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.