The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
White House and Ucore seek secure rare earth supply chains North of 60 Mining News – June 11, 2021
A floatplane touches down in front of Bokan Mountain, a critical minerals project in Alaska with rare earths, titanium, zirconium, niobium, vanadium, beryllium, and hafnium.
A RapidSX rare earths separation circuit at Innovation Metals' commercialization and development facility in Ontario.
Ucore Rare Metals Inc. believes the Biden administration's newly announced strategy to strengthen America's supply chains aligns with its own vision to disrupt China's dominance of the rare earth elements supply chain in the United States.
"We are very pleased with the White House's concern for REEs and its efforts to spur the domestic production of critical materials," said Ucore Rare Metals Chairman and CEO Pat Ryan.
Based on the feedback from a 100-day American supply chains assessment ordered by President Joe Biden in February, the White House has begun to form a strategy for the critical minerals and metals that feed into nearly every U.S. supply chain.
This includes encouraging environmentally and socially sound critical mineral production and processing projects on American soil and abroad.
On the domestic front, a working group of federal agencies led by the U.S. Department of Interior has been instructed to identify sites where critical minerals can be responsibly produced and processed in the U.S.
The White House, however, wants to ensure that any such critical mineral projects are developed at the highest standards for environmental protections and is assembling a second federal interagency team to identify gaps in mining-related statutes and regulations that may need to be updated by Congress.
The Biden administration also plans to invest billions of dollars into domestic and international production of critical minerals, especially rare earths and battery metals vital to renewable energy and national defense.
This continued support for the Department of Defense to deploy Defense Production Act Title 3 incentives – grants, loans, loan guarantees, and offtake agreements – for sustainably-produced strategic and critical materials in the U.S. is among the supply chain investments that could benefit Ucore and its vision.
In 2019, former President Donald Trump used presidential powers under this act to authorize the Pentagon to pursue the reestablishment of a U.S. rare earths mines-to-magnets supply chain.
Under the Trump administration, the Pentagon focused largely on the separation and processing of rare earths, a difficult and key segment of the rare earths supply chain.
This dovetails well with Alaska2023, Ucore's strategy to develop the Alaska Strategic Metals Complex, a heavy rare earths processing facility in Southeast Alaska by 2023 and a separate SMC that will produce light REEs.
Though often referred to as a single entity, rare earths are a group of 17 elements – the 15 lanthanides that make up the second row from the bottom on the periodic table plus yttrium and scandium.
Light REEs make up the first seven elements of the lanthanide series and include lanthanum, for which the series gets its name; cerium, used for polishing high-quality optical surfaces; praseodymium, valued for its magnetic and optical properties; and neodymium, an extremely magnetic element.
The remaining eight lanthanides are considered heavy REEs, which are less abundant in most deposits and tend to be more valuable, including terbium and dysprosium used in the magnets in a wide array of consumer goods and military hardware.
Ucore's heavy and light rare earth processing facilities will feature RapidSX, an REE separation technology developed by its subsidiary, Innovation Metals Corp.
The RapidSX technology represents an enormous upgrade and modernization of the conventional solvent extraction technology that has been the standard for separating rare earths for more than 40 years. While effective, traditional solvent extraction sometimes takes hundreds of stages to extract all the rare earths from a solution containing the 17 notoriously interlocked elements.
Utilizing a column-based platform developed by Gareth Hatch and his team at Innovation Metals, RapidSX reduces the number of process steps required in each SX circuit by 85 to 90%. This reduces the time, cost, and environmental footprint when compared to the solvent extraction techniques popularized in China, which has much lower labor costs and lackluster environmental standards.
"China has long dominated the REE supply chain, but with the US government's help, we can and will use our groundbreaking 21st century separation technology, RapidSX, to bring control back into the hands of Americans," said Ryan.
In the longer term, Ucore plans to develop a mine at Bokan Mountain, an REE and critical minerals project on Prince of Wales Island and only about 35 miles away from the planned Alaska SMC.
According to a resource calculation completed in 2019, Bokan Mountain hosts roughly 31,722 metric tons of rare earth oxides, 17,715 metric tons titanium dioxide, 9,001 metric tons zirconium, 2,205 metric tons niobium, 464 metric tons vanadium, 231 metric tons beryllium, and 178 metric tons hafnium in the indicated category.
All of these metals are considered critical to the United States and would feed into renewable energy, electric vehicle, and other industrial supply chains the White House hopes to make more "resilient, diverse, and secure."
"Our Alaska2023 business model is founded on this transformative technology and the development of a resilient US supply chain through the development of two REE separation plants and ultimately a HREE mine at Bokan Mountain Alaska – the very definition of US resiliency," said Ryan.
Further information on the Biden administration's American supply chain strategy and its implications for the mining sector can be read at White House wants new critical mining, laws in the June 9, 2021 edition of Metal Tech News: https://www.metaltechnews.com/story/2021/06/09/tech-metals/white-house-wants-new-critical-mining-laws/583.html.
Over his more than 16 years of covering mining and mineral exploration, Shane has become renowned for his ability to report on the sector in a way that is technically sound enough to inform industry insiders while being easy to understand by a wider audience.
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