USA Rare Earth Wheat Ridge Hydrometallurgical Demonstration Facility

The USA Rare Earth Wheat Ridge facility is a hydrometallurgical demonstration plant in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, where USA Rare Earth tests separation methods for its planned commercial plants. The company announced the plant's commissioning on June 15, 2026, and said it had begun campaigns on Round Top ore, third-party mixed rare earth carbonate and recycled magnet scrap (USA Rare Earth, June 2026).

Who runs Wheat Ridge and how long it has been there

USA Rare Earth's work in Wheat Ridge in the United States predates this plant. In June 2020 USA Rare Earth, then a private LLC working with Texas Mineral Resources, said its pilot plant processing facility in Wheat Ridge had received its permits and was being commissioned (USA Rare Earth, June 2020). In its annual report filed in March 2025, the company called the Wheat Ridge site its central hub for research on rare earth extraction and separation, housed in two adjacent leased buildings, and said the site was "not a production facility" (10-K, March 2025). In December 2025 the company signed a lease for office and warehouse space in Wheat Ridge to support research and development, running from January 2026 to March 2028 (10-Q).

How the USA Rare Earth Wheat Ridge circuit works

The company describes the plant as fully automated, with a multi-stage solvent extraction circuit, live SCADA monitoring and an on-site analytical laboratory, run by 28 engineers, scientists and technicians on rotating shifts (USA Rare Earth, June 2026). It said in July 2026 that the plant runs 24 hours a day (USA Rare Earth, July 2026).

The company calls its flowsheets proprietary, and its releases do not name the reagents. Each campaign targets different products (USA Rare Earth, June 2026):

• Round Top ore: separated oxides of dysprosium, terbium, yttrium, hafnium, zirconium and other elements.
• Third-party feedstock: separated NdPr, dysprosium, terbium and yttrium oxides.
• Magnet swarf: recovery of NdPr, dysprosium and terbium from neodymium-iron-boron scrap.

This makes Wheat Ridge both a separation plant and a pilot and R&D site.

Status as of October 2026

The plant began its first campaign when it was commissioned on June 15, 2026 (USA Rare Earth, June 2026). On July 14 the company reported dysprosium and NdPr oxide samples made from swarf from its Stillwater, Oklahoma, magnet plant, which it described as commercial-grade (USA Rare Earth, July 2026). On August 10 it was still targeting heavy rare earth oxide production in the third quarter of 2026 (USA Rare Earth, August 2026).

As of October 27, 2026, the company had not released third-quarter results or said whether it met that target (USA Rare Earth news releases). It has published no capacity figure for the plant. REEx noted in July that qualification at the company's metals subsidiary, repeatable production campaigns and customer acceptance were still ahead (REEx), and in August still called the plant demonstration scale (REEx).

Feedstock and where the oxides go

The three feeds are ore from the company's Round Top deposit in Texas, third-party mixed rare earth carbonate that includes material from Serra Verde's Pela Ema mine in Brazil, and magnet swarf (USA Rare Earth, June 2026). USA Rare Earth completed its combination with Serra Verde Group on September 4, 2026 (USA Rare Earth news releases).

The oxides are expected to go to Less Common Metals, the company's subsidiary in the United Kingdom, for qualification and conversion into metals and strip cast for USA Rare Earth's U.S. magnet plants (USA Rare Earth, July 2026). The company says the campaigns are expected to guide engineering of a planned processing plant at Round Top and a planned plant for third-party carbonate and magnet swarf, and that the Round Top Definitive Feasibility Study is on track for completion in the fourth quarter of 2026 and publication in the first quarter of 2027 (USA Rare Earth, August 2026).

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