Thomsen opines that historically, the carbonatite-hosted Rare Earth Element (REE) deposits at Bayan Obo, China and Mountain Pass, California have provided the world with the vast majority of these critical metals used in today's Hi-Tech and Green-Tech industries. Since the REE crisis of 2010, literally hundreds of new rare earth projects have been identified and numerous rare earth resources have been located and evaluated around the world. To date, none of these have become significant new sources of rare earth production and very, very few of these are trending toward any major development. Why? Each of these REE projects, no matter what the deposit type, hold significant technical and economic challenges.
The recent development of the southern China clay leach REE deposits may offer a clue to the future of rare earth exploration and production. Those new deposits, while low grade, are characterized by very low processing costs via simple heap leaching. One might compare this to the development of heap leaching of low-grade gold ores in the 1980's which became a transformative extractive technique for the gold industry. Might a similar transformation occur in the rare earth industry if significant new leachable ores can be discovered? This short paper summarizes and presents the variety of rare earth metal deposits hosted in various different geologic environments.
The author concludes that that there will be a new phase of REE exploration and discovery of low grade but leachable rare earth deposits. The dozens of ‘classic’ rare earth deposits hosted in carbonatites, alkaline intrusives and other ‘hard rock’ types are not currently economic to any great extent and will likely remain uneconomic for some time to come. Potential new ‘unconventional’ REE deposit models may become the criterion for new exploration and discovery.
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