BLM National Minerals Testing Laboratory - We Do That!

NARRATOR [Mitchell C. Leverette, Public Affairs Specialist]: While many are familiar with the Bureau of Land Management’s core mission, sustaining the health, diversity, and productivity of public lands, there's a wide range of impactful work happening behind the scenes. This work is just as essential to supporting our public lands, staff, and volunteers yet it often goes unrecognized. My name is Mitchell Leverette and you're listening to on the ground a Bureau of Land Management podcast. This is “We Do That!”, a special mini-series aimed at highlighting the often-overlooked programs, services, and operations that reside within the BLM. In each episode, we'll take a closer look at a specific team, project, or innovation that quietly but powerfully helps drive our mission forward. To kick off the series, we're highlighting the National Minerals Testing Laboratory (NMTL), a compact facility located in the picturesque small town of Worland, Wyoming. I had the chance to catch up with lab manager Marilyn Wegweiser, as well as BLM Eastern States director Mitch Leverette, and I was able to hear their firsthand experiences and insights into the important work happening at the laboratory. 

C. LEVERETTE: Do you mind telling me your name, your job title, and the state and region that you work out of?

MARILYN WEGWEISER: Sure, my name is Marilyn Wegweiser. My formal job title is “Geologist”, I was put down “/CME” because there is a geologist CME, and I’m the lab manager for the Bureau of Land Management’s National Minerals Testing Lab located conveniently in Worland, Wyoming, and that is in that is in region #7 of the BLM Department of the Interior, yes.

C. LEVERETTE: OK, now what is it that the National Minerals Testing Laboratory does?

WEGWEISER: The National Minerals Testing Laboratory, also known as the NMTL, studies and analyzes industrial minerals, any that are submitted to us, for all the bureau’s states, and we have also done work for sister agencies such as the Forest Service, the BIA, the Department of Justice, any of the sister agencies we will do [work] for. It’s an internal laboratory; it is not a public laboratory. We've even, at one time, conversed with a gentleman at USGS about Bentonite. I think I already mentioned minerals for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. We also we support programs in the BLM. We support the law enforcement program; we have done a lot of X-raying or analysis. Mostly XRD rather successfully for them for things that they were investigating, and we support the cultural resources program when I mentioned natural trapped cave before, that's what we did we were supporting the cultural program. They were looking at fossils that were in the cave but they asked about the sediments as well.

C. LEVERETTE: OK, awesome! Now, do you think you'd be able to provide kind of a brief history of the facility? Can you maybe also describe funding, construction processes, maybe even some of the decisions that were behind what actually pushed the ideas of there being the existence of a National Minerals Testing Laboratory?

WEGWEISER: Sure. The lab was started in 1972 as a result of a need for a Bentonite laboratory due to a lawsuit the government was involved to determine the locatability of Bentonite, and it was located in Worland, Wyoming because it was central to the states that have industrial minerals in them.

M. LEVERETTE: It was originally developed to do sampling and testing of certain deposits in Wyoming and surrounding areas.

C. LEVERETTE: That's the voice of current Eastern States Director Mitch Leverette.

M. LEVERETTE: I became more involved with the development, or the rebuild, of the lab in like 2014/2015 when the existing building became termite infested, and there was a need to come up with a new facility. So, I was instrumental as the - at that time I was the Division Chief for Solid Minerals for BLM at headquarters, and we worked with the state of Wyoming and the national operations center to try to build, or acquire, a new facility to replace the termite infested facility.

WEGWEISER: Our funding comes from headquarters from Washington office 320, and our benefiting sub-activity is 1990, and we deal mostly with mining law administration here. We just tell you what you have, we don't force fit it to be what you think you have, so the X-rays don't lie, and we have a lot of equipment here. We have two X-ray diffractometers, we have an X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy instrument, we have a scanning electron microscope that has an elemental dispersive spectroscopy instrument attached to it. They work in conjunction. The scanning electron microscope creates an image from the flashes of light that are emitted by the electrons leaving the atoms, that that are being excited by the electric beam. The “EDS” (elemental dispersive spectroscopy instrument) reads the electron removed to the element that it matches and so you get an instant chemistry of each specimen. The X-ray diffractometers will tell you the rock that those elements are in. It’s quite interesting the chemistry of rocks. We also can do particle analysis, and we do some API or oil industry testing. We do viscosity and we do the “API 13-A” which discusses how to analyze drilling fluids for things, and we can also test proppant sands which is API 19-C, and really gearing up to move that into the 21st century with some of the new standards for using a particle analyzer in conjunction with the standard, the traditional style, of testing for proppant sand characteristics using a sieve process, the proppant sand process using a particle analyzer is much faster so, it's more efficient, makes us more efficient.

