Researchers produce nearly-pure rare earth concentrates from coal

https://uknow.uky.edu/research/uk-researchers-first-produce-high-grade-rare-earths-coal

by vinnyglennon • 8 years ago

85 48 8 years ago

uknow.uky.edu

vanderZwan4• 8 years ago

Waiting for someone to tell point out why this process is super-toxic, or prone to ruining the environment in some other fashion, or some other bad news.

Also curious if anyone can to weigh in on how this might affect China's (supposed) rare earth monopoly, since I presume that was part of the motivation behind the research. Same thing for the coal industry in general.

reacweb• 8 years ago

IMHO, the future is solar energy and storage. If coal wants to remain significant in long term, it has to find arguments.

vanderZwan4• 8 years ago

Completely agree, which is why I find the article frustratingly misleading: nice that the produced metal is 98% pure, but that does not tell me anything about how useful the process as a whole is.

But I see that mchannon answered my question, with the answer I expected

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16567314

pjc502• 8 years ago

Coal is not conscious, it cannot want.

The coal industry may want, but like everyone else they're not guaranteed relevance in the long term. Going out of business is capitalism's way of saying your product is no longer required.

logfromblammo2• 8 years ago

I could see an argument for coal used to enrich soil for agriculture, if there were a way to economically remove all the toxic metals from it. Urine and bone meal would round it out.

It could be a carbon source for a new type of terra preta.

It would even be useful for the high-sulfur coals.

mchannon2• 8 years ago

Amazing how nobody who reports on this puts forward any numbers.

This Appalachian coal is said to have over 300ppm of rare earth oxides in it.

That means for every ton of coal, we're talking about 300g of material. Compare conventional rare earth ores, where for every ton, we're talking about 90kg (Mountain Pass).

It's nice and all that these things are in coal, but thermal coal's already on its way out, Appalachian thermal coal especially due to its high cost and high sulfur content, and a couple pennies of rare earths per ton is a worse use of resources than Powder River coal + actual rare earth mining.

evgen3• 8 years ago

How much ore is available at these conventional rare earth mining sites I wonder? Even with a 30x lower yield it may be that we have 100x more easily mined coal. When it comes to the so-called rare earths my concern is more about the waste from the refining process than the yield. The press release mentioned 'environmentally-conscious' process, but that is the kind of weasel word that covers a variety of sins so I would need hard data.

tomalpha• 8 years ago

Apologies for the nitpick, but I think you mean 300x and 1000x (90000g / 300g).

I don’t know whether there’s 1000 times as much coal available as rare-earth ores, but it might skew the argument a little compared to 100x.

maxerickson2• 8 years ago

One of the plants they are locating the pilot at can apparently process 950 tons of coal an hour:

https://www.tecoenergy.com/news/article/index.cfm?article=20...

So if you process it all and get high extraction, a couple million Kg of rare earths a year.

(I edited the last paragraph after spotting that I missed a factor in my initial math)

John_KZ3• 8 years ago

The US already produces and consumes 1 billion metric tons of coal per year. Numbers in Europe are similar. Also all this coal is already cleaned and crushed. That's a lot of mass, even at the low yields, and it's essentially "free" ore.

The real limiting factors are throughput and cost of ore processing. If the process can be done economically at the rate of production, it will be implemented. Even if it barely brakes even in terms of finances, it also helps with A) stopping rare earth metals from going airborne (which is a health hazard sometimes) and B) Creating a strategic backup source of rare earth metals and C) Preventing further environmental damage from additional mining for rare earth metals elsewhere.

throwawayuky• 8 years ago

I'm from the University of Kentucky, and I've been reported on through UKNow before. The reporters are not all that great at getting information about your project, and can contain inaccuracies. I also imagine that, since some of this is patent-pending, they are not willing to divulge much else other than what is described.

Firerouge• 8 years ago

I do hope coal companies come to realize coal is worth far more in valuable rare earth elements than burning it. Maybe then they'll stop pushing their coal fueled pipe dreams.

volundr-• 8 years ago

As a rare earth ore, most coal has very little value. From a practical standpoint, this is interesting but not particularly actionable, unless it is a process that is cheap and preserves the other industrial utility of coal.

dmurray• 8 years ago

Unfortunately for your hopes, it looks like the goal of this process is to be able extract rare earths from the coal and still burn the carbon. That would make coal more viable as a fuel, rather than less.

ttul• 8 years ago

What national defense application is yttrium used for?

evgen3• 8 years ago

Yttrium barium copper oxide is a class of materials that exhibit superconductivity at (relative) high temperatures. This has a lot of applications and some of them are defense-related.

AllegedAlec• 8 years ago

Besides the applications in superconductors, it's also used in allows to strengthen, and is used in the creation of certain ceramics and glasses.

topspin2• 8 years ago

Yttrium is used to make high performance filters and oscillators. YIG filters and oscillators are wide band high Q microwave devices used in high performance instruments, radar and frequency agile communication systems. An example would be the AN/ALQ-161A B1-B countermeasure system.

pjc502• 8 years ago

Unanswered questions:

- what happens to the carbon from this process? Does it end up as atmospheric CO2?

- what happens to the energy available from that carbon? Thrown away or used to run the process?

- can't you just run this on fly ash?

- how does this compare to regular mining?

- what happens to everything else in the coal, such as sulphur and thorium?

maxerickson2• 8 years ago

The idea is to insert it into the existing coal consumption pipeline:

https://uknow.uky.edu/research/honaker-awarded-6-million-dep...

It sounds like it is only going to consume byproduct of the washing process.

wrycoder2• 8 years ago

I’m wondering why rare earths end up in coal in the first place.

mchannon2• 8 years ago

Coal (at least most of the time) comes from decaying plants.

Before the plants decayed, they pulled up all manner of minerals from soil. Rare earths behave similarly to iron, so if a plant can uptake iron from its soil (it can) then so can it uptake rare earths.

There are numerous instances of field reclamation from mercury contamination specifically by use of plants to leach the mercury from the soil, then harvest, burn, and safely dispose of the mercury concentrate.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3033295/cleaning-up-polluting-mi...

Same story as this except the latter occurs in a human lifetime, and we want the mercury out of the soil for fundamentally different reasons.

wrycoder2• 8 years ago

Very interesting, thanks!

ClintFix• 8 years ago

I was an engineer at a company attempting to extract rare earth metals from fly ash using a solvent method (supercritical CO2). Similar to how caffeine is removed from coffee.

There aren’t a lot of rare earths in coal/fly ash but even modest coal plants produce tons of fly ash daily.

John_KZ3• 8 years ago

Also fly ash is a pain in the ass to get rid off. I've heard about companies re-using it in concrete products and other construction materials. Even if the value produced is low, any profit is better than dealing with the cost of safely disposing it.

Erlangolem2• 8 years ago

Wouldn’t that make the resulting concrete unusually radioactive?

Symbiote• 8 years ago

Making cheap bricks with waste ash has been common for decades.

Most British houses have two layers of brick, the nice ones on the outside, and these ones on the inside, which will be covered. An air (or fibreglass) gap between them provides insulation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_masonry_unit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavity_wall

topspin2• 8 years ago

Scandium is mentioned as one of the "rare" earth elements readily recovered from coal. I can't speak for the viability of this process, but cheap scandium would be a great outcome. Small amounts of Scandium greatly improves the tensile strength, fatigue behavior and other properties of Aluminum.

Researchers produce nearly-pure rare earth concentrates from coal

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