the
deposit, it also makes the processing of the ore
more complicated,” Eggert said.