Our Approach
A hard problem, worth solving
Rare earth elements (REEs) and critical minerals (CMs) sit at the heart of every technology the United States is now racing to build at home — permanent magnets for EV motors and wind turbines, semiconductors, batteries, defense electronics, and grid-scale storage. The country consumes on the order of 9,000 metric tons of rare earth compounds and metals each year and produces only a fraction of that domestically (USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026). The gap is a national vulnerability. It is also an opportunity — one that Montana Critical Metals (MCM) exists to address.
Recovering REEs and critical minerals from coal combustion residuals (CCR) — the fly ash left behind by decades of American coal-fired power generation — is technically demanding. Target elements are present at only 0.05–0.5% by mass, locked in a glassy aluminosilicate matrix, and surrounded by orders-of-magnitude more aluminum, iron, calcium, and silica. Producing salable, spec-grade material requires an integrated, closed-loop flowsheet — leaching, selective separation, precipitation, and residue conditioning — in which every stage must be reagent-efficient, continuously operable, and economically scalable. Independent techno-economic assessments place mixed-REE recovery from coal-related waste at roughly $3,400–$5,900 per kilogram against approximately $60 per kilogram for NdPr oxide from modern hard-rock operations. Closing that two-order-of-magnitude gap is a scale and integration problem, not a chemistry problem — and it is the problem MCM was built to solve.
What makes MCM’s approach unique
Exclusive feedstock access. Through its Materials Access and Purchase Agreement with Human Powered Future, PLLC — the holder of Montana’s Beneficial Use Determination for Colstrip coal combustion residuals — MCM has secured exclusive rights to the pregnant liquor solution generated under the BUD, together with additional exclusive access to several other domestic ash streams currently under evaluation.
Protected intellectual property. MCM’s process incorporates patented intellectual property covering key extraction and separation steps, together with a growing portfolio of trade-secret formulations and operating parameters developed across multiple funded work programs.
A network of public and private collaborators. MCM’s technical program is executed with a bench of university, national-laboratory, and industry partners — including analytical and process collaborations engaging Texas Tech University, Lehigh University, Montana Tech, and the University of North Dakota, independent laboratories such as Frosch Advanced Technologies, and commercial offtake partners in the supplementary cementitious materials market.
An 8-step, zero-waste flowsheet. MCM’s process — leach → pregnant liquor solution → solid-phase extraction / ion exchange → precipitation → residue conditioning → gypsum recovery → zero-final-discharge disposition — is designed from the outset for continuous operation, reagent recycling, and full co-product utilization. Supplementary cementitious materials, gypsum, and an REE + CM concentrate leave the plant as products; nothing leaves as waste, and no fraction returns to the generator.
What we have detected — and what it means at scale
Under funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, the Southeast Montana Development Corporation, and private investors, MCM has characterized coal fly ash from the Colstrip Steam Electric Station and comparison samples from Ohio and New York by ICP-MS. Independent ASTM D6357-MOD ICP-MS analysis by Frosch Advanced Technologies, Inc. of a Powder River Basin industrial process byproduct provided by MCM (Frosch SOTR, March 19, 2026) confirmed a total REE concentration of 211.48 µg/g across the full 17-analyte suite, with a critical-REE subtotal of 57.05 µg/g in the elements the U.S. Department of Energy has designated as supply-constrained — neodymium, europium, terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, and erbium (DOE 2023 Critical Materials Assessment). High-value co-products gallium (25.60 ppm) and scandium (8.40 ppm) were confirmed in the same analysis.
How that compares to the published benchmark. The most widely cited survey of REE content in U.S. coal fly ashes — Taggart et al. (2016), Environmental Science & Technology — reports a Powder River Basin median of approximately 337 µg/g total REE. MCM’s characterized feedstock sits within a factor of 1.6× of that benchmark, and, more importantly, its critical-REE fraction (27% of total REE by mass) is meaningfully enriched in the elements the market values most.
Elemental yield at production scale. The following quantities of contained element are present in every 10 million metric tons of Powder River Basin coal fly ash processed — the resource scale accessible to MCM under its current feedstock arrangements:
| Element | Contained per 10 M t CFA (metric tons) | |
| Rare earths | Cerium (Ce) | 550 |
| Lanthanum (La) | 360 | |
| Yttrium (Y) | 290 | |
| Neodymium (Nd) | 260 | |
| Samarium (Sm) | 150 | |
| Scandium (Sc) | 120 | |
| Dysprosium (Dy) | 80 | |
| Ytterbium (Yb) | 20 | |
| Critical minerals | Zirconium (Zr) | 1,540 |
| Strontium (Sr) | 1,480 | |
| Gallium (Ga) | 1,450 | |
| Vanadium (V) | 1,050 | |
| Copper (Cu) | 830 | |
| Lithium (Li) | 670 | |
| Chromium (Cr) | 440 | |
| Uranium (U) | 370 | |
| Germanium (Ge) | 320 | |
| Molybdenum (Mo) | 260 | |
| Cobalt (Co) | 40 | |
| Tungsten (W) | 40 | |
| Co-product oxides | Calcium (Ca) | 1,040,830 |
| Aluminum (Al) | 800,560 | |
| Sulfur (S) | 497,670 | |
| Magnesium (Mg) | 189,560 | |
| Iron (Fe) | 89,010 |
These are contained quantities — the theoretical upper bound on what a fully efficient recovery process could deliver from the resource. Process yield and product specification set the achievable floor; MCM’s engineering program is aimed squarely at closing the distance between the two.
Where we are on the technology maturation curve
MCM is currently at Technology Readiness Level 4 — extraction chemistry demonstrated at bench scale across multiple feedstocks, and the integrated flowsheet validated in a laboratory environment. MCM understands clearly, however, that laboratory success is not a supply chain. To meaningfully participate in — and help build — a domestic REE and critical-minerals supply chain, and for the value of the recovered metals to exceed the cost of extraction, MCM must reach a production scale at which it delivers on the order of 2% to 5% of U.S. demand for the specific REEs and critical minerals its process targets. Reaching that scale — moving from TRL 4 through pilot demonstration to first commercial line — is the focus of MCM’s current roadmap, and the basis on which MCM is engaging federal, state, and private capital partners.
