In the middle of a cornfield near Providence,
Kentucky, you’ll find Rick Honaker. He’s
a mining engineering professor at the University
of Kentucky, and he’s running a test plant
to extract rare earth elements from coal.
On a periodic table, they are typically the
Lanthanide Series, which is the horizontal
row at the bottom of the periodic table. Plus,
Scandium and Yttrium. From light bulbs to
golf clubs, cell phones to electric vehicles,
rare earth elements make an array of products.
You're looking at about a quarter ton of rare
earths in one of those permanent magnets
that's used to create energy by a windmill.
There's about 5 kilograms of rare earths in
every electric vehicle and we expect electric
vehicle production's going to exponentially
increase. Almost doubling the amount of rare
earths that currently produced today would
be needed in order to build all of these new
electric vehicles. Probably 85 – 90% of
the world's rare earths are produced in China
and manufacturing of the material occurs primarily
in China. The projections are that sometime
in the 2025 - 2030 time period, that China's
going to stop being an exporter because of
their thirst for the rare earths. In fact,
they are buying up a lot of resource bases
around the world, and that's certainly a concern
for a lot of countries - US being one of them.
One of the most cited internationally coal
sources is the Fire Clay Seam. That Seam is
predominantly in Eastern Kentucky. The reason
why it's special is because it was during
the time of formation, it was exposed to volcanic
ash deposition. And that volcanic ash carried
with it lots of valuable rare earths. With
the funding that we've received from the U.S.
Department of Energy, we've constructed a
quarter-ton-an-hour processing facility that
will take multiple types of feedstocks, whether
it's the actual acid water, the precipitate,
or the actual parts of the coal in the solid
form. It involves physical separations as
well as chemical separations. So, the first
part of it is to actually put it in a form
that's most amenable toward the leaching process.
And then after we get it into solution, then
we follow that up with how we can separate
the rare earths out of the solution. In addition
to rare earths, we're after all other types
of elements. For example, Cobalt, Vanadium,
and Rubidium and other valuable elements that
tend to be concentrated in coal. So we're
looking at separating those out. We'll start
off producing a concentrate mix and we've
been successful in the lab - in a continuous
form - actually producing a 99% pure rare
earth product, so we'll be doing that. But
we'll also be taking that one step further
and actually producing rare earth concentrates.
The end result is a technical economic feasibility
study and then we'll be using those results
in another project that we have, which is
looking at a small commercial-scale plant.
So we're in phase one of that project, where
we're designing what would be a 20-ton-an-hour
system. And so, if you can go to an industry
that's already producing a product where rare
earths could be a byproduct and your mining
costs and a lot of your processing costs are
already covered, then it makes the economics
a lot more favorable. We've developed a lot
of intellectual property products from our
research that focuses specifically on reducing
costs. We've discovered ways that we can actually
benefit from perhaps energy production simultaneously with
the rare earth production that we're not currently
exploiting. We've identified some chemistry
in our process that makes it more amenable
to recover rare earths. So from Kentucky's
perspective as coal being a major economic
source in parts of our state, you know providing
a means of recovering an important byproduct
adds economic strength and viability to the
coal industries in those regions. I'm invited
to give lectures by the Department of Defense
and by the Department of Energy and a number
of other agencies and organizations and companies,
because they realize the importance of rare
earths to manufacturing. And so, just being
involved in a project that is so meaningful
not only from a local community standpoint,
but from a national-international standpoint.
When you do something, you announce the development
- it makes international news. The team that
we have out working on the pilot plant is
a team of undergraduate students from not
only Mining Engineering, but also Chemical
Engineering. We have postdocs. So the training
opportunities that we have is tremendous,
because that's really what we're here for
- is to educate and to develop technology
that nobody's ever done this before. You
can't open up a book on rare earth recovery
from coal or coal-based resources and discover
a way of doing it. It's a brand-new field
and we're learning on the fly. Starting with
our first effort in 2014, we had no idea where
we were going, but we went and we went at
a very fast pace, and we've been very successful.
And that’s been very satisfying.
