Anya Litvak reports that The panic set in around 2010. The trigger words - China, monopoly, national security, iPhones. Yes, iPhones, whose signature features the sleek display, their sound quality draw their properties from rare earth elements, a 15-chunk block of lanthanides at the base of the periodic table, plus the metals scandium and yttrium. By 2010, China had cornered nearly 95 percent of the world production of rare earths and had begun to choke exports, which caused prices to skyrocket.
Bills were introduced in Congress to fast track permits for rare earth mines in the United States. Politicians warned of a national security disaster, and the Department of Defense, which needs rare earth elements for applications ranging from lasers to weapons, sounded the alarm.
Back in his lab at the University of Kentucky, Jim Hower, a geologist, started to see a wave of interest in his research like never before. Mr. Hower has been sampling slabs of Appalachian coal and its waste products and cataloging their rare earth element concentrations for years. He was doing it when Kentucky and West Virginia coal towns boomed with activity where we used to be dodging trucks, and he is still doing it today when it isa ghost town, he said.
Central Appalachian coal mined in parts of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee and once prized for its low sulfur content and is now the most difficult and least economic to mine also holds the most rare earth element hot spots in the country, according to research compiled by Ohio-based Leonardo Technologies for the federal government.
Rare earth element concentrations in these hot spots are more than 1,000 parts per million, measured when coal is burned, compared with about 200 parts per million in regular rock. Coal ash from power plants, as sampled by Mr. Hower, has 10 times the concentration of rare earths as the original coal.
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