South Dakota Mines Wins $3.1M DOE Grant for Rare Earth Tech

South Dakota Mines has landed a $3.1 million grant from the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to build faster, cheaper technology for finding rare earth elements underground, the university announced this week. The award is one of 13 projects ARPA-E selected under its ROCKS program, part of a push to cut the years-long process of proving out a critical minerals deposit down to months, as ExecutiveGov reported.

At a glance

• What happened? South Dakota Mines (the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology) won a $3.1 million ARPA-E grant for a rare earth and critical minerals detection project called RAPID-REE.
• What will the money build? New sensing and AI technology meant to map underground rare earth deposits faster and at lower cost than today’s exploration methods.
• Who else is involved? The University of Oklahoma, New Mexico Tech, and industry partner Dakota Gold Corp.

What is the RAPID-REE project trying to solve?

Finding a rare earth deposit is slow. Geologists typically drill, sample, and lab-test a site over years before anyone can say with confidence how much ore sits underground and whether it is worth mining. ARPA-E built its ROCKS program, short for Reliable Ore Characterization with Keystone Sensing, to attack that timeline directly, seeking technology that can characterize a critical minerals deposit in months rather than years.

South Dakota Mines’ RAPID-REE project, led by principal investigator Zhi Ye, an assistant professor of geology and geological engineering, is one of 13 projects ARPA-E selected under ROCKS. The Rapid City, South Dakota university’s team also includes Kai Ren in electrical engineering, Mingyuan Chen in nanoscience and biomedical engineering, and William Roggenthen, a professor emeritus of geology and geological engineering.

How will South Dakota Mines and its partners build the technology?

The RAPID-REE approach pairs radio-frequency imaging with downhole sensing, then runs the readings through AI- and machine-learning-assisted inversion models to build a 3D map of what lies underground. The goal is to characterize a deposit’s size, grade, and structure with far less drilling than conventional exploration requires, and with less uncertainty in the result.

South Dakota Mines is not building it alone. The University of Oklahoma, led by petroleum engineering professor Ahmad Ghassemi, and New Mexico Tech, led by earth and environmental science professor Alex Gysi, both join the effort, alongside industry partner Dakota Gold Corp, which explores gold and critical minerals ground in the Black Hills. Dr. Ye said advancing critical minerals and rare earth element research "is an important area of strategic focus for South Dakota Mines."

Why does this matter for US critical minerals independence?

China extracts roughly 69 percent of the world’s rare earths and refines more than 90 percent of the global supply, a dominance Mining.com reported leaves the United States and its allies dependent on a single country for the magnets that spin EV motors and wind turbines. The G7 agreed in June that no single country should supply more than 60 percent of member nations’ rare earth imports by 2030.

Faster, cheaper exploration technology attacks the same problem from the geology side: a US mine cannot supply the domestic market if nobody can locate and prove out its ore body in a reasonable timeframe. ARPA-E Director Conner Prochaska framed the stakes plainly, saying rare earths, critical minerals, and magnets "are indispensable to American energy, industry, and national security." The RAPID-REE grant sits alongside a companion ARPA-E program for next-generation magnet materials, part of more than $100 million in combined federal funding now aimed at rebuilding the domestic critical minerals supply chain. Our rare earth elements entry in the Strategic Metals Glossary walks through why those magnets matter, and the tour’s Wyoming Critical Minerals stop covers the Bear Lodge rare earth project that RAPID-REE’s mapping technology could one day help evaluate.