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October 8, 2026 - Could some of our nation’s critical minerals be sitting in the Rocky Mountain region’s coal seams, mining waste or industrial effluence?
A University of Utah-led consortium will find out through a $7.5 million award from the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management. With more than $2 million in additional funding from non-DOE sources, the project has a total value of nearly $9.6 million.
The United States is heavily dependent on foreign sources for critical minerals and rare earth elements essential for electronics, clean energy technology and the nation’s defense. To help rebuild a domestic supply, the team will identify new sources of these critical materials, including resources associated with coal and mining, as well as oil and gas wastewater and acid mine drainage across the Rocky Mountain region.
“There is an urgent need to produce these critical materials domestically,” said Michael Free, professor in the U’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and the project’s principal investigator. “This project is designed to assess potential critical materials resources in locations in the Rocky Mountain region where mining has or is actively taking place, with an emphasis on resources related to coal.”
The project is one of six regional efforts funded by the DOE’s Carbon Ore, Rare Earth and Critical Minerals (CORE-CM) Initiative, which was established in 2020 to help coal- and fossil fuel-producing communities leverage existing carbon ore infrastructure to support new critical materials supply chains.
Building on CORE-CM research
The new project builds on research funded by the first phase of CORE-CM in 2021, which focused on exploring the potential for critical materials in regional basins, including a $1.5 million effort led by the U in the Uinta River Basin.
The new phase expands the research from individual basins to eight regions across the country. The Rocky Mountain collaboration brings together CORE-CM phase I leaders from the U, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and University of Wyoming, along with geology and mining experts at the Colorado School of Mines and other organizations.
“The CORE-CM Phase I project efforts conducted over the past three years provide a solid foundation of CMM resource characterization data across the Rocky Mountain Region,” said Lauren Birgenheier, the project’s geology team leader and associate professor in the U’s Department of Geology & Geophysics. “This next phase will build on that foundation to develop a more robust understanding of CMM resource volumes in key prospective geographic areas and geologic settings.”
Other project partners include 47G, Colorado Geological Survey, Idaho National Lab, Idaho State Geological Survey, JWP Consulting, Los Alamos National Lab, Montana Technological University, Sandia National Lab, SonoAsh, Utah Geological Survey, Utah State University Eastern and Wolverine Fuels. Research for regional strategy The U will coordinate research across the region, including with DOE-National Energy Technology Laboratory working groups and the Critical Materials Collaborative. The team will also make their data available on the DOE Energy Data Exchange database for communities, researchers, industry and policy makers. The goal is to help inform regional strategies for business commercialization, workforce readiness, technology assessments, stakeholder outreach, energy equity and community impacts.
The team will eventually produce a roadmap for technology innovation centers and future strategy.
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