Rare Earth Exchanges

DoD Injects $4.22m into Nebraska Rare Earth Producing Company, Bolster Production: Part of Effort to Break China’s Monopolistic Grip

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Highlights

  • U.S. Department of Defense grants $4.22 million to Nebraska-based Rare Earth Salts to develop domestic terbium oxide production for critical defense technologies.
  • Rare Earth Salts uses environmentally friendly recycling methods to extract terbium from discarded fluorescent light bulbs, offering an innovative alternative to traditional rare earth element extraction.
  • The company’s proprietary electrochemical process enables faster, more cost-effective, and sustainable rare earth element separation, supporting U.S. industrial independence.

A couple months ago the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) announced a $4.22 million grant to Rare Earth Salts (opens in a new tab), a Nebraska-based company, to develop and expand domestic production of terbium oxide, a rare and essential material for defense systems. Terbium enhances the temperature resilience of neodymium iron boron (NdFeB) magnets, critical in aircraft, submarines, and missiles. Rare Earth Salts stands out as one of the few producers outside China and employs environmentally friendly recycling methods, sourcing terbium from discarded fluorescent light bulbs.

Before delving into the DoD grant and the company a brief primer on the substance.

Terbium is a silvery-white, rare earth metal with the atomic number 65, symbolized by “Tb” on the periodic table; it is a soft, malleable, and ductile element that is never found naturally in its pure form, but is extracted from minerals like monazite, cerite, and gadolinite, and is primarily used in phosphors for color television tubes due to its ability to emit a strong green luminescence when excited;

Key points about Terbium:

  • Chemical properties: It is a lanthanide element, meaning it belongs to the series of elements between lanthanum and lutetium. 
  • Appearance: When pure, terbium is a silvery-white metal. 
  • Main use: Its unique luminescent properties make it valuable in the production of phosphors for color television screens, where it contributes to the green color. 
  • Other applications: Terbium is also used in some electronic devices like sensors and actuators, and can be used as a doping agent in certain solid-state devices. 
  • Discovery: Terbium was discovered by Carl Gustaf Mosander in 1843

Terbium is contained in many minerals, but it’s never found in nature as a free element. The most important ores for terbium are monazite, bastnasite, and cerite. 

The majority of Terbium oxide is mined in China, specifically in the ion-absorption clays found in the southern region of the country; this is where the richest commercial sources of terbium are located, with China dominating the global production of this rare earth element.

Other smaller mining areas include the USA, Brazil, India, Sri Lanka, and Australia.

The Grant

This initiative aligns with the National Defense Industrial Strategy (opens in a new tab) (NDIS) to enhance supply chain resilience by reducing reliance on foreign materials. The award also supports the Defense Production Act Investment (DPAI) office’s broader objective to strengthen the U.S. industrial base, which has funded $518.7 million across 50 projects in fiscal year 2024.

The Company

Founded in 2012 and based in Beatrice, Nebraska-based Rare Earth Salts (opens in a new tab) operates a commercial waste refining plant intended to extract rare earth elements from mining waste. The company’s processing plant implements an environmentally friendly technology for the separation and purification of elements that provide a significant operational and capital cost advantage over solvent extraction methods and is proven at a commercial scale and functions on a broad range of rare earth concentrates, enabling mining industries to produce oxides including wind turbines, hybrid automobiles, advanced lasers for defense systems, vibrant flat panel screens and fiber optics.

The venture employs a proprietary electrochemical process for rare earth element (REE) separation that offers transformative improvements over traditional solvent extraction (SX) methods, which have been standard since the 1940s. Their process, designed from first principles in chemistry, is highly efficient, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly.

Key features include:

  • Streamlined Process: The time from concentrate to finished product is reduced from months and hundreds of steps (as in SX) to just days with significantly fewer separation steps.
  • Scalability: The technology has been successfully scaled from lab to pilot to full commercial operation, demonstrating robustness and feasibility.
  • Cost Efficiency: The process boasts lower capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operating expenses (OPEX) compared to traditional refining, making it highly competitive.
  • Sustainability: The method reduces reliance on extensive chemical use associated with solvent extraction, likely minimizing environmental impact.
  • Strategic Impact: By enabling domestic production of rare earth elements, Rare Earth Salts’ innovation supports efforts to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign sources, particularly in critical materials like terbium.

Their proprietary technology purportedly represents a significant industry breakthrough, offering faster, cheaper, and more sustainable rare earth element production to meet modern supply chain demands.

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