John Pastor reports that Virginia Tech engineers have developed a way to extract valuable rare earth minerals from coal and coal byproducts. Eventually they hope to construct a mobile pilot plant in Southwest Virginia. With supplies uncertain of essential materials needed to make products ranging from smart phones to windmills, Virginia Tech researchers are working with academic and industry partners in a $1 million pilot project to recover rare earth elements from coal.
Funded in part by a U.S. DOE National Energy Technology Laboratory grant, Virginia Tech engineers will test HHS technology, a patented process that takes advantage of properties of water-friendly and water-repellent materials to extract rare earth elements from coal waste, according to Roe-Hoan Yoon, a University Distinguished Professor and the Nicholas T. Camicia Professor of Mining and Materials Engineering.
The effort is led by principal investigator Rick Honaker, a professor and chair of the University of Kentucky Department of Engineering, who received his undergraduate and graduate engineering degrees at Virginia Tech. Researchers from West Virginia University and representatives from five corporate partners are also part of the team.
The pilot effort is important because rare earth materials, used to create powerful permanent magnets in products as common as computer hard drives to electric motors, are in increasingly short supply, particularly heavy rare earth elements, researchers said.
The best known source of the heavy rare earths is the clay from the Jiangxi Province, South China. But those resources are expected to be exhausted within 20 years, while recent studies showed that coal may be an excellent source of higher value heavy rare earth elements.
With the recent closure of the rare earth mine in California, the U.S. relies more heavily on imports. It will be good for the country if we can develop an advanced separation technology to extract the critical materials from coal.
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