U.S. Strengthens Its Rare Earth Supply Chain With New Processing Plant

oilprice.com ^ | 6/11/2020

[bitt]

USA Rare Earth, the funding and development partner of the Round Top heavy rare earth project and Texas Mineral Resources announced Thursday that its rare earths pilot plant processing facility in Wheat Ridge, Colorado has received the required permits and officially opened.

Once fully commissioned, the plant will be focused on group separation of rare earths into heavy (dysprosium, terbium), middle, and light (neodymium, praseodymium) rare earths (REE’s) and will be the first facility to separate the full range of rare earth elements in the US since 1999.

USA Rare Earth’s pilot plant is the second link in a 100% US-based rare earth oxide supply chain, drawing on feedstock from its Round Top deposit.

The final phase of the pilot work will be the further separation of high-purity individual REE compounds. The pilot plant will also be focused on the recovery of non-REEs focusing on lithium, uranium, beryllium, gallium, zirconium, hafnium, and aluminum, all of which are on the US Government Critical Minerals List.

Confirming the recovery of these critical non-REEs will support upgrading the measured and indicated resources to proven and probable reserves (with no in-fill drilling required), and completion of the Preliminary Feasibility Study (PFS) for the Round Top project, the company said.

[Elsie]

DANG!

I guess 'critical' must mean something else than what I assumed: scarce.

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https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/05/18/2018-10667/final-list-of-critical-minerals-2018

[9YearLurker]

And food. We need to relocalize and diversify our food chain as much as possible.

[PIF]

first facility to separate the full range of rare earth elements in the US since 1999 when B. Clinton killed the industry for his buddy in Indonesia

[catnipman]

“Its a very tiny plant, unfortunately.”

it’s a pilot plant ... pilot plant are to get the kinks worked out before building full-scale industrial plants ...

[catnipman]

while elements like iron and aluminum are quite abundant in the earth, most of those elements are bound in minerals that are not refineable and/or very dilute ... for example, there's 20 million pounds of gold suspended in the oceans but it's not practical to extract it ... only concentrated forms in certain ores are useful for obtaining the actual metal ... in the case of aluminum, that form is an ore called bauxite, and give that significant bauxite is found in only a very few locations in the world (none in the U.S.), aluminum is strategic

[Elsie]

Thanks for info!