Critical minerals (DOE Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, Division of Minerals Sustainability)
GRAND FORKS, N.D. (KFGO) – The University of North Dakota has been awarded $8 million to design and build a first-of-its-kind facility that will be pivotal in the United States government’s push to reduce the country’s dependence on China when it comes to refining and producing the materials necessary for making cell phones and new cars, as well as the communication systems like sonar and radar necessary for national defense.
“Along with their industry partners and the DOE, UND is on the cutting edge of our energy future,” said Senator Kevin Cramer. “This award builds on the group’s efforts to research, find, and affordably extract rare earth elements and minerals in North Dakota. The significance of developing this domestic supply chain for national and energy security cannot be overstated.”
The grant comes from the funds made available by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and was allocated by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to advance the construction of a critical mineral extraction and separation facility.
Critical minerals are a group of 50 chemical elements in the periodic table that form the building blocks for modern and clean energy technologies. 17 of those 50 are known as rare earth elements (REEs) – an essential part of many high-tech devices, such as cellular telephones, computer hard drives, electric and hybrid vehicles, and flat-screen monitors and televisions. All of the REEs can be found in coal and coal byproducts, but it has only been in the last decade that the U.S. has focused its attention on the feasibility of economically recovering, separating, and refining REEs from coal domestically.
Grant Bromhal is the acting Division Director of Minerals Sustainability for the DOE. He said the U.S. is currently 99% reliant on China for processing REEs.
“Our reliance on these materials is likely to just grow and grow – especially with the expectation for more electrification, and with more renewable energy generation,” Bromhal said.
Bromhal said the U.S. has a goal of meeting 50% of the country’s needs for REEs from domestic sources like coal and coal waste by 2035. He said DOE has been partnering with UND for nearly a decade to study how to recover and refine critical minerals from state lignite coal mine wastes, with the goal of developing technologies to enable efficient production processes.
“They had already built a small-scale pilot plant to do exactly the same thing – to tweak the technologies that they’ve been building for extracting rare earth elements,” Bromhal said. “There’s a lot of rare earths in the coal is being mined in North Dakota right now as well as some other critical minerals, so we’re very excited they are working on developing this design.”
Bromhal says the UND demonstration facility will be developed in phases. Construction is projected to begin in 2026 with the hopes of it being operational by 2027.
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