Our Research: Rare Earth Elements (REEs) Anywhere and Everywhere

Rare earth elements aren’t a household name, but the things they make are.

There are 17 of them, and they’re inside almost every piece of modern technology, including phones, magnets, wind turbines, fighter jets, defense systems, and MRI machines. Four of the 17, called “heavies,” are especially rare and valuable.

It turns out, places across the U.S. have these “heavies” in areas that are already highly regulated by the federal government: acid mine drainage, where the water seeps down from abandoned coal mines. WVU researchers have spent a decade figuring out how to pull these elements out of that water to capture, extract, and separate them without slowing down the environmental cleanup already underway.

• Acid mine drainage produces 45-50% heavy rare earths compared to less than 0.5% from typical sources. “Heavies” are the rarest and hardest to get, and the ones the U.S. needs most.
• Acid mine drainage sites are already across the country and permitted, so we can access them quickly, scale up, and do it cost-effectively.
• REE mixtures from coal work with hard-rock AMD, too. WVU technology can move from one mountain range to another.

As West Virginia’s flagship, land-grant, R1 university, we have been at the forefront of this work even before it became a national priority.

The Horseshoe Bend site (HsB) in Montana proves that recovering rare earth and critical materials from acid mine drainage isn’t just possible at coal sites. Hard-rock AMD, which drains from old metal mines and has long been treated as nothing more than an environmental liability, can actually become a valuable domestic source of these materials when the right technology is applied.

Our technology has successfully produced rare earth-enriched hydraulic pre-concentrates (HPC) from hard-rock. From there, additional processing steps have turned those concentrates into mixed rare earth oxides, which become the refined form that manufacturers use to build everything from wind turbines to electric vehicles to defense systems.

Hard-rock AMD can also serve as a domestic source of rare earth materials when integrated into existing treatment infrastructure.

Hard-rock AMD is a viable domestic feedstock – HsB demonstrates that rare earth and critical material recovery can be integrated directly into existing hard-rock AMD treatment systems. Recovery is integrated with environmental remediation – The approach operates within an active Superfund treatment system without requiring new mining or additional environmental disturbance.

Together, our coal-based AMD projects in Appalachia and the Horseshoe Bend project in Montana illustrate how legacy mine water treatment systems across diverse geologic settings can support a more resilient, environmentally integrated domestic rare earth supply chain.

The key word is domestic. We can extract these critical minerals stateside!

Our researchers are now in the lab testing our research and technology on other feedstocks.

We are in the early stages of looking into red mud, also known as bauxite residue, which is left over after aluminum is made at industrial sites. Red mud contains meaningful amounts of scandium and light rare earth elements. Scandium is especially valuable because it makes metal alloys stronger and lighter, used in everything from aircrafts to sporting goods. WVU researchers are developing the separation and recovery techniques needed to pull these elements out of red mud. It’s the same story we’ve told before. What looks like waste is actually a resource our country needs.

We’re also lab-testing electronic waste, or e-waste. Discarded batteries, hard drives, fluorescent lamps, motors, and countless other devices have become one of the fastest-growing waste streams in the world. They also contain rare earth elements and other critical materials. WVU researchers are investigating how to recover them, turning old electronics into reusable resources.

Each of these efforts point toward the same goal. WVU isn’t just leading in acid mine drainage. We’re building the expertise to identify, characterize, and extract critical minerals from a wide range of sources, addressing environmental challenges and helping to build a broader, more resilient domestic supply chain in the process.

Let’s go beyond!