CMI Director Alex King Talks About Rare Earth Supplies (Video)

Video CMI Director Alex King Talks About Rare Earth Supplies (Video) 27

Posted by Roblimo on Wednesday November 19, 2014 @04:57PM from the we're-talking-about-minerals-not-the-band dept.

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CMI in this context is the Critical Materials Institute at the Iowa State Ames Laboratory in Ames, Iowa. They have partners from other national laboratories, universities, and industry, too. Rare earths, while not necessarily as rare as the word "rare" implies, are hard to mine, separate, and use. They are often found in parts per million quantities, so it takes supercomputers to suss out which deposits are worth going after. This is what Dr. King and his coworkers spend their time doing; finding concentrations of rare earths that can be mined and refined profitably.

On November 3 we asked you for questions to put to Dr. King. Timothy incorporated some of those questions into the conversation in this video -- and tomorrow's video too, since we broke this into two parts because, while the subject matter may be fascinating, we are supposed to hold video lengths down to around 10 minutes, and in this case we still ended up with two videos close to 15 minutes each. And this stuff is important enough that instead of lining up a list of links, we are giving you one link to Google using the search term "rare earths." Yes, we know Rare Earth would be a great name for a rock band. But the mineral rare earths are important in the manufacture of items from strong magnets to touch screens and rechargeable batteries. (Alternate Video Link)

Timothy Lord: Hi there. We are talking today with Alex King, he is the director of the Critical Materials Institute which is part of the Ames Research Lab which is also part of the Department of Energy for the United States Government. Dr. King, would you mind just talking a little bit about what is the Critical Materials Institute.

Alex King: Yeah, it is one of four of what DOE calls energy innovation hubs. These are large scale research efforts that are topical, current that are designed to solve specific problems by bringing together the best expertise available. So we are about a $25 million a year effort involving 250 or so researchers across about 16 different institutions. But it is all coordinated out of the office I am sitting in right now.

Tim: And where is that?

Alex: In Ames, Iowa. Not to be confused with NASA Ames Research Center.

Tim: Right. Good distinction.

Alex: Yeah.

Tim: So the first thing I want to talk to you about is the nature of the rare earths materials that your institute is very concerned about right now. Can you talk about why are they called rare earths, certainly people are going to be familiar with some of the names of the chemicals involved but they are not rare in the sense that let’s say diamonds are.

Alex: Well, you might argue that diamonds aren’t all that rare but yeah, the rare earths were named more than a hundred years ago because people thought they were rare and they thought they were somehow associated with earth, so they are neither rare nor are they earth. They are metallic elements, the most common of them are as common as things like nickel in the earth’s crust, but they are not found in concentrations like nickel is found, they are more uniformly distributed around the world. So if you dig up a handful of soil in your backyard, we could probably detect some neodymium in it but it would be there in sort of parts to million quantities and finding places where there is high enough concentration to make it worthwhile is more rare.

Tim: Now there are a few concentrations around the world that we are quite aware of and some others that we probably might not be yet. China famously is the site of the most economically viable depository right now.

Alex: That’s correct. But when there was this price spike back in 2010-2011 people got their hiking boots on and their geological hammers out and went looking for more. And so we actually know where there are a lot of rare earth deposits around the world. There are probably somewhere around 400 that at one point or another in the last few years have been considered as potentially viable mining sites of course, not over 100 will ever survive as commercial mines, but that’s where they are.

Tim: The importance of these materials is in part is they are very hard to substitute: Is that a fair way to put it?

Alex: Yeah. So the rare earths is a series of elements, if you are familiar with the periodic table that is the double row of elements at the bottom with the rare earths are the upper north of those two rows of elements, plus two others, can be thought of as rare earths but if you can characterize them by their electron orbital structure which is way too arcane for most people but what they do is they impart rather special properties on different materials of the most powerful magnets in the world relative to their weight contain rare earths. And in a couple of different kinds of formulations. Most of the efficient light sources that we have in the world today including fluorescent lights and LEDs and in fact, the computer screens we are both looking at contain rare earths. So anything that needs a magnet, anything that produces light that pretty much involves rare earths, and then the rare earths do a few other things too, they are very good catalysts in certain reactions, and on one of them in particular cerium or cerium oxide is used for polishing glass and silicon wafers. It has an abrasive feature to it like alumina or diamond but it also entirely chemically reacts with silicon which makes it a great abrasive, gives really beautiful polished surfaces on those materials. Lanthanum which is the lightest of the rare earths, so Lanthanum is used in the lenses of the cameras on all the cell phones, you get those tiny little lenses, you need a very high dispersion glass and they had lanthanum for that. So they are used in all sorts of different things.

Tim: In thinking about the supply and the fact that these are so rarely found in easy to mine quantity, do they tend to be found together, one of the things I understand from your own institute is that it is sometimes difficult because they have such similar molecular structures and weights to actually separate them.

