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Hidden in the piles of slag, ash, and debris left behind when coal is mined and burned are rare earth minerals necessary for building electronic necessities from chips for smartphones to motors for electric cars.
Now the U.S. energy department is investing $19 million to test new processes through which cobalt, dysprosium, neodymium, and other crucial minerals can be reclaimed from coal waste, reprocessed, and put to economic use.
The department is building or planning research labs in Kentucky, North Dakota, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming to assay coal waste region by region to determine the rare earth riches in each and to hone new processes to extract them.
Processes that show promise will be funded for further testing, commercial development, and workforce training.
About 60 percent of the world’s rare earths output is controlled by China, which refines about 90 percent of the resulting ore.
But finding rare earths in the coal ash pits beside coal-burning electric generation plants, coal slag scraped from boilers, and mine tailings poisoning lands around the world would do more than make rare earths a more competitive market.
In the U.S., for example, the federal energy department estimates there are 5,200 coal mines remaining to be cleaned up and 700 coal ash pits scattered across 43 states.
U.S. factories use about 13,000 tons of rare earths each year; by one estimate, 6,000 tons were bound up in the mine waste left behind each year during coal’s heyday.
Reprocessing coal waste to collect vital minerals not only would add financial incentives and rewards to cleaning up hazardous waste, but also would bring jobs to communities plagued by poverty and unemployment in the played-out coal regions of Kentucky, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and parts of the American West.
Scientists already are good at pulling small amounts of pure minerals from coal waste, but the processes are energy-intensive, expensive, messy, and create noxious emissions, including acidic waste.
The new tests aim to make the process cheap and clean enough to be commercially feasible.
TRENDPOST: Researchers estimate needing three years to develop the new technologies and another three to bring them to commercial scale.