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Demand for rare earthRare earths elements (REEs)Rare earth elements in energy and defence technologies is rising, underscoring the need for exploring domestic resources, including unconventional sources. Coal ashCoal ash is abundant, but geographically dispersed, compositionally heterogeneous, and stored across legacy impoundments and landfills, creating challenges for economic REE recoveryRecovery. Prior studies emphasize resource characterization and plant-level technoeconomics, but the system-level cost drivers of a national supply chainSupply chains remain underexplored. Here we present a preliminary, scoping analysis that includes a geospatially explicit and basin-informed coal-ash database, process mass-balances, and technoeconomic data to design a cost-optimal supply chain for REERare earth elements recovery from coal ashCoal ash. As a counterfactual, we first model a centralized “ship-the-ash” configuration to decompose costs and identify dominant contributors. Even under favourable assumptions (100% REO recoveryRecovery, full ash saleability, and high Nd/Pr pricing), operating revenues fail to offset costs, with bulk transport of low-grade material emerging as a key cost driver. This outcome demonstrates that transport penalties overwhelm single-stage centralized strategies as large scale ash transport is not economically viable. Consequently, these results motivate a multi-stage architecture in which the first pass (beneficiation and/or leachingLeaching) occurs on site—ideally with mobile or relocatable units—to reduce transported mass and move higher-value intermediates to regional hubs for finishing, which can increase the chances of economic feasibility.

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Optimizing Domestic Supply Chain Strategies for Rare Earth Element Recovery from Coal Ash

  • 会议论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年

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  • Brent McNeil,
  • Kavitha G. Menon,
  • Obaid Khwaja,
  • Alinson Santos Xavier,
  • Chukwunwike Iloeje

摘要

Demand for rare earthRare earths elements (REEs)Rare earth elements in energy and defence technologies is rising, underscoring the need for exploring domestic resources, including unconventional sources. Coal ashCoal ash is abundant, but geographically dispersed, compositionally heterogeneous, and stored across legacy impoundments and landfills, creating challenges for economic REE recoveryRecovery. Prior studies emphasize resource characterization and plant-level technoeconomics, but the system-level cost drivers of a national supply chainSupply chains remain underexplored. Here we present a preliminary, scoping analysis that includes a geospatially explicit and basin-informed coal-ash database, process mass-balances, and technoeconomic data to design a cost-optimal supply chain for REERare earth elements recovery from coal ashCoal ash. As a counterfactual, we first model a centralized “ship-the-ash” configuration to decompose costs and identify dominant contributors. Even under favourable assumptions (100% REO recoveryRecovery, full ash saleability, and high Nd/Pr pricing), operating revenues fail to offset costs, with bulk transport of low-grade material emerging as a key cost driver. This outcome demonstrates that transport penalties overwhelm single-stage centralized strategies as large scale ash transport is not economically viable. Consequently, these results motivate a multi-stage architecture in which the first pass (beneficiation and/or leachingLeaching) occurs on site—ideally with mobile or relocatable units—to reduce transported mass and move higher-value intermediates to regional hubs for finishing, which can increase the chances of economic feasibility.