These Two Companies Are Innovating To Help With America’s Rare Earths Challenge
Excerpt from Forbes:
As we deal with our domestic political turmoil, it’s important we not lose sight of some critical technology challenges we face regardless who’s in office and what size our Covid payouts are. Chief among those is that China continues to have the U.S. over a barrel when it comes to our supply of rare earth elements (REEs), which are vital for everything from batteries to electric vehicles to cell phones to defense technologies.
The good news is that, as I’ve covered extensively in the past year, numerous companies and the U.S. government are coming together to solve that problem in a variety of ways, from starting up old REE mines and processing facilities, to recycling our e-waste and recovering and reusing the REEs it contains.
Now two new players have entered the REE fray, both with plans to tackle the problem from a different angle: recovering REEs from already-mined materials.
The first of the two, ElementUS, is a joint venture announced last October between DADA Holdings (principal owner of New Day Aluminum) and Enervoxa, a Canadian green technologies company. DADA is a Fort Lauderdale investment and management company focused on metals and mining, while New Day is the parent company to Noranda Bauxite in St. Ann, Jamaica, which mines and processes bauxite ore for use in its alumina refining, and Noranda Alumina in Gramercy, Louisiana, which produces (among other things) smelter-grade alumina from bauxite, as a feedstock to the aluminum industry. Enervoxa, meanwhile, develops extraction technologies to process various mining tailings, and is also active in hydrogen production for clean energy, along with other green technologies.
ElementUS was formed to extract REEs and other valuable minerals from bauxite residue left over from Noranda’s mining operation in Jamaica. “One of the biggest challenges for North American alumina refining is bauxite residue,” said John Habisreitinger, New Day’s COO. “We’ve never been able to find a sustainable use for it before, but now we’re aiming to be a zero-residue operation. The new joint venture will reclaim the residue by separating it into useful minerals—metals and REEs.” ElementUS will build an extraction plant, which will have a one million ton per year processing capacity, on the Noranda refinery site in Gramercy, where New Day has about 35 million dry tons of bauxite residue waiting to be processed. The residue contains 10 of the 17 REEs, as well as titanium, iron, and gallium.