rare-earth

13 Articles

Flash Joule Heating Recovers The Good Stuff

April 20, 2026 by 15 Comments

Rare earth materials are a hot button topic these days. They’re important for everything from electric vehicles to defence hardware, they’re valuable, and everyone wishes they had some to dig up in their backyard. Lithium, too, is a commodity nobody can get enough of, with the demand for high-performance batteries grows each year.

When a material is desirable, and strategically important, we often start thinking of ways to conserve or recycle it because we just can’t get enough. In that vein, researchers have been developing a new technique to recover rare earth metals and lithium from waste streams so that it can be put back to good use.
Continue reading “Flash Joule Heating Recovers The Good Stuff” →

Finding A Way To Produce Powerful Motors Without Rare Earths

January 13, 2026 by 40 Comments

The electric vehicle revolution has created market forces to drive all sorts of innovations. Battery technology has progressed at a rapid pace, and engineers have developed ways to charge vehicles at ever more breakneck rates. Similarly, electric motors have become more powerful and more compact, delivering greater performance than ever before.

In the latter case, while modern EV motors are very capable things, they’re also reliant on materials that are increasingly hard to come by. Most specifically, it’s the rare earth materials that make their magnets so good. The vast majority of these minerals come from China, with trade woes and geopolitics making it difficult to get them at any sort of reasonable price. Thus has sprung up a new market force, pushing engineers to search for new ways to make their motors compact, efficient, and powerful.

Continue reading “Finding A Way To Produce Powerful Motors Without Rare Earths” →

Hackaday Links Column Banner

Hackaday Links: July 13, 2025

July 13, 2025 by 8 Comments

There’s interesting news out of Wyoming, where a coal mine was opened this week. But the fact that it’s the first new coal mine in 50 years isn’t the big news — it’s the mine’s abundance of rare earth elements that’s grabbing the headlines. As we’ve pointed out before, rare earth elements aren’t actually all that rare, they’re just widely distributed through the Earth’s crust, making them difficult to recover. But there are places where the concentration of rare earth metals like neodymium, dysprosium, scandium, and terbium is slightly higher than normal, making recovery a little less of a challenge. The Brook Mine outside of Sheridan, Wyoming is one such place, at least according to a Preliminary Economic Assessment performed by Ramaco Resources, the mining company that’s developing the deposit.

The PEA states that up to 1,200 tons of rare earth oxides will be produced a year, mainly from the “carbonaceous claystones and shales located above and below the coal seams.” That sounds like good news to us for a couple of reasons. First, clays and shales are relatively soft rocks, making it less energy- and time-intensive to recover massive amounts of raw material than it would be for harder rock types. But the fact that the rare earth elements aren’t locked inside the coal is what’s really exciting. If the REEs were in the coal itself, that would present something similar to the “gasoline problem” we’ve discussed before. Crude oil is a mixture of different hydrocarbons, so if you need one fraction, like diesel, but not another, like gasoline, perhaps because you’ve switched to electric vehicles, tough luck — the refining process still produces as much gasoline as the crude contains. In this case, it seems like the coal trapped between the REE-bearing layers is the primary economic driver for the mine, but if in the future the coal isn’t needed, the REEs could perhaps be harvested and the coal simply left behind to be buried in the ground whence it came.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: July 13, 2025” →

From The Ashes: Coal Ash May Offer Rich Source Of Rare Earth Elements

March 19, 2025 by 39 Comments

For most of history, the world got along fine without the rare earth elements. We knew they existed, we knew they weren’t really all that rare, and we really didn’t have much use for them — until we discovered just how useful they are and made ourselves absolutely dependent on them, to the point where not having them would literally grind the world to a halt.

This dependency has spurred a search for caches of rare earth elements in the strangest of places, from muddy sediments on the sea floor to asteroids. But there’s one potential source that’s much closer to home: coal ash waste. According to a study from the University of Texas Austin, the 5 gigatonnes of coal ash produced in the United States between 1950 and 2021 might contain as much as $8.4 billion worth of REEYSc — that’s the 16 lanthanide rare earth elements plus yttrium and scandium, transition metals that aren’t strictly rare earths but are geologically associated with them and useful in many of the same ways. Continue reading “From The Ashes: Coal Ash May Offer Rich Source Of Rare Earth Elements” →

Making EV Motors, And Breaking Up With Rare Earth Elements

July 9, 2024 by 85 Comments

Rare earth elements are used to produce magnets with very high strength that also strongly resist demagnetization, their performance is key to modern motors such as those in electric vehicles (EVs). The stronger the magnets, the lighter and more efficient a motor can be. So what exactly does it take to break up with rare earths?

Rare earth elements (REEs) are actually abundant in the Earth’s crust, technically speaking. The problem is they are found in very low concentrations, and inconveniently mixed with other elements when found. Huge amounts of ore are required to extract useful quantities, which requires substantial industrial processing. The processes involved are ecologically harmful and result in large amounts of toxic waste.

Moving away from rare earth magnets in EV motors would bring a lot of benefits, but poses challenges. There are two basic approaches: optimize a motor for non-rare-earth magnets (such as iron nitrides), or do away with permanent magnets entirely in favor of electromagnets (pictured above). There are significant engineering challenges to both approaches, and it’s difficult to say which will be best in the end. But research and prototypes are making it increasingly clear that effective REE-free motors are perfectly feasible. Breaking up with REEs and their toxic heritage would be much easier when their main benefit — technological performance — gets taken off the table as a unique advantage.

Iron Nitrides: Powerful Magnets Without The Rare Earth Elements

September 1, 2022 by 41 Comments

Since their relatively recent appearance on the commercial scene, rare-earth magnets have made quite a splash in the public imagination. The amount of magnetic energy packed into these tiny, shiny objects has led to technological leaps that weren’t possible before they came along, like the vibration motors in cell phones, or the tiny speakers in earbuds and hearing aids. And that’s not to mention the motors in electric vehicles and the generators in wind turbines, along with countless medical, military, and scientific uses.

These advances come at a cost, though, as the rare earth elements needed to make them are getting harder to come by. It’s not that rare earth elements like neodymium are all that rare geologically; rather, deposits are unevenly distributed, making it easy for the metals to become pawns in a neverending geopolitical chess game. What’s more, extracting them from their ores is a tricky business in an era of increased sensitivity to environmental considerations.

Luckily, there’s more than one way to make a magnet, and it may soon be possible to build permanent magnets as strong as neodymium magnets, but without any rare earth metals. In fact, the only thing needed to make them is iron and nitrogen, plus an understanding of crystal structure and some engineering ingenuity.

Continue reading “Iron Nitrides: Powerful Magnets Without The Rare Earth Elements” →

Recycling Will Be Key To The Electric Vehicle Future

July 15, 2021 by 114 Comments

Electric vehicles have become a mainstay in the global automotive marketplace, taking on their gasoline rivals and steadily chewing out their own slice of market share, year after year. Government mandates to end the sale of polluting internal combustion engine vehicles and subsidies on cleaner cars promise to conspire to create an electric vehicle boom.

The result should be much cleaner air, as generating electricity in even the dirtiest power plants is far cleaner and more efficient than millions of individual engines puttering about the place. However, if the electric car is to reign supreme, they’ll need to be built in ever greater numbers. To do that is going to take huge amounts of certain materials that can be expensive and sometimes in very limited supply. Thus, to help support the EV boom, recycling of these materials may come to play a very important role.

Continue reading “Recycling Will Be Key To The Electric Vehicle Future” →