The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded $6 million in grant funding to support research by the University of Wyoming (UW) aimed at expanding rare earth energy domestically.
The project will look into ways of using microorganisms to process rare earth elements on a large scale. UW’s School of Energy Resources (SER) is a subawardee of the grant, and the research is in collaboration with the University of Alaska and Montana Technological Institute.
UW’s involvement in the project will be led by Tyler Brown. Brown is the program manager of the minerals team inside SER’s Center for Economic Geology Research. He said the use of bacteria to process minerals from coal and coal waste may be a key to growing domestic critical mineral recovery.
“This microbial method of biorecovery has been shown to be more economically efficient at a very small scale, and that is part of what this project is going to do is identify the economic viability as we continue to scale this up,” Brown said.
The collaboration, Brown said, allows each of the universities to benefit from the others’ specialized research. The University of Alaska, Anchorage is the lead institute on the project. Their chemists will use microbes to separate valuable rare earth elements from an extracted material like coal, according to Brown.
“We have some really intelligent chemist engineers that are working on this from the other institutions,” Brown said. “Essentially, they put a specific type of bacterium, it interacts with the feedstock, so whether that's coal or a coal byproduct, and it will separate the rare earth elements from the coal itself.”
Researchers at UW will contribute to characterization of minerals, which involves identifying things like the chemical composition, grain size and cohesive strength of a mineral. UW will also be involved in evaluating how to scale the use of bioprocessing as well as training and workforce development approaches.
The project will also focus on identifying ways to extract rare earth elements from coal waste already being produced in other industries, such as mining.
“So we're trying to essentially squeeze more juice out of the lemon, get more usable material out of what is already happening instead of wasting it,” Brown said.
The project is aligned with an aim by the Trump administration to “Unleash American Energy.” Brown said the administration views the limited domestic involvement in the rare earth industry as a potential national security risk.
“Critical minerals have been a hot topic for the U.S. for about a decade now,” Brown said. “There are 60 different mineral and mineral materials that have been identified by the Department of the Interior that are essential to national security or the economic well-being of the United States.”
Those mineral and mineral materials can be extracted from coal and other materials for use in things like phones, lasers and batteries. These rare earth elements are frequently imported from other countries. Over the past decade, China has been the primary producer of rare earth elements. The country accounts for about 90% of global production and supply, according to the American Geosciences Institute.
Brown said the university’s project could help shift the nation’s dependence on foreign resources.
“This whole concept of critical minerals [research] is basically trying to onshore not only the extraction of those resources, but also the development of all of the links in the supply chain of those materials, from raw material to end-use product,” Brown said.
NSF recognized the universities’ research aim to increase domestic production when announcing the grant award.
“The project aims to strengthen U.S. economic and national security through reduced dependence on foreign sources of critical minerals,” the NSF announcement said.
The grant funding came through NSF’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research Infrastructure Improvement Program. The project is one of eight receiving a total of about $40 million in funding.
If successful, it may prove valuable to the Trump administration’s aim to domesticate energy resources in the future.
“Even the glimmer of hope that this could potentially become a commercially viable entity at some point in time in the near future, so that we could at least start to move the needle in terms of domestic production of these materials, that is what I'm most excited about,” Brown said. “ We have a very real need, and I think that this team is addressing part of that need”
