Extracting Rare Earth Minerals From Coal Mines ‘Winning Proposition’ for UK, MPs Told

An aerial view at a coal mine in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, on Nov. 1, 2021. (Matthew Horwood/Getty Images)

Reopening coal mines to produce rare earth minerals seems to be a “winning proposition” for the UK, a policy expert told MPs.

Giving evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday, Duncan Wood, vice president for Strategy and New Initiatives at the U.S. think tank Wilson Center, said the proposal is being considered for a number of old coal mines.

There’s now “the potential for going back in there and getting rare earth out of those coal mines, often out of just the flooded mines themselves, and then creating the processing capacity around those. That seems to be something where you have a win-win situation for a lot of folks,” he said.

Rare earth elements (REE) is an umbrella term for 18 metallic elements that have a wide range of applications ranging from LCD displays, Computer hard drives, electric cars, aircraft engines, nuclear fuel, and weapons.

Experts previously warned that the UK has to wean its dependency on China, which extracted around 80 percent of global REE supplies until a few years ago.

As the relationship between the communist-controlled country and Western democracies deteriorated in recent years, countries are rushing to diversify their supply chains, including finding new ways to extract them.

In 2017, researchers from the University of Kentucky boasted the “groundbreaking accomplishment” of producing a 98 percent pure rare earth concentrate from a coal source “using an environmentally-conscious and cost-effective process.”

More studies have since been done, including a South African review that confirmed “the abundance of REEs in coal,“ although the concentration varies from source to source, and a U.S. study on extracting RRE from Coal mine byproducts.

Commenting on what the UK can do domestically, Wood suggested using old mining sites appears to be “a winning proposition in terms of regenerating some of the mining communities in across the country that lost out in the 1980s,” when the government closed a number of less productive coal mines.

Samples of rare earth minerals at Molycorp's Mountain Pass Rare Earth facility in Mountain Pass, Calif., on June 29, 2015. (David Becker/Reuters)

The British Geological Survey on Monday published a report, identifying eight areas across the UK as potential sites for critical minerals mining.

However, “by happy coincidence, or unhappy coincidence, almost all of those are coincident with areas of extraordinarily high protection from national parks standpoint, or outstanding natural beauty. And that’s just the nature of the kind of the minerals globally,” Aidan Davy, Chief operating officer of International Council on Mining and Metals, told MPs at the same hearing.

Citing the Woodsmith fertiliser mining project that’s being developed in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, Davey said mining company Anglo American managed to “navigate incredibly strong planning restrictions by applying extraordinarily high standards of ESG [environmental, social, and governance] due diligence,” proving the feasibility to push ahead mining projects in these areas.

The United States in 2022 passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) which contains provisions to subsidize electric vehicles that use minerals not produced by “a foreign entity of concern.”

Wood said the U.S. government and industry had begun focusing on supply chains for a while, but “what really pulled it together, I believe at the end, was actually the focus on competition with China.”

Asked what the UK can do to narrow the gap, panelists told MPs that the UK has unique advantages in education, innovation, and some highly specialised production areas.

Vale’s nickel refinery in Wales produces “a very, very high purity of nickel product” that is “very hard to replace,” and the UK supplies 70 percent of its output to the EU market, said Christopher Heron, director for communication and public affairs at Eurometaux.

He also said the UK is very competitive in producing platinum group metals, with industry-leading company Johnson Matthey at its helm.

Wood said he believes the UK’s “extraordinary higher education system ... has a great deal to offer.”

The “21st century Britain is more about questions of research and design, thinking about how you can make more efficient electric vehicles, how you can make more efficient batteries, how you can reduce the weight of batteries and vehicles, how you can actually create perhaps modular batteries where you can switch parts in and out. These are things that the United Kingdom excels in still today,” he said.

The panelists also said the UK can be more competitive than some countries by making sure “the supply chain here is as green as possible.”

Asked what are the main obstacles, he told MPs that people’s perception of the mining industry and the long licencing process are two huge hurdles.

“There is an overwhelming tendency these days to say, ... although I agree with the general principle, I just don’t want it, I don’t want to see that built, even if it’s not in my backyard,” he said.

He also said the “highly” technology-dependent industry “has done a lousy job of selling themselves” to job-seeking young people by portraying itself in a 19th-century image of digging things out of the ground.

The lengthy process of applying for a permit, which he said could take seven to ten years in the United States, is also a huge turn-off for investors, he said.