Both of the businesses planning to mine rare earth elements in Wyoming are also interested in other, more difficult portions of the essential mineral supply chain.
Western Rare Earths, a subsidiary of American Rare Earths and owner of the Halleck Creek drilling project north of Laramie, said Tuesday that it will participate in the testing of a unique method designed to speed up the extraction of certain elements from mined ore.
According to https://techtimetas.blogspot.com/ to Western Rare Earths CEO Marty Weems, this is the third such partnership the company has entered. The plan is to continue partnering with researchers whose work could reduce processing costs and shrink the company's significant environmental footprint — a major reason the United States now sources the majority of its rare earth from China.
"In this processing environment, it's often trainloads of sulfuric acid and trainloads of kerosene, with expended amounts of acid-and-kerosene-soaked sludge material as a waste byproduct," Weems explained. "No one wants it in their backyard, including the Chinese, and we certainly don't want it in Wyoming.
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He compared rare earth refinement to trying to salvage baking powder from a cooked cake. The approach must function not only in the lab but also on the millions and tonnes of rock handled by commercial operations, in order to help the industry.
"Quite https://techtimetas.blogspot.com/ frequently, chemists will attempt to take a very beautiful and fantastic technique that results in a really great research article, but is too elegant and too difficult to scale to commercial proportions," he explained. "Remarkably, what we found here was a pretty simple procedure that appears to be extremely simple to scale."
Progress in small steps
The separation https://techtimetas.blogspot.com/ technique, which is being investigated by Virginia Tech and the resource recovery company Phinix, focuses on two of the 17 rare earth elements — neodymium and praseodymium — that are in particularly high demand for use in computers, electric vehicles, some wind turbines, and a variety of other everyday technologies.
It's intended to extract those elements from ore containing at least 300 parts per million — roughly the equivalent of a tablespoon of material dissolved in 10 gallons of water, and the minimum distribution of rare earth required by the Department of Energy to be considered highly concentrated — while minimizing chemical inputs.
"We want to make sure that the reagent is not spent targeting calcium and silicone and other prominent components, but that it is spent attacking the specific element that we're pursuing," said Phinix's founder and CEO, Subodh Das. "The art is in how selective you can be.
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The Department https://womenvitamin007.blogspot.com/ of Energy gave the research team an advanced manufacturing grant of up to $500,000 over the next three years to fund laboratory-scale testing and refining. Western Rare Earths joined to provide an industry viewpoint as well as the required rock.
"We already got some rock stuff out of the earth from drilling and getting surface samples," Weems explained. "So it's actually fairly simple for us to take some of that material, put it in containers, and transfer it to Virginia Tech.
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Weems expects that Western Rare Earths' backing for lab work will propel the new industry ahead — and help the firm gain early access to innovations that prove beneficial during future pilot-scale and demonstration-scale testing.
A national imperative
In addition to its Wyoming project, Western Rare Earths is investigating a bigger deposit in Arizona that fulfills Department of Energy criteria, and it is looking for additional possible mining sites. Meanwhile, preliminary data from Halleck Creek suggest that the concentration of rare earth there might be significantly greater.
Mining on a large scale at Halleck Creek might take five to ten years. The corporation will also have to wait a long time to see if its other supply chain investments, including this one, pay off.
Das estimates that later-stage research might take another five years. To get there, the researchers will need to demonstrate that their strategy works regularly and earn millions of dollars in financing.
"We have no influence over the market — the pricing, availability, supply, and demand, and what's going on in China, what's going on with tariffs," Das explained. "It's our responsibility to reduce technological risk.
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The Department of Energy also funded one of Western Rare Earths' other research collaborations. The Department of Defense is backing the third.
"We're going to use the available money from the United States government, through (the Departments of Defense and Energy), to operationalize innovative, cutting-edge technology, and attempt to do it better from the start," Weems said.
He claims that the federal government has made it plain that rare earth is a priority. Earlier this month, the semiconductor-focused CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act were signed into law, allocating hundreds of millions of dollars to the production and processing of rare earth and other key minerals.
Getting to the market The convoluted supply chain for rare earth is top of mind for Rare Element Resources, the other firm doing exploratory drilling in Wyoming. It is in the process of obtaining permission to build a demonstration facility in Upton, near the location it has been studying for over two decades, where it will mill and then magnetically sort ore that has already been extracted.
Weems believes the technique pioneered by Phinix and Virginia Tech might compete with — or complement — Rare Element Resources' process. While the two overlap in the center, the former employs a more raw material while the latter produces a more finished result, perhaps giving the possibility for both to be inventive. Whatever it takes to get the industry started.
Rare earth must be concentrated, segregated from one another, and transformed into metals that may be utilized in manufacturing once they are extracted.
"As a nation, we were all too glad to let the Chinese do the dirty work, literally, and no one thought much of it." Fast forward to today, and these materials are vital to new energy, low-carbon future," Weems added.
Because China already dominates rare earth processing, expanding U.S. mining without simultaneously constructing the rest of the supply chain will do nothing to relieve rising concerns about the local manufacturing sector's reliance on China. However, the developing US rare earth business expects that technology advances in processing will increase mines' prospects as well.
"If that processing can be done near to the mine site, the economics are considerably better, and the cost of the finished product is fairer for the consumer," Weems explained."In a perfect world, those things would be as near as feasible."
"The mining itself isn't too bad," Weems added. "It's after the rocks have been extracted from the earth and the chemical process https://womenvitamin007.blogspot.com/
to extract the elements from the rock has begun."
to extract the elements from the rock has begun."
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