This town could use some of Times most precious commodity….
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Oh my…..Company plans rare earth metals plant in Beatrice Story CommentsPrint Create a hardcopy of this pageFont Size: Default font size Larger font size
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POSTED: SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2014 1:00 AM
By Cole Epley World-Herald staff writer
There’s new chatter about rare earth metals in southeast Nebraska, and this time around, Beatrice is ground zero.
An industrial technology company called Rare Earth Salts plans to begin construction on a pilot plant there during the first half of 2015 and to have a completed facility about two years from now.
Officials aim to prove the commercial feasibility of a process they say enables the extraction of valuable metals from the earth at a significantly lower cost than by traditional means. The company works on materials that have already been processed by mines.
“The pilot phase is the last hurdle because there have been a lot of technologies that have worked really well on a small scale but just don’t scale up to the industrial level,” said Allen Kruse, CEO at Rare Earth Salts. “Nothing tells us this shouldn’t work.”
He pegged the cost of the pilot plant at less than $10 million.
In late October, Rare Earth Salts announced a joint development agreement with a global mining company. Officials declined to name the company but said it would be instrumental in scaling up its technology for use at an industrial level.
Rick Serafini, a member of the Rare Earth Salts advisory board, described the company’s pursuit as “a hedge, in a sense, against financial instability or increased military tensions with China.”
That’s because up to 95 percent of the global supply of rare earth elements — commonly found in smartphones, clean energy applications and high-tech military components — come from China.
This isn’t the first time rare minerals have been discussed in southeast Nebraska.
A deposit believed to contain significant volumes of niobium, a hard-to-find metal of high importance to manufacturers
of high-tech gadgets and the defense and aviation industries, is situated underneath land near Elk Creek. Testing in the 1980s showed the deposit also contains some rare earth elements like lanthanum, cerium and neodymium.
Niobium is not technically classified as a rare earth element, but there are few known significant deposits in the world and 92 percent of the metal is mined and produced in Brazil.
Drilling and testing of samples near Elk Creek ramped up in the 1970s and 1980s and have recently been revived as a Canadian company called NioCorp Developments Ltd. continues to raise money for additional development and an ongoing feasibility study.
Rare Earth Salts’ Kruse said there have been no official discussions between the two companies, but he did not rule out opportunities there.
“It would be silly for us not to have conversations if there are rare earth elements there,” he said.
Contact the writer: 402-444-1534, cole.epley@owh.com |
