[3] The Sierra Blanca area is on the northern margin of the Chihuahua Tectonic Belt and is a massive complex of volcanic rocks including pyroclastic materials, lava flows, and intrusions.

[8] Round Top Mountain is a surface-exposed rhyolite intrusion that was created from molten liquid rock pushing up from beneath the earth's surface.

[5] The rare-earth elements contained in the mountain can be used to build energy and defense applications as well as electronic devices, lasers, in oil and gas drilling, water treatment, and other uses.

[15] The United States was the leading producer of rare-earth elements until the 1990s when lower production costs in China caused other mines to close down.

[16] Texas Rare Earth Resources picked up the project in 2011 with the re-logging and re-analyzing of the previous 82,000 feet (approximately 24,993 meters) of drilling.

[11] The heavy rare-earth elements are hosted in yttrofluorite which is soluble in dilute sulfuric acid, making heap leach extraction feasible.

[19] The natural porosity and permeability of the rhyolite provide the micro-conduits that allow the acid to penetrate to the interior of the large crush size (one inch, or 2.5 cm) for the heap leach.

[19] The even grade of heavy rare-earth mineralization throughout the deposit leads to a consistent, unchanging quality of raw material for the heap leach.

In July 2016 TMRC announced it had successfully completed a demonstration-of-concept project using Round Top ore as feedstock to separate and refine specific high-purity rare earth elements for the DLA Strategic Materials Division in conjunction with its joint venture partner K-Technologies, Inc. (K-Tech).

In the bench scale demonstration, Texas Mineral Resources Corp. and K-Tech successfully separated specified high-value rare earths to between 99.996 and 99.999% purity, using static column systems designed to provide the general design concepts for ultimate use of continuous ion exchange (CIX) and continuous ion chromatography (CIC) systems at larger scales.

TMRC and its funding and development partner USA Rare Earth, LLC announced completion of an expanded and updated NI 43-101 Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) on the Round Top Project on August 20, 2019.