Silicon Ridge critical minerals in Utah: grade, flowsheet and capex notes for engineers
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on MINING.com
30 Second Briefing
Ionic Mineral Technologies reports its Silicon Ridge project in Utah is a halloysite-hosted ion-adsorption clay system grading about 2,700 ppm (0.27%) combined rare earths and critical metals from 106 boreholes over 10,000 m and 35 trenches across 650 acres, exceeding typical Chinese IAC grades of 500–2,000 ppm. The confirmed mineralisation currently covers only 11% of the resource area to 100 ft depth, with existing mining permits and a 74,000 ft² Provo processing plant enabling rapid start-up. Ionic MT plans a vertically integrated flowsheet producing three co-product streams—critical minerals (including gallium, germanium, scandium, lithium and tungsten), high-purity alumina and nano-silicon—with a preliminary economic assessment due in H1 2026.
Technical Brief
- Silicon Ridge is characterised as a halloysite-hosted ion-adsorption clay system rather than hard rock.
- Ionic MT describes the mineralisation as “IAC-Plus”, reflecting magmatic enrichment in multiple critical elements.
- Critical metals identified include gallium, germanium, rubidium, caesium, scandium, lithium, vanadium, tungsten and niobium.
Our Take
With Silicon Ridge hosting 16 different elements and a combined grade of 0.27%, the key technical question will be whether Ionic MT’s processing facility in Provo can economically separate multiple value streams, rather than relying on a single flagship product like lithium or rare earths alone.
The comparison to Chinese ion-adsorption clay deposits (500 ppm and above, supplying 35–40% of China’s rare earths and over 70% of heavy rare earths) signals that any scalable success at Silicon Ridge in Utah would be strategically significant for US supply chains, especially for heavy rare earth elements that currently have few non-Chinese sources in our database.
Only a subset of the 650-acre Silicon Ridge project has confirmed grades down to 100 feet (11% of the resource area), so near-term work is likely to focus on tightening the resource model and demonstrating continuity at depth before the first-half-2026 timeline becomes realistic for larger-scale development decisions.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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