ElementUSA Rare Earth: Key Louisiana Red Mud Project

ElementUSA rare earth recovery is being built around a resource most of the industry has ignored: bauxite residue, the caustic red mud left over from alumina refining. The company holds exclusive rights to an estimated 30-34 million tons of the material stockpiled at the former Atalco alumina refinery in Gramercy, St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, and has secured a combined $96.9 million in federal funding to turn it into a domestic source of rare earth elements, gallium and scandium.

Company Overview

ElementUSA Inc. is a privately held critical minerals and rare earth processor developing its flagship project at the Gramercy site along the Mississippi River. Company and government materials place its founding around 2020-2021, and reporting has not fully settled on a single headquarters city, with Fort Lauderdale, Florida cited alongside the company’s operational hub in Cedar Park, Texas. Ellis Sullivan serves as CEO and has been the company’s consistent public voice across its federal funding announcements.

Rather than mining new ore, ElementUSA’s elementusa rare earth strategy applies to an existing industrial waste stream: bauxite residue generated over decades of alumina refining at the Gramercy site, one of the largest single-site concentrations of the material in North America. The approach positions the company alongside a small group of firms recovering critical minerals from waste rather than from the ground, a model REM has also covered in the context of how government deals are cutting risk for Western rare earth developers.

Key Assets & Operations

The Gramercy site is ElementUSA’s central asset: exclusive access to bauxite residue stockpiled at the former Atalco refinery, with more than 95% payable metals across iron, rare earth elements and critical minerals, according to the company. ElementUSA’s proprietary Waste2Market platform combines pyrometallurgical processing, which recovers iron as pig iron, with hydrometallurgical processing, which separates the REEs and critical minerals, in a single integrated flowsheet designed for zero solid waste output.

The target basket includes dysprosium, terbium, yttrium, gadolinium, neodymium, praseodymium, samarium and lanthanum from the DOE-funded REE facility, alongside a separate, earlier-funded stream focused on gallium and scandium recovery. For background on one of those target elements, see REM’s explainer on scandium’s uses and supply chain. A second hub, the Critical Resource Accelerator in Cedar Park, Texas, handles process validation and scale-up work, including a September 2025 partnership with DISA Technologies to deploy mineral-liberation technology developed for harder-to-process feedstocks.

Latest Projects & Developments

ElementUSA’s federal backing has arrived in two stages. A $29.9 million Department of War award funds gallium and scandium recovery and commercialization at Gramercy. A $67 million Department of Energy award, made jointly with Colorado School of Mines and announced 2 June 2026, funds the design, construction and operation of a dedicated REE processing facility at the same site, targeting an output range of 150-1,000 metric tons per year.

In December 2025, ElementUSA announced a final investment decision to build a full commercial-scale refining facility at Gramercy, with reported capital costs ranging from $850 million up to $1.1 billion at full build-out, backed by a Louisiana state incentives package including LED FastStart workforce training and a $6 million infrastructure grant. The company projects 200 direct jobs averaging $90,000 a year, plus 554 indirect jobs, for 754 total regional positions. Groundbreaking on an initial scale-up phase was expected in mid-2026; demonstration and commercial facility construction is separately reported to begin in 2027, with initial production targeted for the third quarter of 2028 and full commercial-scale capacity, over 1 million tons processed annually, following in a later build-out phase.

ElementUSA and Colorado School of Mines were one of two projects named in the DOE’s Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation announcement on 2 June 2026. The other, Phoenix Tailings, received a separate $67 million DOE award for a comparable waste-to-REE-metals project in Ardmore, Oklahoma, in partnership with MIT. REM’s Phoenix Tailings profile covers that parallel project in detail.

ElementUSA in the Global REE Market

At full scale, ElementUSA states the Gramercy resource could supply 45-385% of US annual demand across gallium, scandium, yttrium, germanium, ytterbium, dysprosium and gadolinium, a range wide enough to reflect how early-stage these projections remain. The company also frames its Waste2Market process as replicable at other bauxite residue sites globally, an inventory the industry estimates at more than 4 billion tons across Australia, Brazil, Jamaica, India, Greece, Hungary and West Africa.

That ambition sits inside a broader push to build processing capacity outside China, a dynamic REM has tracked in its 2026 supply chain geopolitics update. ElementUSA’s model, recovering REEs and critical minerals from an existing waste liability rather than new mined ore, is one of the more distinctive approaches among the current wave of federally backed US processors.

Company Snapshot

Sources: ElementUSA; USGS Rare Earths Statistics.