By Taylor Kuykendall
Published: 13 March 2025
The US could produce substantial amounts of some critical materials it sources from China within just a few years, Harvey Kaye, a director of US Critical Materials Corp., said during an interview.
President Donald Trump recently outlined plans for an executive order to build metal refineries on Pentagon military bases and fast-track mine permitting. Trump’s administration has looked elsewhere, including Greenland and Ukraine, for critical minerals used in defense, technology and other applications — but US Critical Materials has identified a significant deposit closer to home.
“The mandate is critical mineral sovereignty for the defense of the homeland,” Kaye told Platts, part of S&P Global Commodity Insights. “We believe that we can play an integral part in that because Montana is a little bit more accessible than Ukraine or Greenland.”
US Critical Materials announced in late February that its Sheep Creek project in Montana has the nation’s highest-grade rare earth and gallium deposit.
The US was 100% dependent on imports for gallium in 2024, according to the US Geological Survey’s 2025 summary of mineral commodities. China supplied about 19% of the gallium imported to the US in 2020–2023. Only Japan shipped more gallium to the US than China; Germany and Canada were the other major sources of the metal. The US is about 80% reliant on imports for rare earth elements.
Even if the US does strike a deal with Ukraine, it will take quite some time before those materials are mined, let alone delivered to customers, Kaye said.
“We’re all for it,” Kaye said. “They sign the mineral deal [with Ukraine], we say hooray.”
Supply chains have been happy to take material from wherever they can get it the cheapest, Kaye said, and now China has cornered the global market for a number of minerals and can limit those exports. Both sides of the US political aisle are starting to recognize this as a problem, Kaye said.
“Nobody even knew what rare earths were a year ago, if you were to say to somebody, ‘Well, we need rare earths domestically, we’re dependent upon it,'” Kaye said. “Today, it’s front of mind of the administration.”
Kaye expects domestic gallium and rare earth supplies to “really start to flow” in about five years, though it could be a faster process for operations that are using smaller-scale mining techniques, such as Sheep Creek.
US Critical Materials recently said that independent findings confirmed that Sheep Creek boasts rare earth oxide grades averaging 9.1%. Gallium grades averaged 300 parts per million at Sheep Creek and the highest-grade sample was 1,370 ppm gallium.
Gallium is of particular interest. China, a major global source of the metal, in late 2024 imposed export bans on shipments of antimony, gallium and germanium to the US in an ongoing back-and-forth trade conflict between the two world leaders. Gallium is crucial to producing semiconductors and microchips, radar technologies, satellites and other key tech and defense applications.
“Over my [30-plus-year] career evaluating properties for the US government, I have never encountered a deposit with the high rare earth and gallium grades being generated at Sheep Creek,” Jim Hedrick, president of US Critical Materials and the former rare earth commodity specialist at the US Geological Survey, said in the Feb. 26 news release.
US Critical Materials also has a cooperative research and development agreement with Idaho National Laboratory, a facility run by the US Department of Energy. The partnership is focused on refining sustainable separation and processing technologies for carbonatite ore. US Critical Materials intends to use in-situ mining practices, allowing the company to tap into underground resources without spending significant funds and time on earth-moving work.
“We want to be the guys that do it right,” Kaye said. “We want to be the guys that help to deal with national security, obviate the existential problem with the Chinese and yet be respectful and do it the right way for the environment and for the country.”