Cool if it pans out. I’m always extra skeptical when it comes to mining PR.
Didn’t the extraction process, involving leaching ponds with some really nasty chemicals, had the EPA basically shutting down rare earth mining in the continental US?
What’s interesting is that in or near the Powder River Basin, where much of the coal used to supply electrical powerplants of the Midwest comes from. Mines that are approaching the “bust” part of the “boom and bust” cycle for most mining operations. Could this be a way that some are trying to flatten that curve? (Not that Gillette is going to become another Jeffrey City any time soon.)
We should put out some good talking points for the left.
“If the finds had been in Colorado then we’d mine them in an ecologically friendly and sustainable fashion using sub-Saharan African child slave labor, but they’re in Wyoming were exploitive capitalist mining companies will just rape the planet for obscene profits.”
“We need to block Australian coal companies from raping our own nation’s resources! The Biden Administration should only issue mining permits to companies overseen by Jim and Hunter, and in partnership with China Northern Rare Earth Group, Jiangxi Copper Co., China Molybdenum Co., and Russia’s Rostec, with refining and processing done in Russia’s Veliky Novgorod plant.”
Rare Earths aren’t particularly rare, the big problem is, if you look at the periodic table, they’ve got there own two rows, separate from all the rest. The reason is that the chemistry of all of them is so similar that they are always found in groups and the standard ways of separating them from each other don’t work. This makes refining them very messy and China has had an advantage since the cultural norm is to just dump all your waste like cyanides and metal saturated HF into the nearest water course. It’s not like the people down stream aren’t throwing there own waste in the same river. It’s not like anybody eats the fish, drinks the water or irrigates crops with that water, right? But this gives them a big cost advantage.
Oak ridge has been making improvements in rare earth separation.
Laboratory bench scale processes no doubt. The industrial outdoor leaching ponds involved tons of crushed rock, a large basin lined with impermeable clay and filling it with nasty water soluble solvents like cyanide …then waiting for time to do its thing. Relatively inexpensive as long as you don’t really care about cleaning up the mess in the future! Or are a Communist regime that doesn’t care about the contamination in the present!
They’re doing their testing in industrial settings to get feedback on how their processes perform in real settings and at scale.
What they’re doing is tweaks to the existing organic compounds to improve the selectivity, so that far fewer purification passes are required.
I think NGAREADER had this one right:
I’d really like this to be true but look up the company making the claim.
It’s a penny stock company and possibly making pump and dump type claims.
Some of this “news” happened a couple of years ago, not yesterday.
Mining is notorious for this sort of fraudulent claim.
Cool if it pans out. I’m always extra skeptical when it comes to mining PR.
Didn’t the extraction process, involving leaching ponds with some really nasty chemicals, had the EPA basically shutting down rare earth mining in the continental US?
What’s interesting is that in or near the Powder River Basin, where much of the coal used to supply electrical powerplants of the Midwest comes from. Mines that are approaching the “bust” part of the “boom and bust” cycle for most mining operations. Could this be a way that some are trying to flatten that curve? (Not that Gillette is going to become another Jeffrey City any time soon.)
We should put out some good talking points for the left.
“If the finds had been in Colorado then we’d mine them in an ecologically friendly and sustainable fashion using sub-Saharan African child slave labor, but they’re in Wyoming were exploitive capitalist mining companies will just rape the planet for obscene profits.”
“We need to block Australian coal companies from raping our own nation’s resources! The Biden Administration should only issue mining permits to companies overseen by Jim and Hunter, and in partnership with China Northern Rare Earth Group, Jiangxi Copper Co., China Molybdenum Co., and Russia’s Rostec, with refining and processing done in Russia’s Veliky Novgorod plant.”
Rare Earths aren’t particularly rare, the big problem is, if you look at the periodic table, they’ve got there own two rows, separate from all the rest. The reason is that the chemistry of all of them is so similar that they are always found in groups and the standard ways of separating them from each other don’t work. This makes refining them very messy and China has had an advantage since the cultural norm is to just dump all your waste like cyanides and metal saturated HF into the nearest water course. It’s not like the people down stream aren’t throwing there own waste in the same river. It’s not like anybody eats the fish, drinks the water or irrigates crops with that water, right? But this gives them a big cost advantage.
Oak ridge has been making improvements in rare earth separation.
ornl.gov news link
Laboratory bench scale processes no doubt. The industrial outdoor leaching ponds involved tons of crushed rock, a large basin lined with impermeable clay and filling it with nasty water soluble solvents like cyanide …then waiting for time to do its thing. Relatively inexpensive as long as you don’t really care about cleaning up the mess in the future! Or are a Communist regime that doesn’t care about the contamination in the present!
They’re doing their testing in industrial settings to get feedback on how their processes perform in real settings and at scale.
What they’re doing is tweaks to the existing organic compounds to improve the selectivity, so that far fewer purification passes are required.
I think NGAREADER had this one right:
Mining is notorious for this sort of fraudulent claim.