In Appalachian we've got a lot of coal
mines some of them are being retired but
In any event all of them require
remediation and they create waste and
I'm talking about a lot of waste
Question is can this waste be worth
something?
Paul Ziemkiewicz  is standing in front of
a silo full of crushed limestone that
slowly gets flushed into a stream
pouring out of an old coal mine here
it's a state of the art state operated
facility that treats acid mine drainage
If it weren't here the stream would run
rusty red killing ecosystems in its path
We are at the Omega Mine, about four and a half miles
south of Morgantown, West Virginia, in an area that’s been heavily mined
for coal since the Civil War.
This year Ziemkiewic, the Director of
the West Virginia Water Research
Institute at West Virginia University
was awarded 2.6 million federal dollars
plus funds from the private sector
His research aims to locate isolate and
commercialize select hard to gather
elements of the periodic table. Elements
that are critical to the technology age
we live in some of those elements can be
found in acid mine drainage
I finished off some calculations that the acid mine
drainage production in West Virginia
Pennsylvania, Maryland, Eastern
Ohio can supply anywhere between
in terms of rare earth somewhere
between 800 tons per year to maybe 2200 tons per year
Now 800 tons a year is
basically what the military needs
Ziemkiewic and a handful of other
scientists in and around the Ohio Valley
make up the majority of the American
team dedicated to cracking the rare
earth element puzzle; that is, the team
that's on the hunt for rare earth
elements and how to build an industry
around them. The Americans are the
underdogs right now China is the team to
beat - where 95% of the rare earth used in
phones, electric cars, and smart bombs are
all sourced. In 2011 the prices of rare
earth elements spiked in part because of
a supply problem from China and so that
instilled an interest in researching other sources of rare
earth elements throughout the world but
also in the United States
Tom Tarka is the technical project lead
for rare earth elements at the National
Energy and Technology Laboratory in West
Virginia
He explains about 140,000 tons of rare
earth elements are processed globally
each year into products on the market. So
far there's no commercially viable
alternative for sourcing these elements
outside of China. Since the US doesn't
want to have to rely on any single other
nation to provide important components
critical to national security, government
funds are funneling into research at the
National Lab in Morgantown which largely
focuses on coal and fossil fuel research
Mary Anne Alvin is the head of the rare
earths division there right now what we
have is actively 15 programs, 15 projects
that are investigating not only separations
investigating where we can
find our best reserves and how can we take this forward
rare earth mines have
tried and failed in the u.s. already
they just weren't profitable on their
own. The hope now is that rare earth mining
can be economically viable if it piggy backs on other mining operations like coal
researchers have
already begun to identify rare earth elements
in and around coal seams as
well as those within waste products
associated with mining and burning coal
turns out that in Appalachian coals
especially  southern West
Virginia and Central Appalachia we're seeing more
heavy rare earth elements and that's
good because these heavy rare earth
elements, they're rarer and they
have an increased value as a result
it turns out rare earths are not
actually rare so much as rarely
concentrated they are hard to extract it
usually takes acids and harsh chemical
processes which creates the stuff of
environmental nightmares
West Virginia is already coping with environmental
nightmares
before the Clean Water Act the
Monongahela River at Morgantown was
orange and it had a pH of about 4 4.2 it
was absolutely dead the only difference
between then and now is the amount of
treatment the water gets before it winds
up in the river so the Clean Water Act
required companies to treat
a lot of that acid mine drainage and
right now in the Mon River Basin
I think something like a third of all
the acid mine drainage is actually being
treated in industrial sized
operations so acids are literally
seeping from coal mines everywhere
throughout Appalachia and apparently
leaching rare earth elements in the
process it turns out that the more
acid seams give us the the best results
because it has the most pyrite
pyrite in turn generates the acid that leeches
the rare earth out of the rock
Ziemkiewicz research is not only identifying which
elements exist in acid mine drainage and
the sludge left from treatment of
polluted water but also how to process
the elements and get them into
marketable form
rather than sludge disposal being a liability if you could
actually make some money on it and it's
pretty not going to pay for all of the
costs of AMD treatment but even if it
knocks down the cost by 20, 30, 40 percent
that's a very very significant incentive
to continue treating acid mine drainage.
And Ziemkiewicz is just one researcher
others in Kentucky and Pennsylvania are
studying lots of other coal waste products
scientists estimate that with
continued research a rare earths
industry is ten to twenty years down the
road
For the legislature today, I'm Glynis Board
