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SPREE: Separation and Purification of Rare Earth Elements

 
DARPA seeks input on novel methods to Separate, Purify Rare Earth Elements

Summary

Rare Earth Elements (REEs) comprise 17 elements, including scandium, yttrium, and the lanthanide series. 

REEs are used in a range of products and manufacturing processes, including permanent magnets, catalysts, fiber optics, and phosphor displays, which are, critical to wind turbines, cell phones, and electric vehicles, among other modern technologies. 

However, REE extraction, separation, and purification from a complex feedstock can be environmentally degrading, energy inefficient, and difficult to permit in the U.S.

From the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s, the U.S. was the world’s major supplier of REEs. Today, the U.S. imports nearly 100% of REEs used in commercial products and exports some domestically mined REE minerals for economic processing overseas. 

This dependence on foreign sources for processing and purification represents a significant vulnerability for the U.S. supply chain, which could be mitigated by developing a domestic manufacturing industry to extract and purify REE resources within the U.S. 

However, widely-utilized methods of extraction and separation of REEs, especially from each other, can be inefficient, energy-intensive, complex, and/or produce sizeable amounts of hazardous waste due to the use of toxic reagents and solvents, resulting in domestic permitting challenges due to predicted environmental impacts. 

As a result, there is a significant commercial barrier for domestic mining and refining of REEs.

Unlike DARPA’s Environmental Microbes as a BioEngineering Resource (EMBER) program, which seeks to separate and purify REEs using novel biotechnology and biomolecules, SPREE targets a wide range of novel techniques to separate REEs from each other. Since REEs have similar physical and chemical properties and occur together in deposits, separation of individual elements is challenging but necessary to provide a highly pure domestic REE supply. 

This ARC topic will address the following question: How can we purify Department of Defense (DoD)-relevant REEs using environmentally sustainable, energy-efficient, and commercially viable techniques that can be incorporated by the U.S. domestic mining sector?

 

This program is now complete

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Opportunity

DARPA-EA-24-01-01

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