Mark Wilcox reports that the University of Wyoming earned one of 10 grants from the U.S. DoE to research separating rare earths valuable to electronics manufacturing out of coal ash. The DOE said that it is looking for cost-effective and environmentally benign approaches to take rare earths out of coal and coal byproducts as rare earths become more valuable to the American way of life.
The agency cited unique chemical properties making rare earth elements essential to electronics, computer and communications systems, transportation, health care and national defense.
The demand, cost and availability of rare earth elements has grown significantly over recent years stimulating an emphasis on economically feasible approaches for recovery, officials said in a release.
Meanwhile, China has been all but cornering the market to feed into its industrial complex, making it difficult for other rare earth mines to succeed.
The only rare earths mine in the U.S. recently went bankrupt and may need to sell assets to keep from going completely out of business.
Even so, a new player is trying to elbow into the market in Wyoming with a new rare earths mine in coal country in northeast Wyoming.
The U.S. BLM points out that Wyoming produced 382 million short tons of coal from the Powder River Basin. A study presented at the 2015 World of Coal Ash Conference in Nashville identified 16 different rare earths in fly ash from PRB coal. Although coal ash has been identified as a potential source for rare earth production, it still remains as an untapped source, study authors Tran Phuoc, Ping Wang and Dustin McIntyre wrote in an abstract. This is because data on the concentrations of trace rare earth elements in various coal ash wastes are not available.
The DOE studies could put an end to that deficiency. The UW study funded in part by the DOE will design, develop and test a three-step bench-scale extraction process that will use carbon dioxide and ferric chloride...
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