Ucore MRT to Revolutionize the Rare Earth Business

Rare Earth Deposits & Mining / Rare Earth Exploration, Mining, Processing, & Uses

Date posted: 04/04/15

Teresa Matich reports that Ucore has successfully separated each of the rare earth elements from a pregnant leach solution derived from feedstock from its Bokan Dotson-Ridge project in Alaska. The next day, it announced that it has paid 2.9 million dollars to secure exclusive rights to the Molecular Recognition Technology - MRT - that brought that success from IBC Advanced Technologies. For heavy rare earths, there is a significant increases in the price of heavy rare earths over the last four or five months. The Molycorp ore body contains about 1 percent of their rare earths are heavy rare earths. At Bokan, the ore body contains about 39 percent of heavy rare earths. And so, Molycorp basically produces cerium and lanthanum plus small amounts of others. And the price of cerium and lanthanum is quite low. But the dysprosium prices are in the range of 500 to 600 dollars a kilo now versus 5 or 7 dollars for light cerium or lanthanum. This is the first time that dysprosium has ever been produced in the United States using US feedstock.