Alex: Yeah, that’s right. They are chemically more similar than almost any other group of elements. So the two things that you can use to separate elements from each other chemically speaking is the size of the atom and the affinity that the atom has for electrons. So if you can separate them by size or you can separate them by electrical affinity, then life gets easy. But these things are all very close in size and very close in electrical affinity so they are hard to separate. And we know that, because Nature found it hard to separate them when it laid down rocks, it put all the rare earths together. There is a subtle distinction in that the lighter atomic weights tend to be more abundant than the heavier ones. So the ones on the left side of the periodic side, the lanthanum, the cerium, the praseodymium, the neodymium tend to be more concentrated than the heavy rare earths which have some of the more special properties—they tend to be very low in concentration. So among the rare earths, those are the rarer ones if you like, but yes, they are all found together and separating them is chemically a challenging business to do.

Tim: Is it also a very energy intensive process?

Alex: The separation is not so energy intensive... sort of where do you mine, you dig rocks out of the ground, that’s basically what mining is, and then in order to convert the rocks into metal, there are lots of stages, some of which are very energy intensive and some of which are not so energy intensive. But overall, it is a very energy intensive business. The chemical separation is not the most energy intensive but it is one of the places where you have a large investment in chemical engineering infrastructure. What you tend to do is you dissolve the things in solution, and then you have to try and separate the ones you want from the ones you don’t in the chemical solutions. So what you do is add a water based solution usually an acidic solution that contains all your rare earths. You mix that up with an organic solvent, and the organic solvent preferentially absorbs the ones you want and leaves behind the ones you don’t. That’s the theory. But the level of preference for one element over another is very very slight. So you have to repeat this process hundreds of times to get a reasonable concentration of the ones you are after. So it is chemically intense. It uses strong acids, it uses volatile organic compounds which are flammable and in a typical plant maybe 300 or 400 mixer settlers. So it is complicated and it is expensive.

Tim: It sounds too like the less times you have to do that and the less of these volatile chemicals better probably people would be able to accept the need to go through this process, because it is pretty harsh environmentally.

Alex: Yeah, it is environmentally risky. It is also very expensive. If you want to set up a rare earth mine and you got to buy and install 400 what they call mixer settler stages which is just big old tanks basically, they shake and mix fluids and then let them settle out. It is expensive. And one of the big challenges in getting new mines going is that it costs roughly a $1 billion to put in a mine in the separations plant. If you can reduce the separations plant from 400 stages to 100 or maybe 50 or 40 stages, you save a lot of money in terms of putting together a new mine. And when you talk to miners about how long is it going to take till you get your mine operating, the answer you get is always a number of dollars. So I ask, I have friends in the mining business, I call them up and say well, how long is it going to be? And $800 million. So it is a question of how long it takes to get the investment to pay for the infrastructure in the mine. If you can reduce the cost of investment, you can make mines up and running much faster.

Tim: Some people might argue that it is actually a good investment in a sense to import these minerals, because it means that we are not putting in that new investment in infrastructure especially in countries where it is currently much more expensive because both the labor and regulations and concerns about environment, although that doesn’t take away the worldwide problem of we can mine in China but the same acids and the same processes are happening.

Alex: Yeah, so somewhere, someone’s at risk from the pollution. But the bigger picture is, right now, as of 2009, we had one supplier in the world, which was, well, not exactly one, but China produced 97% of the rare earths so effectively one supplier. And if your one supplier has a problem for whatever reason then everybody is out of luck. So it is a matter of security of supply chain. So when all our oil effectively came from the Middle East we were really worried about the Middle East and as our oil comes from more and more places, it is less of a concern. And the same is true for minerals like the rare earths. So it is not that we really want to have supplies here in the US, it is we want to have supplies in more places than just China.

Tim: Now one of the things that the institute that you work for is actually doing right now is trying to reduce the difficulty of extracting as well as looking for substitutes. Can you talk about each of those please?

Alex: Yeah, so we actually have a three-pronged strategy. We are trying to develop technologies that can be taken into the marketplace and used to make profit in the real world. The first area is things that enable mining to work more efficiently and at lower cost. The second is in precise opposition to the first. Finding ways to do without the materials at all, by finding substitutes that work just as well. The third prong is actually trying to make use of the existing supplies and the existing sources much more efficiently so just making better use of what we have by avoiding waste in the manufacturing process, and in some cases we waste 80%, you know, 80% of what comes into a factory gets thrown away, and 20% goes out those doors as an useful product. We try to reduce that. And we are also trying to increase recycling at end of life. So three real approaches. The one where we are trying to improve the efficiency of mining. And there are a lot of different approaches to that, but they largely boil down to improving the chemical reactions that are used to separate rare earths from other things including each other. And like you said earlier, the rare earths are very chemically similar to each other. And most solvents that we use don’t distinguish between them very well. There is a little bit of improvement of concentration from one solvent to another; if we can get that preference for different rare earths to be increased then we can reduce the number of stages in a separation plant. That improves things a lot. So what we are actually doing is using very high powered computational tools, some of the fastest and biggest computers in the world, that are available to us through the DOE complex and we are using those to search through lists of potential chemical solvents that should be able to separate one rare earth from another more efficiently. So we are using the computers to identify good candidates. Once the computer says yeah this is a good idea, then we take it in the lab and actually start doing real chemistry the way you remember from high school.

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