I just posted about a company working on magnets for EVs and Wind turbines that will not need rare earth elements.
On the other end of the equation, there is work being done to extract rare earths from existing coal mines, but also, see below, Rice University researchers are looking at the back of the coal fuel cycle, to coal ash, to pull out rare earths.
Twelve years ago, former Wall Street banker Randall Atkins bought an old coal mine outside Sheridan, Wyo., sight unseen, for about $2 million.
He thought the mine might eke out a profit. Instead, Atkins recently learned it could bring a windfall.
Several years after Atkins bought the Brook Mine, government researchers came around asking if they could run some tests to see if the ground contained something called “rare-earth elements.”
When Atkins acquired the mine, he says he “didn’t know the difference between rare earths and rare coins.” When he got the test results, including some as recently as September, he says he was surprised and humbled: His sleepy mine contains what might be the largest so-called unconventional rare-earth deposit in the U.S., according to government researchers.
At current market prices, it could be worth around $37 billion.
Atkins’s company, Ramaco Resources, recently started extracting larger samples for more analysis. If the project proceeds as intended, it would be the first new rare-earths mine in the U.S. since 1952.
The U.S. is racing to catch up on rare-earth supplies with China, among other countries, as the minerals are in ever-greater demand for a variety of uses, including electric vehicles and offshore wind turbines.
The deposit was found in conjunction with researchers at the Energy Department’s National Energy Technology Laboratory. They spent years developing a model that combines data with artificial intelligence to predict unconventional deposits of rare earths and critical minerals, and it forecast sizable deposits in the Powder River Basin in northeast Wyoming, which includes the Ramaco site.
“We ended up discovering world-class enrichment” of so-called heavy rare earths, which are more valuable than light ones, said Burt Thomas, a NETL researcher.
Ramaco’s stash, which comprises both heavy and light rare earths, includes neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium. Some elements are in the coal itself, while most are found within the clays and carbon-rich materials at the tops and bottoms of coal seams.
Coal beds are considered an unconventional source for rare earths, compared with conventional hard rock deposits.
Kelly Rose, a senior fellow at NETL, is hopeful that Ramaco’s experience can be a model for other companies potentially sitting on unconventional critical mineral deposits. Companies could use the model to see if they, too, have rare earth elements in their coal, while others might adjust the model to check for lithium.
The Rice lab of chemist James Tour reports it has successfully extracted valuable rare earth elements (REE) from waste at yields high enough to resolve issues for manufacturers while boosting their profits.
The lab’s flash Joule heating process, introduced several years ago to produce graphene from any solid carbon source, has now been applied to three sources of rare earth elements — coal fly ash, bauxite residue and electronic waste — to recover rare earth metals, which have magnetic and electronic properties critical to modern electronics and green technologies.
The researchers say their process is kinder to the environment by using far less energy and turning the stream of acid often used to recover the elements into a trickle.
The study appears in Science Advances.
Rare earth elements aren’t actually rare. One of them, cerium, is more abundant than copper, and all are more abundant than gold. But these 15 lanthanide elements, along with yttrium and scandium, are widely distributed and difficult to extract from mined materials.