American Rare Earths Ltd (ASX:ARR)’s US subsidiary, Western Rare Earths (WRE), has joined as the industrial partner in a research consortium that includes Virginia Tech University and the technology company Phinix, LLC.
The team has been awarded R&D funding of up to US$500,000 by the US Department of Energy (DOE) in an AMO (Advanced Manufacturing Office) program known as Critical Materials: Next‐Generation Technologies and Field Validation.
WRE will provide rare earths bearing ores as feedstock for extraction and separation focused processing technology studies.
“We could not be more excited”
WRE president and president of North America for American Rare Earths Marty Weems said: “We are honoured to join this talented and prestigious consortium as part of our goal to help develop the next-generation of extraction, separation, and processing technologies.
“We value partnering with organizations at the forefront of developing cleaner, greener processing of rare earths for a more sustainable and secure North American supply chain.
“We could not be more excited about this latest collaboration.
"Dr. Das and Professor Zhang are highly accomplished innovators.
“We are deeply honoured by their invitation to join their team and support them on this important work. We see value in the simplicity of the process which is the key to high volume throughput and successful evolution to industrial scale operations.”
Project goal
The project goal is to produce light, medium, and heavy rare earth oxide products of greater than 95% purity.
Given the criticality of neodymium, a neodymium oxide product of greater than 95% purity will also be produced.
An innovative extractor technology, based on gas-assisted micro-flow extraction (GAME) theory, will be employed with an efficient task-specific ionic liquid (TSIL) for rare earths extraction and separation.
Success could reduce capex and opex expenditures for producing high value rare earths from lower grade sources while improving recovery efficiencies, thus reducing the loss of valuable rare earths to the tailings pile.
Simple process and high throughput
Phinix founder and CEO Subodh Das said: “Our proof of concept offers several advantages, such as simple process and high throughput.
“Moreover, due to rapid mass transfer rates and fast extraction of kinetics, our technology is credible for the recovery and separation of REEs from not only conventional rare earth ores, but also from resources with lower concentrations of rare earth content.”
Impact of DOE Funding
Virginia Tech University assistant professor Wencai Zhang said: “As a result of EERE funding, we expect to raise the Technology Readiness Level from its current classification of stage 2 to stage 3.
“This project represents a fantastic opportunity to showcase our new state of the art, Minerals and Materials Processing laboratory capabilities that we renovated and expanded over the past year.
“We now have one of the finest research facilities in the world that is focused on rare earths processing to facilitate the global transition to the reduced carbon, new energy future.”