Ucore Rare Metals has announced the results of its recent testing of Molecular Recognition Technology (MRT). Ucore has successfully utilised MRT to produce a near quantitative separation of a heavy rare earth (HREE) concentrate consisting of 99+% of rare earth elements from a pregnant leach solution (PLS). The PLS was created by the extraction of metal values from beneficiated material sourced from the company’s Bokan Dotson-Ridge property in Southeast Alaska.
The production of a high purity HREE concentrate is the key and critical first step in the production, by separation, of individual high purity heavy rare earth salts. The resultant salts can be utilised to readily generate output products tailored to customer specifications. Those products include oxides, carbonates, nitrates and other salts of each of the individual REEs. A highly purified HREE concentrate can be considered an end product to be sold to independent rare earth separation facilities, or can be used as input material for an in-house individual rare earth salt separation facility. The tests on the PLS using MRT were conducted by IBC Advanced Technologies, headquartered near Salt Lake City. The MRT process yielded a >99% pure HREE concentrate, separated as a group, using proprietary MRT SuperLig resins in fixed bed format. Greater than 99% of the contained HREE’s were recovered from the Bokan PLS.
The >99% pure HREE concentrate is a carbonate salt rare earth concentrate (REC) comprised of heavy rare earths ranging from samarium (Sm) through lutetium (Lu). The REC is easily convertible to oxide or other salt forms depending upon commercial requirements. “This achievement speaks not just to the quality of Bokan feedstock but also to the company’s industry leading advancements in hydrometallurgy.” said Jim McKenzie, President and CEO of Ucore. “MRT is a disruptive technology in every positive sense. It’s a revolutionary alternative to the more costly, slower and environmentally invasive Solvent Extraction (SX) based methods of REE concentration and separation. What’s more, we’re excited to now be testing MRT as a platform for obtaining individual high purity rare earth oxides. This objective that has proven highly elusive in the REE processing community, outside of the more expensive and environmentally burdensome SX methodologies currently in use in China and beyond. Ucore will keep our shareholders posted on these further tests as they become available.”
“We’re exceptionally pleased with the results of this testing on the Bokan PLS,” said Ken Collison, COO of Ucore. “The ability to generate an HREE enriched concentrate efficiently is crucial to the success of any rare earth project outside of China. We’re excited to be introducing MRT to the REE sector, especially given its substantial record of success in other industries and its potential for rapid, clean and cost effective throughput.”
“The MRT process is remarkable in that it uses green chemistry procedures throughout,” said Ed Bentzen, Project Manager of Lyntek of Lakeview, Colorado. “No solvents or pernicious chemicals are used. The highly selective separations achieved with the MRT process make REE separations and recovery at high purities possible. Conservation of the rare earth metals has great importance, especially since large amounts, as much as 30% of these metals, remain unrecovered using conventional separation processes such as Solvent Extraction.”
“This is an exceptionally clean and high grade heavy REE mixed concentrate,” said Jack Lifton, a consultant to Ucore. “By clean, I mean free of radioactive elements and free of commonly produced elements that interfere with traditional Solvent Extraction separation such as Al, Fe, and fluoride. MRT is a proven industrial technology that is now being applied to rare earth ore metallurgy. I look forward to the next logical step, the separation and purification of the individual rare earths from the mixed concentrate via MRT.”