Do freepers know that rare earths can be extracted from Coal?
search: Penn State coal rare earth
New coal need not be mined.
Bonepiles and Coal Ash left over from power generation
can be utilized.
nully likes!
It seems that significant research grants picked up towards about 2016 and has been increasing. Some of work has progressed from the lab to continuous pilot plant. I didn’t delve much into to details of the pilot plant unit operations but it seemed like selective precipitation was being looked at. I can think of a few other technologies that could also play a role.
The above refers to handling liquid solutions. The big gorilla though is dealing with tailings directly in terms of extraction. The materials handling is going to be very capital intensive and with high operating costs. Ouch... The obvious way to reduce the costs is to do the tailing extraction in situ within a coal tailings pond. I have no info on how this angle is being looked at but I can see some significant environmental negatives that could be difficult to handle economically.
Whatever promising techs may emerge from the existing R&D tracks with coal tailings would likely transfer over to addressing low level nuclear waste issues scattered across the western US. This is from mine tailings at defunct mining and milling operations and from the sole active low level uranium mill in operation in northwest New Mexico.
I hope the Universities involved now have a separate technology licensing organization that can get their R&D program into private industry to work up the commercial aspects of this. I’ve had mainly negative experiences when the academics try to push into or micromanage too far into the commercial development.