Ucore reports Bokan HREE processing win

In the race to deliver heavy rare earth metals to western markets, Ucore Rare Metals Inc.'s Bokan Dotson-Ridge property in Southeast Alaska may sprint to the front of the pack with the help of an award-winning industrial process.

Ucore recently completed a successful test in which it produced a heavy rare earth concentrate from material found in the deposit, using Molecular Recognition Technology, a proprietary process developed by IBC.

The concentrate, which is 99 percent rare earth elements, was extracted from a minerals-rich solution by IBC Advanced Technologies Inc. of Salt Lake City.

Ucore said production of the high-purity HREE concentrate is the key and critical first step in the production, by separation, of individual high-purity heavy rare earth salts. The resultant salts can be used to readily generate a range of output products tailored to customer specifications, including oxides, carbonates, nitrates and other salts of each of the individual rare earth element. A highly purified HREE concentrate can be considered an end product to be sold to independent rare earth separation facilities, or can be used as input material for an in-house individual rare earth salt separation facility.

"This achievement speaks not just to the quality of Bokan feedstock but also to the company's industry leading advancements in hydrometallurgy," said Ucore President and CEO Jim McKenzie. "MRT is a disruptive technology in every positive sense. It's a revolutionary alternative to the more costly, slower and environmentally invasive solvent extraction-based methods of REE concentration and separation.

"What's more, we're excited to now be testing MRT as a platform for obtaining individual high-purity rare earth oxides. This objective has proven highly elusive in the REE processing community, outside of the more expensive and environmentally burdensome SX methodologies currently in use in China and beyond. Ucore will keep our shareholders posted on these further tests as they become available," McKenzie added.

Ucore Chief Operating Officer Ken Collison said the ability to generate an HREE-enriched concentrate efficiently is crucial to the success of any rare earth project outside of China.

"We're excited to be introducing MRT to the REE sector, especially given its substantial record of success in other industries and its potential for rapid, clean and cost-effective throughput," he added.

Ed Bentzen, project manager of Lyntek Inc. of Lakeview, Colo., said the MRT process "is remarkable in that it uses green chemistry procedures throughout."

No solvents or pernicious chemicals are used in the process, and the highly selective separations achieved with the MRT process make REE separations and recovery at high purities possible. Conservation of the rare earth metals has great importance, especially since large amounts, as much as 30 percent of these metals, remain unrecovered using conventional separation processes such as solvent extraction, Bentzen observed.

Ucore consultant Jack Lifton described the material extracted in the tests as an exceptionally clean and high-grade heavy REE mixed concentrate.

"By clean, I mean free of radioactive elements and free of commonly produced elements that interfere with traditional solvent extraction separation such as aluminum, iron, and fluoride. MRT is a proven industrial technology that is now being applied to rare earth ore metallurgy. I look forward to the next logical step, the separation and purification of the individual rare earths from the mixed concentrate via MRT," Lipton said.

The testing was conducted by IBC, using its MRT products in fixed bed format.

The IBC process is designed to bind selectively with ions based on multiple parameters such as size, coordination chemistry, and geometry. In contrast, separation methods used in conventional technologies such as ion exchange, solvent extraction and precipitation generally recognize differences between ions based only on a single parameter.

High-purity HREE concentrate

The HREE concentrate resulting from the process is a carbonate salt rare earth concentrate comprised of heavy rare earths, ranging from samarium through lutetium. Rare earth content of the concentrate includes 24.54 percent samarium, 4 percent europium, 21.82 percent gadolinium, 6.01 percent terbium, 5.96 percent erbium, 1.71 percent thulium, 6.09 percent ytterbium and 1.08 percent lutetium.

As preparation for the MRT testing process, non-REEs, including aluminum, iron, thorium, titanium, and zirconium, are first removed from the Bokan solution by way of precipitation at controlled pH levels. Removal by way of pH-controlled precipitation results in cost-saving economies and reduction in the number of MRT resin columns used in the process.

In addition to the 99 percent-plus REE content, Ucore said non-target elements including copper, nickel, zinc, cobalt and manganese remain in the solution. This output solution is then fed into the first resin column designed to selectively remove these non-target elements. The rare earth metals, as a group, are then selectively removed from the resulting raffinate, or solution which has had components removed through binding, onto an additional resin column. These bound elements are then removed by washing with a solvent into essentially a pure mixed rare earth concentrate.

Ucore said the resulting mixture contains greater than 99 percent of the REE that was contained in the original pregnant solution.

This rare earth-enriched solution is fed through a further extraction column, which is designed to separate the HREEs as a group.

The remaining solution containing the light rare earths, as well as yttrium, is preserved for further processing.

Ucore said it is working to develop a high-purity yttrium salt as an additional output product of the MRT process.

Industry game-changer?

Industry analysts and observers say the new concentrate could represent a game-changing breakthrough for Ucore and for the rare earth metals processing sector, as a whole.

"Ucore has been the major winner in 2014, and this relative outperformance may be just the beginning as they announce … a major breakthrough in rare earth metallurgy," reported Gold Stock Trades Editor Jeb Handwerger recently.

"The Bokan project hosts a potential world-class deposit for dysprosium, (which is) used to make high-tech magnets for modern defense contractors. In 2012, the U.S. Defense Department entered into a strategic partnership with Ucore to bring the resource into production, showing the extent to which the U.S. government wants ways to reduce reliance on China for rare earths," wrote Alessandro Bruno for Rare Earth & Technology Metals Intel.

"Ucore is one of the few rare earths mining juniors that continues to run its course toward production," Bruno added.

Lipton said Ucore's "test" of MRT for rare earth gross separation from a pregnant leach solution has turned out to be a "home run."

"I understand the disclosure in the press release to say that essentially 100 percent of the HREEs (defined by Ucore as samarium through lutetium, inclusive) extracted from the beneficiated or concentrated ore into the PLS has been recovered from the PLS through a combination of wet chemistry and MRT," he said. "This is a great achievement, and along, with the similar results announced by Rare Element Resources, means that a new threshold has been established in the junior rare earth space for business model success.

"The next step for both companies is obvious: They must now separate the mixed rare earths into individual high-purity salts. These will then be the feed stocks for metal and alloy making as well as for fine chemical work (for lasers and phosphors for example). Both companies will be tasked to recover all of the individual rare earths at as high a level (hopefully 100 percent) as they have recovered the mixed rare earths contained in their PLSs," consultant Lipton said.

"The bar has been raised, and it is now set. The race is not between Ucore and RER as much as it is between Ucore, RER and everyone else in both the junior and senior spaces," he said.

Lipton also said that even the best metallurgy does not guarantee that the separation of the individual rare earths in the mixed concentrate can be achieved.

"Yet the production of pure rare earth mixed concentrates without radioactive species and elements inimical to further separation is necessary for any rare earth junior to achieve a high-value product mix," he added.