By the end of next year, the Saskatchewan Research Council expects its Rare Earth Processing Facility will be operational.
The fully integrated minerals to metals rare earth processing facility, the first of its kind in North America, is still under construction in Saskatoon. Dr Muhammad Imran, P.Eng., is the Vice-President, Rare Earth Elements Division, Saskatchewan Research Council spoke about the opportunities and challenges faced by Saskatchewan, SRC and industry to develop a rare earth elements (REE) supply chain and the role of the facility to provide an industry model for future REE resource expansion in the province.
Rare earth metals are a key ingredient used to manufacture permanent magnets which are used in electric vehicles, wind turbines, electronics, and more. Imran went through the current and future demand for permanent magnets and explained that no one in North America is manufacturing permanent magnets or separating rare earth elements. China currently dominates the rare earth industrial sector.
To be able to manufacture the magnets, the elements must first be mined and then processed. There are several steps in that process. But, setting up a secure and reliable supply chain to accomplish that is difficult. REE prices are volatile and fluctuate in a six-month cycle. Companies focussed on one part of the stream – upstream, midstream or downstream – are challenged to quickly get their businesses up and running. If a company doesn’t have enough capital when prices drop, it is done.
In addition to explaining the demand, he went through why Saskatchewan is well positioned to establish an REE processing industry, from mining to magnets. The province has plentiful REE deposits and considerable mining expertise and talent. Canada has the fifth-largest rare earth mineral resources in the world. Most are still under exploration, but the potential is there to produce REE concentrate within the next five to ten years.
The Government of Saskatchewan released the 2030 Growth Plan in 2019, which said Saskatchewan has world-class resources of rare earth elements. To accelerate the development of cost-effective extraction technology, it said it would create the first North American REE processing plant to deliver individual high purity REE.
SRC has a strong history in mining and oil and gas with knowledge and experience pertaining to upstream, midstream and downstream. Imran said the facility will be trying to provide industry “footsteps to follow.” The concept for the facility, at a fundamental level, is that it will be built at a demonstration scale to allow for the commercialization of the technology. Imran said SRC is building relationships to make sure that, from piloting to commercializing, there is a smooth transition and that the technology works for commercial uses.
While rare earth elements are present in vast quantities in the world, they are not often found in significant concentrations. Deposits suitable for commercial extraction – which contain about two to four per cent rare earth elements — are rare. What comes out of a mine must be concentrated to 90 per cent.
SRC’s Monazite Processing Unit (MPU) will produce total rare earth oxides by separating the REE from the impurities. That mixture is fed to a Separation Unit that separates the elements from one another. In the third unit, a Metal Smelting Unit, some of those elements are converted to metals so they can be used to manufacture permanent batteries. These three units are to process 3,000 metric tonnes per year of monazite concentrate per year.
He explained a few of the challenges SRC had to overcome. The first was that it hoped to acquire some technology from China, but exports of the technology they required from that country were restricted. SRC looked around for another supplier, but no one could provide a performance guarantee. So, SRC took on the challenge of designing and fabricating the solvent extraction cells they needed. The work was done in Regina.
He also explained that REE processing work is very labour intensive. In China, the labour is available, but here, it would have been difficult to find enough operators. In one process, those operators would be needed to ensure the proper separation of oil and water. That process can take months. During that time, money is not being made, which creates another challenge. SRC found a solution with an artificial intelligence application developed through custom software to drop the labour requirement from 80 operators to five and the length of the process from months to a day.
