NETL fly ash research earns awards consideration

The Morgantown, West Virginia-based National Energy Technology Laboratory says its Targeted Rare Earth Extraction (TREE) process, designed to recover rare earth and minor metals from coal and coal byproducts, has been named a finalist in the 2022 R&D 100 Awards competition.

NETL describes TREE as “an environmentally friendly and cost-effective technology to extract rare-earth elements and critical minerals (REEs-CMs) from a broad range of coal and coal-processing materials and waste streams, including bottom ash, fly ash, ponded ash and landfill ash.”

Rare-earth elements can include cerium, gallium, germanium and lanthanum, while critical materials can include aluminum, chromium and nickel. The metals are used in a wide range of applications, including for making computers, in clean energy technologies and defense systems.

NETL researchers say they developed the technology “to help build a strong domestic supply chain of REEs-CMs. U.S. manufacturers need REEs-CMs to produce high-tech consumer products and electronics, electric and hybrid vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines and components for the nation’s defense.” According to NETL, the United States currently imports more than 80 percent of its REEs-CMs from offshore suppliers.

The lab states, “NETL’s revolutionary discovery also supports the development of technologies to decarbonize the U.S. electricity sector by 2035 and the economy by 2050 while creating good-paying, clean energy jobs in communities that have produced fossil fuels and fossil fuel-based power and have an abundance of coal and coal byproducts.”

The laboratory says its process “significantly improves upon current REE-CM extraction methods. TREE employs ambient temperatures and pressure, requires almost no material preprocessing and reduces the amounts of acids and organic solvents required to conduct extraction.”

NETL and its partners have worked in the Powder River Basin (PRB), a coal-producing area in Wyoming and Montana, where NETL researchers estimate 2,300 tons of REEs could be extracted per year from coal ash in the region.

The members of NETL’s TREE research team are Ward Burgess, Alison Fritz, Christina Lopano, Mengling Stuckman, Thomas Tarka and Jonathan Yang. TREE was named a finalist in the Process/Prototyping category.

The R&D World media organization competition drew entries from 12 different countries and regions, NETL says.