Highlights
- Recycling rare earth elements (REEs) from wind turbines and electronics is emerging as a key strategy to diversify supply chains and reduce dependence on foreign sources.
- The U.S. government is supporting REE recycling initiatives through funding programs and partnerships with companies like Critical Materials Recycling.
- The Critical Materials Innovation Hub at Ames National Laboratory is spearheading research and development efforts in REE recycling and supply chain resilience.
Recycling to access rare earth elements (REE) represents an important prong in a multifaceted, market-driven but government supported strategy to diversify supply chains in the REE sector. Myriad companies are getting into the act, such as Critical Materials Recycling (opens in a new tab), busy breaking apart various old components of products, from circuit boards to used transmissions to decommissioned wind turbines all in a quest to access and recycle rare earth minerals.
While most recycling operations focus on minerals such as copper and aluminum, some operations mobilize engineers to access the spent products such as batteries, which are a source of REE. Key here is that about 90% of products such as wind turbines, mostly the parts made of steel and concrete, have an established recycling process, but there is little effort in recycling to access and secure the REEs.
Those materials include the fiber reinforced composites that make up the blades, housing components and the rare earth materials found in the turbine generators
According to a piece written by Cami Koons (opens in a new tab) in the Iowa Dispatch (opens in a new tab), REEs represent 10%-15% of wind turbine materials that are not currently recycled.
And the hope is to change this via the Critical Materials Innovation Hub led by Ames National Laboratory (opens in a new tab), in Iowa representing a nexus of important research activity.
A scientist at this hub who worked with Critical Materials Recycling, Ikenna Nlebedim, reports this effort represents “a key strategy” for U.S. sustainability, security, and technological advancement.
Enter the Company
Critical Materials Recycling (opens in a new tab), based in Iowa, secured a U.S. Department of Energy prize of $500,000 plus another $100,000 in national laboratory assistance as part of a broader grant. Overall, the government selected 20 projects as part one of an ongoing funding initiative. Smaller sums, $75,000 were also awarded by the federal government to help cultivate initiatives to help
diversify the REE supply chain. to further develop their concepts.
According to a government release $5.1 million has been awarded in the form of a Wind Turbine Materials Recycling prize (opens in a new tab) backed by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (opens in a new tab) as part of its efforts targeting a carbon-pollution-free power sector by 2035.
Leading the Iowa-based company is Dan Bina (opens in a new tab) who told the local media "The prize will give us the funding to be able to do that initial leg work, and we’ll build a team to make it happen much sooner and probably much better.”
What’s driving the federal prizes?
As reported in the Iowa Dispatch, the need for superior wind turbine recycling. According to Tyler Christoffel (opens in a new tab), an aerospace engineer and a technology manager for materials manufacturing and design innovation at the DOE wind energy technologies office, said a big goal of the office is to create a circular economy.
“Basically, looking at the ways that we can make our materials more sustainable, be able to reuse them, make them go further,” Christoffel said.
He said about 90% of the turbines, mostly the parts made of steel and concrete, have an established recycling process.
“The work in the program was really focusing on those materials that have been hard to recycle so far, developing technologies so that you can more cost effectively recycle them and then get them into secondary markets,” Christoffel said.
Those materials include the fiber reinforced composites that make up the blades, housing components and the rare earth materials found in the turbine generators.
Christoffel said increasing recycling infrastructure and technology will help reduce waste at all stages of the turbines, from the production process to the end of life and updating stages that occur less frequently.
The Company’s Activities
Critical Materials Recycling has been engaged in a multi-phase STTR (Small Business Technology Transfer) project in cooperation with Denis Prodius (opens in a new tab) and Ikenna Nlebedim (opens in a new tab) of the Critical Materials Institute (the developers of the Acid-Free Dissolution Recycling (ADR) process) as a proof-of-concept for commercially viable and environment-friendly approaches for reclaiming rare earth elements (REEs) and cobalt from magnets in different types of electronic wastes generated in the U.S.
Critical Materials Recycling’s goal is to use the ADR process to recover critical material REEs as a sustainable renewable resource and to reinsert these REEs back into the supply chain as oxides, metals, and alloys.
The company claims they have the only technology that selectively and efficiently recovers critical minerals from dilute electronic waste streams, without limiting further recycling of the other components of the electronic wastes. It also does not require pre-concentration of the magnets in the e-wastes prior to recycling.
Critical Materials Recycling’s collaborative team has successfully applied this process to hard disk drive (HDD) shreds, Neodymium/Iron/Boron magnets and to Samarium/Cobalt magnets (both swarf and slag).
The team has successfully recovered Neodymium, Praseodymium, Samarium, Terbium, Dysprosium, and Cobalt.
Why is this process important?
As the company reports on its website rare earth metals and alloys that contain them are a key modern-day material used in many applications such as consumer electronics, computer memory, DVDs, rechargeable batteries, catalytic converters, magnets, and fluorescent lighting. The use of rare earth elements is vital for modern life, but the end products are rarely recycled.
Recycling often requires the use of aggressive solvents or high temperature metal processing and has not been historically cost-effective or environmentally superior to mining.
Future demand is predicted to far outpace the exponential growth of demand for these rare earth metals and cause supply shortages in the future.
Rare earth metals mining is heavily concentrated in a few countries, particularly China, Mongolia and elsewhere, which mines and refines most of the global supply of rare earth metals.
These supply challenges impact the U.S. economy as well as its national security and energy independence, which is a critical DOE concern. New sources of rare earth elements have been identified in the U.S., but opening new mines requires long lead times (10-20 years) and large capital investments.
The Ames Critical Materials Innovation Hub
The Critical Materials Innovation Hub (opens in a new tab) of Ames Laboratory is a U.S. DOE Energy Innovation Hub led by Ames National Laboratory seeking to accelerate innovative scientific and technological solutions to develop resilient and secure supply chains for rare-earth metals and other materials critical to the success of clean energy technologies.
Formerly known as the Critical Materials Institute, the Hub was established in 2013 and is led by Ames National Laboratory as a sustained, multidisciplinary effort to develop solutions across the materials life cycle as well as reduce the impact of supply chain disruptions and price fluctuations associated with these valuable resources.
By bringing together scientists and engineers from diverse disciplines, the CMI Hub is addressing challenges in critical materials, including mineral processing, manufacture, substitution, efficient use, and circular economy; integrating scientific research, engineering innovation, manufacturing, and process improvements; and developing a holistic solution to the materials challenges facing the nation.
It includes expertise from nine national laboratories, over a dozen universities, and over thirty industry partners to minimize materials criticality as an impediment to the commercialization of clean energy technologies.
Is all this enough in the aggregate to make a dent in Chinese dominance, only time will tell.
Daniel
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