Abstract:

Rare Earth Elements (REE) are essential to many critical electronic components, such as sensors, batteries, and magnets, used for computing and are a vital component of renewable energy production and distribution. Contrary to what their name implies, they are found in low abundance in many ore deposits across the world. Purification of REE requires a much greater degree of processing – that is it requires more time and energy and is more chemically intensive – than is necessary for the elemental separation of other metals. These factors, along with market dynamics, make recovery of rare earths from mineral species rather challenging for many countries. However the demand for these minerals and elements will only continue to rise as the world continues to electrify, decarbonize, and bring more sophisticated computing capabilities to market.

The known processes today that recover and purify these rare earth elements have yet to be industrialized in Canada, the US, or the Americas but the demand for the metals in these regions continues to grow. Expansion of the domestic production of REE is being advanced through heavy investment by both the mining industry and the US government. Historically, the path forward would have heavily focused on renewed exploration to identify virgin resources to be exploited, which takes decades to develop. Both groups also recognize that meeting the domestic supply goals will require new technologies to be invented and deployed across the entire supply chain. Current REE-enriched wastewater, such as mine-impacted streams, is a clear starting point for building domestic capacity in the near term and avoids the high environmental cost of production from virgin materials.

At Allonnia, we are harnessing the element-level selectivity afforded by metal-binding proteins to unlock REE capture and purification from dilute wastewater. Our strategy capitalizes on the vital and highly specialized biological processes that govern the acquisition, transport, sequestration, and elimination of metals. We are developing deployment systems that will allow these novel biological solutions to create environmentally responsible technologies at scale for operating mining and manufacturing sites. Allonnia’s unique technology utilizes metal-binding proteins attached to a solid support to selectively complex with REEs in the presence of high levels of interfering metals found in wastewater such as aluminum, calcium, magnesium and iron. Our ion exchange-like deployment allows for the passive treatment of wastewater where the REEs are retained in the column and non-target elements pass through. The REEs are then eluted at significantly higher concentrations with minimal other cations present, resulting in a high-purity tREE solution.

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Dr. Dan Stigers