American Resources Corporation (NASDAQ:AREC) announced Wednesday it is going ahead with its planned 2kW mobile electrolytic cell rare earth processing plant.
In a statement, the Fishers, Indiana-based company said that the facility represents a “novel approach” for the revalorization of coal, coal waste, and coal by-products like fly ash, utilizing Coal Electrolytic Cell (CEC) technology for the production of REE concentrate, carbon, purified fly ash and hydrogen.
The energy company will use previously acquired technology and patents from Ohio University, in addition to its partnership with research programs and Dr Gerardine Botte, a board member and current Whitacre Department Chair in Chemical Engineering at Texas Tech University.
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According to American Resources, the facility’s design is based on successful analysis utilizing electrolysis of fly ash that was from a representative Ohio facility with particle size less < 75μm leading to the production of hydrogen in the cathode of the cell and the extraction of 65% Yttrium (Y), 59% Dysprosium (Dy), and 76% Ytterbium (Yb). The design of the initial facility has a total capital expenditure of less than $1 million and is in the form of a mobile application that can be transported from internal and external sites to process and evaluate the specific fly ash and coal-based feedstocks at each location, the company added.
American Resources told investors that the facility will enable it to determine the specific economics of each feedstock site and the revenues that will be generated from the critical and rare earth elements, the fly ash-to-concrete market, and the recovered carbon and the hydrogen generated during the process. Once the site’s economics are determined, the company could potentially build a local processing facility at certain sites to further expand the revenue base.
American Resources CEO Mark Jensen said that the company is eager to move onto the commercialization process.
"The electrolysis stage of our ‘Capture - Process - Purify' technology process chain is a game-changer when it comes to producing low-cost environmentally safe REE concentrate,” Jensen said in a statement.
“What makes it unique is that we can sustainably reprocess and recycling coal waste, coal by-products and fly ash to produce REE concentrate but also produce revenue-generating by-products during the process itself, further lowering our cost structure during the process.
“With this technology, combined with our chromatography technology, we are confident that we have the processes, assets, technology and team to help restore and redefine the domestic supply chain of critical and REEs providing a real cost-effective and environmentally safer solution for the US economy and national security."
The facility is expected to be built over the next six months with the goal of deploying into the field in the third or fourth quarter of 2021.
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