America's heartland supplies domestic REEs

With the technology and facilities already in place, Rare Earth Salts Separations and Refining LLC has stepped up to bat for the first fully domestic U.S. supply of critical rare earth elements by announcing the production and sale of its high-purity terbium and yttrium from recycled feedstock.

Founded in 2012 by Rare Earth Salts Chief Technology Officer Joseph Brewer, his goal was to address the global need for a cost-effective, sustainable, and environmentally friendly rare earth element separation process.

"The need for securing both domestically sourced rare earth elements and domestic rare earth element processing infrastructure is critical," said Brewer. "In an industry that has not seen viable refining innovation in more than three-quarters of a century, we are proud of our proprietary, cost-effective and environmentally friendly way for the separation of rare earth elements."

Much like other REE separation companies, Rare Earth Salts has developed its own patented and proprietary technologies for the separation and refining of rare earth elements to high purity from various feedstock.

Holding a massive head start in the REE race, the company has already established itself at its 50,000-square-foot headquarters, which comprises a commercial demonstration plant, laboratory, and research and development facility within the heartland of America – Nebraska.

Foreseeing the imbalance of importing critical materials, Rare Earth Salts has directed its process to produce three of the "BIG 4" most critical rare earth oxides: neodymium, praseodymium, and terbium.

In addition to the announcement of its terbium and yttrium production, the company says it also recently produced hundreds of kilograms of high-purity neodymium-praseodymium from light rare earth concentrate feedstock, as well as many metric tons of high-purity lanthanum.

"We are proud to provide vital solutions to ensure a resilient domestic supply chain of strategic components essential to the United States and its allies' security and economic prosperity," said Rare Earth Salts CEO Aaron Dowd.

As the only commercially scaled non-solvent extraction heavy rare earth element separation company currently in the world, Rare Earth Salts has come at a time when domestic supply was all but non-existent and on a ticking time bomb that is the deficit of supply to the ever-growing demand.

With electric motors requiring REEs to power green energy technologies, it was becoming increasingly evident that zero-carbon or even low-carbon goals were going to be a miss unless things progressed more quickly – and seeing how that is generally very unlikely due to sourcing the raw material or having existing facilities to recycle – there is perhaps now a better chance to at least be within the ballpark of those goals, and Rare Earth Salts can help show the way.