Researchers produce nearly-pure rare earth concentrates from coal
1–10 of 50 posts
Re: Researchers produce nearly-pure rare earth concentrates from coal
#2Waiting 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.
Re: Researchers produce nearly-pure rare earth concentrates from coal
#3Waiting 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.
Re: Researchers produce nearly-pure rare earth concentrates from coal
#4Amazing 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.
Re: Researchers produce nearly-pure rare earth concentrates from coal
#5I 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.
Re: Researchers produce nearly-pure rare earth concentrates from coal
#6I 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.
[deleted]
Re: Researchers produce nearly-pure rare earth concentrates from coal
#7Waiting 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.
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
Re: Researchers produce nearly-pure rare earth concentrates from coal
#8 What national defense application is yttrium used for?
Re: Researchers produce nearly-pure rare earth concentrates from coal
#9I 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.
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.
Re: Researchers produce nearly-pure rare earth concentrates from coal
#10What national defense application is yttrium used for?
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.