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Techno-Economic Assessment for Integrating Biosorption into Rare Earth Recovery Process

Metadata Updated: January 20, 2025

The current uncertainty in the global supply of rare earth elements (REEs) necessitates the development of novel extraction technologies that utilize a variety of REE source materials. Herein, we examined the techno-economic performance of integrating a biosorption approach into a large-scale process for producing salable total rare earth oxides (TREOs) from various feedstocks. An airlift bioractor is proposed to carry out a biosorption process mediated by bioengineered rare earth-adsorbing bacteria. Techno-econmic asssements were compared for three distinctive categories of REE feedstocks requiring different pre-processing steps. Key parameters identified that affect profitability include REE concentration, composition of the feedstock, and costs of feedstock pretreatment and waste management. Among the 11 specific feedstocks investigated, coal ash from the Appalachian Basin was projected to be the most profitable, largely due to its high-value REE content. Its cost breakdown includes pre-processing (primarily leaching) (8077.71%), biosorption (1619.04%), and oxalic acid precipitation and TREO roasting (3.35%). Surprisingly, biosorption from the high-grade Bull Hill REE ore is less profitable due to high material cost and low production revenue. Overall, our results confirmed that the application of biosorption to low-grade feedstocks for REE recovery is economically viable.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: Creative Commons Attribution

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Dates

Metadata Created Date January 11, 2025
Metadata Updated Date January 20, 2025

Metadata Source

Harvested from OpenEI data.json

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date January 11, 2025
Metadata Updated Date January 20, 2025
Publisher Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Maintainer
Doi 10.15121/1452714
Identifier https://data.openei.org/submissions/7132
Data First Published 2017-07-01T06:00:00Z
Data Last Modified 2018-06-14T16:17:29Z
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 019:20
Metadata Context https://openei.org/data.json
Metadata Catalog ID https://openei.org/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Data Quality True
Datagov Dedupe Retained 20250120155001
Harvest Object Id 492ad4b3-84ac-4ef7-8792-a11416bd5e52
Harvest Source Id 7cbf9085-0290-4e9f-bec1-91653baeddfd
Harvest Source Title OpenEI data.json
Homepage URL https://gdr.openei.org/submissions/964
License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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Program Code 019:006
Projectlead Holly Thomas
Projectnumber LLNL FY17 AOP 2.5.1.12
Projecttitle Extraction of Rare Earth Metals from Geothermal Fluids using Bioengineered Microbes
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash aa052918b91c29261163c33cb80b1774ad937d842c50a7f38bf3e28ea6504d2e
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