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Researchers produce nearly-pure rare earth concentrates from coal

uknow.uky.edu

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Re: Researchers produce nearly-pure rare earth concentrates from coal

#11

Post by evgen »

mchannon wrote: post #4

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…

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.

Re: Researchers produce nearly-pure rare earth concentrates from coal

#12

Post by pjc50 »

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?

Re: Researchers produce nearly-pure rare earth concentrates from coal

#13

Post by pjc50 »

reacweb wrote: post #3
vanderZwan wrote: post #2

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.

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

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.

Re: Researchers produce nearly-pure rare earth concentrates from coal

#15

Post by tomalpha »

evgen wrote: post #11
mchannon wrote: post #4

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…

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 wo…

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.

Re: Researchers produce nearly-pure rare earth concentrates from coal

#16

Post by vanderZwan »

pjc50 wrote: post #13
reacweb wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

> Coal is not conscious, it cannot want.

This is pedantic to the point of wilfully not wanting to understand that the coal industry is implied with that statement. But if we're going down the pedantic route:

> Going out of business is capitalism's way of saying your product is no longer required.

Demand and need are correlated, but not the same. Capitalism works with the former, and also has an entire industry devoted to creating demand when there is no need. I'm not saying capitalism is bad - it is an amoral system and a very effective tool for a lot of things. By itself self-regulates only to the vested interests of the people wielding the tools within the capitalist system, and this does not have to align with societal or planetary needs.

Re: Researchers produce nearly-pure rare earth concentrates from coal

#17

Post by maxerickson »

pjc50 wrote: post #12

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?

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.

Re: Researchers produce nearly-pure rare earth concentrates from coal

#19

Post by dmurray »

Firerouge wrote: post #5

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.

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.

Re: Researchers produce nearly-pure rare earth concentrates from coal

#20

Post by evgen »

tomalpha wrote: post #15
evgen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

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.

Yeah, conversion fail on my part. OTOH, I would not be surprised at all if the difference in known deposits was more than 1000x in favour of coal, if only because we have been looking for it for so long. 300-1000x does make process throughout and efficiency a bit harder to match though.
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