Ionic MT expands Silicon Ridge project area, confirms deposits

Ionic Mineral Technologies, a rare earth and critical mineral company with a major mining operation in Utah County, has announced a pair of developments that advance its flagship project.

Ionic said in a release that it has expanded its lease agreement with the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration (SITLA) by approximately 4,100 acres, bringing its Silicon Ridge project land package to roughly 13,000 contiguous acres.

The new property is significant to the project because it abuts the Soldier Pass Road alignment, facilitating direct hauling access from the project area to the company’s 74,000-square-foot processing facility in Provo. Soldier Pass Road is a 6.2-mile, primarily dirt and gravel route that is accessed off State Route 68 (Redwood Road) near Eagle Mountain.

Ionic’s Silicon Ridge project is on the southern end of the Lake Mountains in Utah County, west of Utah Lake. The company’s mining operation is in a deposit of 16 critical minerals and rare earth elements found in ion-adsorption clay, including gallium, germanium, lithium and halloysite — minerals that are becoming increasingly critical to production of modern electronics, including electric vehicles and computers.

Ionic also published results of a step-out drilling program designed to test the lateral extent of the mineralized clay system and provide the data necessary to expand the geological model for additional mining. The company said the test drilling confirmed a strong lateral continuity and indicated the deposit remains viable at depth.

“Consolidating 13,000 acres and confirming continuous mineralization across a 1,400-acre footprint reinforces that Silicon Ridge has the potential to be one of North America’s most significant and scalable critical mineral assets,” said Andre Zeitoun, CEO and founder of Ionic Mineral Technologies. “Ending all step-out holes in mineralization at only 100 feet depth gives us tremendous confidence in the system’s size and continuity.”

In a December announcement, Ionic Mineral Technologies said that the Silicon Ridge project entails “a suite of critical technology metals — gallium, germanium, scandium, rubidium, cesium, lithium, niobium, tungsten and vanadium.” Ionic brands the geology of the area as an “ion-adsorption-clay-plus” deposit, claiming mineral content of 2,700 parts per million. That concentration is in the same range reported in deposits in China, where the bulk of the world’s rare earth minerals are now mined.