You’ve heard of old-world prospectors panning for gold or striking oil. Now, a high-tech venture is seeking out a new treasure: rare earth elements.
Rare earth elements are a key part of the transition to a green economy — from magnets in wind turbines to batteries in electric vehicles, they’re needed for technology that is increasingly in demand.
While the rare earth market is dominated by China, Canada also has some of the largest reserves in the world. But new rare earth mining projects have to balance the need for these materials with the environmental impacts that mining has on the land.
Instead of starting from scratch, the University of Alberta and Calgary-based CVW CleanTech are trying to mine these valuable substances from tailings, a waste product of open-pit oilsands mining.
Previously known as Titanium Corporation, CVW CleanTech is a publicly traded company that does research, engineering and co-ordinates financial resources to deploy its “Creating Value from Waste” technology on oilsands tailings.
Its project with the U of A reprocesses the tailings in search of monazite, a phosphate that can contain rare earths.
CVW CleanTech has already found a way to recover other important minerals from tailings, including titanium and zircon.
But company CEO Akshay Dubey said it’s important to learn how to recover substances like monazite because of the value of the rare earth elements.
“While 10 years ago you would never hear of rare earths, they’ve become increasingly important because the supply of those rare earths today [is] dominated by China,” Dubey told CBC’s Radio Active.
“To be able to extract this valuable resource that currently is just being disposed in waste tailings ponds and actually recover it for the benefit of all Canadians, I think is an incredibly good use of our time and effort,” Dubey said.
Dubey’s collaborator, University of Alberta engineering professor Qi Liu, has been working on how to recover minerals from oilsands since he started at the U of A in 1998.
How does it work?
Many of these substances can be found in the sand that lies on beaches in Australia and South Africa, Liu said.
“In a way, the oilsands tailings is just coarse sand … very similar to the beach sand, but obviously with a couple of major differences — one is we’ve got oil in it,” Liu said.
“So that makes it quite a bit more difficult.”
Radio Active9:46Valuable rare earth minerals from oilsands
The oil sands in Alberta’s north are rich with minerals. These minerals could then be used to build batteries for electric cars and wind turbines. Qi Liu is a professor in the Faculty of Engineering at the U of A. Akshay Dubey is the CEO of CVW CleanTech.
The CVW technology is cleaning these minerals from hydrocarbons. But the valuable monazite is actually in low concentrations to start.
“The amount in the original oilsands is actually quite low. It’s not economic, so you can’t really go after the oilsands oil itself,” Liu said.
“Fortunately … the oilsands operations, when they extract the bitumen away from the sand, most of the monazite actually goes with bitumen.”
As the bitumen is cleaned of any remaining sand, minerals and water, you end up with the tailings, which now contain high-grade monazite in high concentrations.
This is what makes the extraction commercially viable, Liu and Dubey argue.
From there, the denser monazite can be sifted from the residual sand and other minerals in the tailings.
Hardest part? Getting industry to buy in
The technology to recover zircon and titanium is ready for commercialization, Dubey said, adding that the final step is to build a facility at an oilsands site — which presents a challenge.
“The oilsands industry is typically very risk-averse. They’re not minerals companies, they’re oil and gas companies,” Dubey said.
But the economic case for this project is strong, they argue. Liu predicts that scaled up, the province could produce as much as 40,000 tonnes of monazite per year.
“From my perspective, this is actually one of the largest untapped resources in Canada, because the oilsands mining industry is so large and the tailings that they produce are so large,” Dubey said.