C. LEVERETTE: Right, I see. OK, so, I'm going to get into some questions about your years of experience, and some of the things that you've seen on your day-to-day life of the facility. Do you have a favorite story, or anecdote, involving your experiences at the lab?

WEGWEISER: One that was particularly amusing was attending a course when I was becoming a mineral examiner for industrial minerals, when I had my service dog with me, God bless him he's been dead 10 years, and we had a Forest Service gentleman along and it had been raining on us all day to the extent that our Write-in-the-Rain waterproof notebooks were soggy and falling apart. And we stopped, and this guy, Forest Service gentleman, his name was Mike, I can't remember his last name, but he was very fastidious everything was crisp and clean, including his Forest Service truck. And we were soaked, including my dog who was soaked and muddy, not just soaked, and I have Australian shepherds, so he was long haired. Mike opened up his door, and I believe when he opened up his door, he kind of waved his hands in a wide opening hug move, and my dog launched into the back of his truck and shook. My entire class was in hysterics. We looked like a bunch of people falling on the floor rolling around laughing. Mike’s face was a “Kodak moment” we used to say. So, there’s one, and it was funny and the dog was really proud of himself, and he was sure glad to get out of the rain.

M. LEVERETTE: I don't have experience with this lab, and actually I've never visited the lab, but I'm familiar with some of the equipment in the lab. When I was a graduate student in college, I did geochemistry and used some of the same type of equipment that we have in our lab. I used it for my graduate work. So, my goal is to go to the lab and in Wyoming and I plan to do that in fiscal year 2026. So that's one of the things that I have on my list to complete.

C. LEVERETTE: What does your ideal future for the facility look like? I was going to get into ideas of hoping there can be more students out of college, looking for government jobs and maybe getting into the minerals division like yourself and finding a real passion or path for themselves in it. But I don't know. What are you feeling?

WEGWEISER: That's a good question. I've had the opportunity to have summer interns here, and that program kind of has faltered a bit, I think. I don't know if it's still viable in the BLM. It was called the direct hire authority program, and I would generally get 2 interns. One of my interns is now program lead for the state of Arizona and the minerals program. So, she's done well. We had another one that was a production engineering tech that was in New Mexico and then he moved on to a different opportunity. I have another intern that was here that would like to come back to the government but he's working on a PhD in volcanology right now. He's in Oregon. But, I would hope to see someone come in here that - a lot of people, a lot of my interns, are interested in a government job and they're also interested in building their resume. So, I would hope to get someone back here that would like to return to this laboratory maybe after they begin a government career and there's an opening and they see it. I always let them know. Actually, I left one out. I had another one that, she was in Nevada and New Mexico for quite a while, and she came back in New Mexico and then I think industry hired her again, she's gone. But, one of those people would be so much fun to have return in a different capacity here in the lab because it no longer is an intern, but a scientist. Helping field offices understand the materials that they have on the lands that they have to manage for the for the wealth of America.

M. LEVERETTE: Well, I agree with Marilyn. If we could get more of our mineral specialists first of all, make sure they know that this lab is out there and available for use, and then to have them have trainings set up to help them understand the utility of the lab and how it can benefit them in doing their job. I think that would be something that would be beneficial to the BLM and as we know the priorities of the current administration are centered around critical minerals and energy and minerals. I could see highlighting the lab and focusing on its use could help with the identification of some of these minerals that are being looked at under this current administration under the critical minerals list and helping to enhance mineral development and new discoveries of these minerals across BLM lands and across other federal other federal lands. So, connecting the lab to the current priorities of the administration I think, I think we should try to leverage that interest and make the lab more well known to those geologists and mineral specialists in the BLM and across the federal government.

C. LEVERETTE: Special thanks to Marilyn Wegweiser and Mitch Leverette for taking the time to meet and providing fantastic insight on the operations and history of the BLM 's National Minerals Testing Lab. Links to additional info of the lab will be posted on our website. Thanks for tuning in. Once again this is Mitchell Leverette, and we'll see you out there, on the ground.