Editor’s note: In 2021, NETL awarded nearly $1 million to six recipients for project development under funding opportunity announcement (FOA) 2404, Advanced Processing of Rare Earth Elements and Critical Minerals for Industrial and Manufacturing Applications. This is the second article highlighting these projects. Each article reviews three projects. Click here to read the first article.

Three additional projects advanced under FOA 2404 have made positive strides toward their objectives and have reached key development milestones, providing solutions that could create a sustainable domestic supply chain of critical minerals (CMs), including rare earth elements (REEs), which are crucial to the development of clean energy and national defense technologies.

REEs and CMs such as lithium, scandium, neodymium, praseodymium and germanium are used in a wide array of products and technologies, including aircraft, wind turbines, electric vehicles (EVs) and semiconductors. The need for REEs and CMs is rising, and the current $5 billion global REE market is projected to grow 40% over the next five years, with similar growth anticipated for the remainder of the CM market.

“REEs make cell phones vibrate and power EVs down the road,” said NETL’s Michael Fasouletos, a federal project manager. “They are integral to the production of items we use every day and in the manufacturing of technologies with a wide array of applications for U.S. economic, energy and national security.”

The United States remains heavily reliant on offshore suppliers for REEs and CMs. Currently, the United States imports approximately 80% of its REEs directly from China. Even the modest, domestically mined supply that exists today is shipped to facilities overseas for processing and then sold back into the United States at a markup.

The projects advanced under this funding opportunity announcement and recent milestones achieved in their development are:

• Researchers at the University of Kentucky have advanced a pathway to target the production of high-purity metal oxides and metals from six REEs and eight CMs from coal-based feedstock sources. The project is designed to stimulate the economies of distressed coal-producing communities and advance environmental justice in communities that have been disproportionately harmed by the adverse environmental impacts associated with coal mining through the remediation of coal waste materials.

The new technology is projected to reduce capital and operating expenses by more than 20% over conventional processes for REE and CM extraction. Project partners include MP Materials Corp., owner and operator of Mountain Pass in San Bernardino County, California, the only integrated rare earth mining and processing site in North America.

• A team at the University of North Dakota Energy and Environmental Research Center has demonstrated a proof-of-concept of the novel tunable electrochemical pathway process for producing individually separated high-purity rare-earth metals and CMs from lignite coals and combustion byproducts from the Williston Basin.

Research has focused on rare earth separation into individually separated high-purity materials and reduction to metals. An analysis confirmed 26% REE recovery from the lignite coal ash solution. Sixteen of the 17 REEs were recovered at greater than 10%, with the highest recovery at nearly 50%.

• Florida Polytechnic University has developed a process to produce rare earth metals from phosphoric acid sludge. The dominant use of phosphoric acid is for fertilizers. The research strategy involves a novel solvent extraction technology to separate REEs from the leaching solution.

Recent milestones achieved in this research include REE recovery of greater than 90% from phosphoric acid sludge feedstock and an extraction efficiency greater than 95%.

These funded projects will focus on developing innovative midstream processing technologies that will be environmentally benign and potentially lower capital costs and operating expenses. This work may also contribute to the further development of a domestic CM industry, creating new jobs for communities that have disproportionately suffered adverse economic, health and environmental impacts by emphasizing CM production from waste streams.

A total of nearly $1 million in federal funding for cost-shared research and development was awarded to the developers of the six projects under FOA 2404. 

NETL is a DOE national laboratory that drives innovation and delivers technological solutions for an environmentally sustainable and prosperous energy future. By leveraging its world-class talent and research facilities, NETL is ensuring affordable, abundant and reliable energy that drives a robust economy and national security, while developing technologies to manage carbon across the full life cycle, enabling environmental sustainability for all Americans.