Journal
JOURNAL OF RARE EARTHS
Volume 36, Issue 4, Pages 337-338Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
DOI: 10.1016/j.jre.2018.01.002
Keywords
Rare earth elements (REEs); REE oxides (REEOs); Coal and coal byproducts; Critical materials
Categories
Funding
- Department of Energy [DE-FE00027069]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Rare earth elements (REEs) are critical materials and provide significant values to national security, energy production, environmental protection and economic growth. The supply of REEs in U.S. solely relies on import as domestic production of REEs was ceased because of the environmental concerns during mining and lack of competitiveness. Nonetheless, unconventional REEs-containing resources, including produced water, acid mine drainage, and coal and coal byproducts (C&CBs) contain significant amounts of REEs. However, the concentrations of REEs in these resources are several orders of magnitude lower than that of REEs ores. Thus, extraction of REEs from these materials is challenging. Here we report REEs extraction with environmentally friendly method that successfully concentrated REEs from 312 ppm in fly ash to 99.4% in the final product. Especially, the five critically important REEs (Dy, Eu, Nd, Tb, and Y) account for up to similar to 63% of the total weight of all REEs in the final 99.4%-purity product. Coal fly ash is one of the major solid coal utilization byproducts, representing great potential resources for REEs extraction. Extraction of REEs from these unconventional resources could be the way to secure domestic supply of these critical materials. (C) 2018 Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Chinese Society of Rare Earths.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available