The Apex mine sits in the desert hills of Washington County, a few miles from the Arizona line. Miners first worked it for copper. In the 1980s and 1990s, it produced something rarer: gallium and germanium, two obscure metals nobody outside a laboratory had reason to think about. Then production stopped. For thirty years, it sat there, a hole in the ground with a fence around it.
In March, it sold.
Blue Moon Metals, a critical minerals company listed on NASDAQ and the TSX Venture Exchange, acquired Apex from a subsidiary of mining giant Teck Resources. The deal closed March 13, according to the company's SEC filings. Teck took roughly 7 million shares, a royalty, and offtake rights. Blue Moon's largest shareholder, Hartree Partners, is a partner with the federal government on its recently announced $12 billion critical metals stockpile, according to the company.
Nobody spends that kind of attention on a dead mine in southwest Utah unless the world has changed. It has.
The gallium problem
Gallium is used in chips that power radar, missile defense, and electronic warfare systems. Germanium is used in semiconductors and infrared optics. China produces 98 percent of the world's raw gallium, according to U.S. Geological Survey data cited by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Beijing has used that leverage. China restricted gallium and germanium exports in August 2023. By May 2025, gallium prices outside China had risen more than 150 percent from pre-control levels, according to CSIS, with shortages hitting manufacturers in the United States, Japan, and South Korea. In December 2024 China banned exports of both metals to the United States outright. After the Trump-Xi meeting last fall, it suspended the ban until November 27, 2026. The suspension has a hole in it. The original order also prohibited shipping these materials to U.S. military users, and the suspension did not address that provision. The Pentagon cannot buy Chinese gallium even during the truce.
The United States has produced no primary gallium since 1987, according to the USGS, leaving the country 100 percent reliant on imports. It brought in about 25 tonnes of gallium metal in 2025 from countries including Japan, Germany, and Canada. Much of that material traces back to Chinese raw gallium.
That is the math behind the Apex sale. Blue Moon describes the property as one of the few primary gallium and germanium deposits identified in the United States. Reopening it will require permits, drilling, and metallurgical work. The company says it is starting with historical production data and a plan to re-enter the mine for bulk sampling.
Utah already does this
The state is not starting from zero. Utah already dominates one critical mineral outright. The Spor Mountain mine in Juab County is the sole producer of beryllium in the United States and the largest in the world, historically supplying up to 85 percent of global production, according to the Utah Geological Survey. The USGS classifies high-purity beryllium as a strategic and critical material for aerospace, defense, and nuclear applications. One mine in the west desert carries that load for the entire country.
Utah has also proven the second half of the thesis: that valuable material hides in what mining leaves behind. Since 2022, Rio Tinto's Kennecott operation has recovered tellurium, a critical mineral used in solar panels, from byproduct streams generated during copper refining, material that would otherwise be discarded as tailings. It is the working example of waste becoming supply.
Researchers now want to extend that model to Spor Mountain's tailings, the waste left by decades of beryllium processing, which may hold recoverable rare earth elements. That work is early. No one has proven the rare earths can be pulled out at commercial scale.
The holes in the ground
Utah Business reported this week on an effort by the Utah Mining Association and a Salt Lake City nonprofit called the Critical Mineral Resources Network, or CMRN, to catalog the state's abandoned mines as a source of critical minerals. CMRN, whose co-founder Denee Hayes advises the University of Utah's College of Mines and Earth Sciences, wants to match legacy mine waste with industrial buyers. Metals once considered worthless, such as manganese in historic tailings, now appear on the Pentagon's domestic sourcing list.
The premise is sound. The numbers around it deserve care, because no two counts agree.
Utah Mining Association president Brian Somers told Utah Business there are about 14,000 abandoned mines in Utah. The state's Abandoned Mine Reclamation Program has estimated that there are 17,000 abandoned mine openings statewide, of which roughly 7,000 have been closed since the program began in 1983. The program's current homepage puts the remaining figure at an estimated 10,000. Mines and openings are not the same unit. A single mine can have dozens of openings. Every number in this space is an estimate, and the honest summary is that nobody knows precisely how many holes Utah has, which is part of why the cataloging effort exists.
The bigger number is shakier. CMRN claims abandoned mine lands nationwide hold up to $100 billion in economic value. Utah Business reported the figure twice, each time citing only CMRN as the source. The number appears on the organization's website as a goal, what it "aims to unlock," not as the product of any published study. No federal agency or peer-reviewed assessment supports it. It may prove right. Nothing public currently verifies it. The Utah Business piece also misattributed the Moab uranium tailings cleanup to a "Utah Department of Energy," which does not exist; the project belongs to the federal Department of Energy, and the Atlas site it is remediating was a uranium mill, not a mine.
The state's relationship with these holes has, until now, been about closing them. The Abandoned Mine Reclamation Program exists because the openings kill people. In 2018, the bodies of Brelynne Otteson and Riley Powell, two teenagers from Juab County, were recovered from an abandoned shaft in the Tintic Mining District. The state sealed that shaft and 55 others nearby in a single project. The new proposition is that some of these liabilities are assets. Both things can be true. The same inventory that maps the danger maps the opportunity.
The federal stakes
Utah's congressional delegation is already in this fight at its other end. The Moab Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action Project, the largest mine-waste cleanup in the state's history, marked the removal of more than 16 million tons of radioactive material from the banks of the Colorado River in April. Sen. John Curtis and Rep. Mike Kennedy are carrying a bill to transfer the remediated site to Grand County for reuse. Moab is what the end of the legacy mine story looks like when the only goal is cleanup. The question now on the table is whether recovery can pay for remediation elsewhere.
Three things will tell us whether this becomes an industry or stays a press release.
First, Apex. Blue Moon has to convert a historic mine into a permitted, producing operation. Watch for state mining permits and a confirmed resource estimate. The company's California and Nevada projects target production in 2028, suggesting a realistic timeline for Utah.
Second, the tailings science. The University of Utah is advising CMRN on sampling and processing methods. Recovering minerals from low-grade waste is harder than mining ore, and most existing technology was built for the latter. A commercial recovery stream from Utah tailings would be a first.
Third, the federal money. The stockpile initiative, Defense Production Act funding, and Section 232 trade actions are the demand signals that make marginal domestic projects pencil. Without them, China can flood the market and strand every reopened mine in the West. It has done so before. When Molycorp revived California's Mountain Pass rare earth mine in the early 2010s, Chinese production ramped up and prices plunged as much as 90 percent, ending the mine's feasibility; Molycorp went bankrupt in 2015. Any Utah revival is a bet that Washington has learned that lesson.
Utah spent a century digging these holes and fifty years walking away from them. The state's official program exists to seal them shut. The new bet is that some of them are worth opening back up. The geology hasn't changed. The world has.
