Joe Stopper—a former senior energy adviser in the Trump White House and at Interior—just joined Ramaco Resources as senior vice president of planning and analysis, and he’s bullish on two things: Wyoming and US-made rare earths.
“I had a front-row seat to the administration’s push for domestic critical minerals,” Stopper told Cowboy State Daily. “Oh, absolutely [Wyoming and rare earths came up]. Ramaco did, and so did the topic of rare earths and critical minerals. It was a topic of almost daily conversation given its importance to economic and national security goals.”
Stopper’s résumé straddles Wall Street and Washington. He spent 12 years at Yorktown Partners, the New York private equity firm that made the first institutional investment in Ramaco about 15 years ago (“the first Yorktown investments… returned more than tenfold,” he notes). In early 2025, he moved into government as senior director for the White House National Energy Dominance Council and a senior adviser to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
At Ramaco, he’ll focus on the money and the map.
“We’re going to make sure it’s capitalized appropriately and that we have the right counterparts—commercial partners and government partners,” he said. “I’m unique in that I come from both the government and business side… and I bring relationships and knowledge about how the government can help.”
Ramaco CEO Randall Atkins called that mix a timely fit as the company’s “rapidly evolving businesses” scale up.
Stopper arrives as Ramaco unveils a major expansion for Brook Mine, about seven miles north of Sheridan:
- Annual coal production: from ~2 million to ~5 million tons.
- Critical mineral oxides: from roughly 1,240 tons to ~3,400 tons per year.
- Footprint: up from ~4,500 acres to nearly 16,000 acres under company control, with plans to work with state and federal officials to broaden the existing permit.
The Wyoming DEQ has fully permitted the project, and Ramaco has been probing the mine’s rare-earth potential with the DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory since 2019. NETL has called Brook “the largest unconventional rare earth deposit in North America,” according to Ramaco’s shareholder letter.
What’s “unconventional”? Most rare earths are mined from hard rock, which means intense crushing, grinding and radioactive tailings. Brook’s ore sits in a soft coal seam — “so soft that you can hold it in your hand, and it just starts to crumble,” Atkins said — potentially simplifying processing and keeping more of the value chain in the US Stopper underscored the point:
“The processing here is critical.”
Ramaco has built around that idea, operating the iCAM Center (an integrated carbon R&D facility) next to the mine and the iPark Center for coal-to-products manufacturing.
Stopper says he’ll be spending a lot more time in the state.
“I’ll be there all of next week… over time, the percentage of time I spend up there will only go up.”
And he’s pitching the home-team angle hard:
“The folks of Wyoming should be proud… the pipeline offers a potential solution and supply that’s entirely domestic. It’s tremendously exciting for the people of Wyoming and for the entire country.”
The original story by David Madison for Cowboy State Daily.
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