Mining Rare Earth Elements to be used in green technology may not be the only option.  It’s something that University of Regina PhD student Brendan Bishop has been studying. He and his team have been studying the ash produced as waste from coal-fired power plants and how REEs could be extracted from it.

Bishop says it’s a new field that has been studied in the past ten years or so in the United States and China, but there has been little work on ash from Canadian coal. They looked at coal from the three coal-fired power plants in Saskatchewan and one in Alberta.  Part of that research included using the X-ray beamlines at the Canadian Light Source on the USask campus. They were probing the ash to fine REEs and how they were distributed. Bishop states that they found that the specific elements they were looking for were found in phosphate minerals in the coal ash.

He adds that the minerals in the coal ash are the same minerals being targeted in ore deposits in mines, so it’s possible that already existing techniques could be used to recover and extract the Rare Earth Elements from the coal, similar to ore that has been mined.  Bishop suggests this research could help inform the development of an efficient and environmentally friendly process for recovering REEs from the ash. He expects it could be a good short-to-medium-term source of the metals used in green energy technology, and notes that most coal ash just sits in landfills or tailings ponds near power plants, so this gives it another use, and it’s already available, as opposed to mining, which would be more long-term.

REEs are used in electronics like your cell phone and your screen, and they are also used in clean energy technology, like electric motors and turbines, which are a few of the power sources being used as the world moves to decarbonization.