Rare earth elements recycled from coal waste could spare Wyoming Black Hills

In January of 2016, the US Forest Service suspended the Draft Environmental Impact Study for a Wyoming Black Hills mountaintop-removal mine that would extract more minerals containing elements like neodymium and praseodymium from the Belle Fourche watershed. In 2017 Rare Element Resources said its mine just upstream of the South Dakota border in the headwaters of the Redwater River, a tributary of the Belle Fourche/Cheyenne, announced financial backing from General Atomics and applied for enough water for the mineral separation process despite widespread contamination in Crook County wells. 

Acid mine drainage can kill or cause birth defects in the birds and mammals that happen into contaminated standing water on these sites but Wyoming Senator John Barrasso and other Earth raping Republicans are working overtime to defund environmental protection, especially on public lands. 

Without further permitting from the Forest Service Europe’s GA Umwelt-und Ingenieurtechnik GmbH (UIT) proposes to use a $22 million award from the US Department of Energy to move rare-earth oxides mined in 2015 and stored in tanks near Sundance. A demonstration-scale separation and processing plant is expected to cost $35-40 million and a site in Upton, Wyoming near the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway (BNSF) was confirmed earlier this month as the location for the facility.

Americans are beginning to get religion on existing rare earth stocks and we have more buried in landfills than all other developed countries combined but recycling rare earths in the US is virtually nonexistent. Japan recovers most of her needs from the waste stream but China currently dominates the rare earth market. 

A dying strip mine near Gillette and Upton is gearing up to harvest minerals containing the rare earth element dysprosium from coal waste.

The Bureau of Land Management estimates there are close to 5,200 abandoned coal mining sites yet to be fully reclaimed nationwide. “We’re already actively reclaiming a lot of these abandoned mine sites,” said Virginia McLemore, the senior economic geologist for New Mexico’s Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources. “If it should be that rare earths are in those wastes, then it becomes attractive.” [The plan to turn coal country into a rare earth powerhouse]