Rare earths aren’t rare. You can find deposits of the family of metals needed for all kinds of modern energy, military and consumer technologies all over the world. What is hard to find is the expensive, heavily-polluting processing plants that can turn rare earth-laced rocks into materials that can go into magnets and other hardware. And China, after years of consolidating the industry, enjoys a near monopoly over that production.

Finding deposits that are rich enough in minerals to ease the cost and impact of that refining process are widely considered key to bringing production back to the United States. That’s why the backers of one increasingly talked-about project called Sheep Creek in the woods north of Helena, Montana, call their find a “geological unicorn” – it has a particularly high grade of rare earths but lacks the radioactive contaminants that typically make processing harder.

Now the 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, has inked a contract to build its first pilot-scale processing plant with help from the Idaho National Laboratory, this newsletter can exclusively report.

The company was already working with INL through what’s called a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement to confirm the high concentrations of minerals such as gallium and rare earths at the Sheep Creek site.

As part of the new agreement set to be announced Thursday morning, U.S. Critical Materials will develop its proprietary processing technologies alongside researchers at the lab.

"There is no more pressing national security issue than securing America’s supply of rare earths and critical minerals," Jim Hedrick, U.S. Critical Materials’ president who previously worked as a specialist in rare earths at the US Geological Survey, said in a statement. "This pilot plant will accelerate the development of next-generation separation and refining methods to ensure America no longer relies on foreign adversaries for resources essential to national defense."

It’s a major step forward for the company, which aims to partner with a larger miner to do the actual excavation at the site.

“We don’t consider ourselves a mining company,” Harvey Kaye, U.S. Critical Materials’ executive director, told me when we last spoke in March. “We consider ourselves an exploration company, a developer of the property and a technology company.”

If federal researchers prove that U.S. Critical Materials’ processing technology produces less pollution than others, Kaye said, “we’ll not only respect the environment, we can also go out and use it as a counterweight politically” to compete with China for minerals overseas by promising to deploy cleaner tools.

That could prove vital closer to home. Since exploration began at the site, Montana conservations have warned that mining risks damage to the headwaters of the Bitterroot River. The northward-flowing 84-mile long river is popular with hikers and trout fishermen.

“The risks to our water, agriculture, and fisheries are too high,” the advocacy group Bitterroot Trout Unlimited said in a statement earlier this year. “If developed, this mine would wreak unimaginable damage on the landscape and likely degrade water quality.”

U.S. Critical Materials has said modern mining techniques would avoid such damage and noted that its processing technologically would render a once-polluting industry “environmentally benign.”

For more on the project, read my previous newsletter from March.

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PROGRAMMING NOTES: Over at Latitude Media, I published two new stories in the past few days. One examines Finland’s push to upgrade its power lines with state-of-the-art dynamic line rating technology, potentially clearing the way for 30% more electricity to travel on the country’s national grid by the end of the year thanks to software from the Estonian startup Gridraven. The other is an exclusive on the U.S. grid software startup Nira Energy securing its first major investor to grow its business of unclogging the interconnection queue stymying the growth of new power plants at a time when electricity demand is surging.

At Canary Media, I wrote about the lasting confusion over President Donald Trump’s position on the Japanese steelmaker Nippon Steel’s controversial bid to acquire its American rival U.S. Steel – and what the implications of the deal may be for the future of green steel and cleaner air.

I’m also pleased to share that Mother Jones last week republished my May 22 newsletter on the breakthrough in using microbes to extract copper.

This edition’s soundtrack is “Alencon,” a clean-sounding, upbeat, house track with a gurgling bassline. It’s by John Claude and Vano1337 – which, as far as I can tell, are the same Lisbon-based artist’s different monikers.

Signing off a sunny Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where on Wednesday evening as I wrote this, my precious no-longer-technically-a-newborn Eve figured out how to roll over – more than three weeks earlier than average. I’m kvelling.