Inside Australia’s Bid To Process Rare Earths At Home

Inside the fortified campus of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) near Sydney, workers in hard hats move between newly installed 500 L tanks and steel piping inside one of dozens of buildings. The unassuming structure is where scientists in the 1990s tested how to process ore from one of the country’s first major rare earth–mining discoveries.

Now decades later, the building is being refitted to resume that work and help Australia develop full-scale rare earth refineries. That renovation places this pilot plant at the center of the country’s ambitions to challenge China’s dominance in rare earth refining.

Rare earth elements—used to make the powerful magnets found in electric vehicles, wind turbines, and other advanced electronics—are somewhat misnamed. These metals are relatively abundant in Earth’s crust. But they are rarely found in concentrations high enough to be economically mined.

“Rare earths aren’t rare . . . it’s the processing that is,” says Chris Griffith, a senior process chemist and principal consultant in ANSTO’s mineral division.

But as demand for these critical metals has grown several-fold over recent decades, spurred by the low-carbon energy transition and new defense technologies, the bottleneck lies not in finding rare earths but in turning them into products.

These thinly dispersed metals are often found bound up with other elements and with each other, meaning large volumes of ore must be processed to produce relatively small amounts of usable material.

The 17 metallic elements classified as rare earths—the lanthanides, plus scandium and yttrium—share nearly identical physical and chemical properties, making them difficult to separate. They include both the light rare earths, such as neodymium and praseodymium, used in magnets, and the less-abundant heavy rare earths, like dysprosium and terbium, which are valued for maintaining magnetic performance at high temperatures. Isolating each element requires dozens or even hundreds of stages of solvent extraction, in which metals are repeatedly partitioned between aqueous and organic phases using acids and organic solvents.Because Australia, the world’s fourth-largest producer of rare earth ore, has historically had limited domestic refining capacity, much of the downstream chemical work occurs overseas.

The push for domestic refining is driven in large part by the fact that China accounts for roughly 90% of global processing capacity—a strategic vulnerability. Backed by government support and growing demand from allies such as the US, Australia is positioning itself as an alternative. “It’s largely [about] geopolitics,” says Chris Vernon, a chief research scientist at Australia’s national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO.

The ANSTO pilot facility is set to open this month for work with commercial partners. That follows an April announcement that Australia and the US would mobilize more than $3 billion in public financing and investment to diversify critical-mineral projects under a bilateral framework.New plant will be a testing ground for rare earth refining

The pilot plant gives companies a place to test how their specific ore behaves before committing to full-scale plants. Operating at an intermediate scale, the facility will allow flow sheets—step-by-step processing designs—to be refined and run as integrated systems rather than as isolated lab experiments.

“There is no one-size-fits-all flow sheet that addresses all the challenges,” says Karin Soldenhoff, an ANSTO principal consultant in minerals who manages the process development and research groups.

But moving from pilot-scale success to industrial production introduces a second test: how to manage the environmental impacts.Australia has strict regulatory environmental frameworks related to mining, but whether rare earth refining can be scaled up while maintaining those standards remains an open question.

“Australia’s claim to be a cleaner alternative is not so much wrong as it is untested,” says Gwenaël Velge, a researcher at the Mineral Policy Institute, a nongovernmental organization.

Why China dominates rare earth processing

China’s rise to refining dominance traces back a few decades. In the 1980s and 1990s, when demand was limited and environmental costs loomed large, the US and other rare earth–mining countries scaled back or exited processing. China, by contrast, accepted the environmental toll and invested heavily in processing and separation, accepting lower profit margins and higher environmental costs to build capacity. Over time, it developed a vertically integrated industry linking mining, separation, and magnet manufacturing. When rare earth demand surged starting in the early 2000s, particularly for high-performance magnets, ores mined from around the world were increasingly shipped to China for processing, cementing its position at the center of the global supply chain. For Australia, one of the world’s largest mining nations, that dynamic has meant exporting raw materials while much of the value—and profit—is generated elsewhere. Industry analysts note that rare earth ore has relatively little value on its own; it is the refined materials and magnets that command higher prices.

Now as concerns grow over a heavy reliance on China, Australia is pushing to bring at least some refining home. Projects underway include Iluka Resources’ Eneabba refinery in Western Australia—expected to be the country’s first fully integrated rare earth processing facility and scheduled for commissioning in 2027. There’s also Arafura Rare Earths’ Nolans Project in the Northern Territory. It’s designed to produce rare earth oxides—an intermediate product that is then further refined into individual metals—on-site.

How uranium processing will help rare earth refiners

At ANSTO, the focus is on figuring out how to process specific ores—whose mineralogy and chemical composition can vary wildly—before companies commit to building full refineries. The new facility will take material from a deposit and run it through an entire processing route—from initial leaching to dissolving metals from the ore and through to producing materials such as rare earth oxides—so companies can see whether their proposed refining approach will work in practice.That role builds on ANSTO’s expertise in uranium processing, which, like rare earth refining, requires separation. In uranium ores, scientists must isolate trace amounts of uranium from other metals and impurities, often dealing with elements that behave very similarly chemically and must be separated through carefully controlled reactions. “We’re taking known chemistry and applying it to different materials,” Soldenhoff says.

Among the first companies set to use the ANSTO facility is Australian Rare Earths, or AR3, which is developing a rare earth deposit discovered in 2020 in southern Australia and known as the Koppamurra Project. This deposit stretches across farmland and low, sandy soils, where rare earth elements occur in shallow clay rather than hard rock.This type of mineralization, known as ionic clay, has been a major source of China’s domestically mined rare earths, particularly for the heavier rare earth elements, which typically occur at lower concentrations in most hard-rock deposits. In ionic clays, heavier rare earths are more readily accessible, loosely bound to the material and thus easier to extract. Outside China, such deposits have rarely been developed. “There’s a limited amount of knowledge and expertise within this style of mineralization,” says Travis Beinke, AR3’s managing director.Unlike hard-rock deposits, where ore must be crushed and processed at high temperatures, clay-hosted rare earths can often be extracted using relatively mild chemical solutions that wash the metals out of the soil. At Koppamurra, the aim is to produce a mixed rare earth oxide on-site. That material would require further processing—typically multiple stages of separation and conversion into metals—before it could be used in applications such as magnets.

“Before you go and invest hundreds of millions of dollars . . . you want to be sure that you can do it at scale,” Beinke says. The company has signed a nonbinding agreement to supply some of its rare earth oxide to Canada-based NEO Performance Materials.

Can rare earth refining ever really be green?

Australia’s push into rare earth refining rests in part on the premise that it can be done under strict environmental oversight. Mining and refining projects are subject to federal laws such as the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, along with detailed state approvals governing water use, waste management, and site rehabilitation. Companies must show they can safely contain tailings and wastewater and return sites to a stable condition after operations end.But some skeptics argue that regulation alone may not resolve the underlying challenges associated with rare earth refining. Even with strict oversight, the scale and persistence of the waste streams generated by the process can make them difficult to manage over time, especially in preventing leaks into surrounding soil and freshwater. “Newer processing technologies may improve containment, but the underlying chemistry is what it is,” Velge says.

“It’s not hard to be cleaner than China,” adds Charles Roche, a sustainability lecturer at Murdoch University and the executive director of the Mineral Policy Institute, “but we haven’t managed to process rare earths at any scale.”

The reluctance of Western countries to invest in refining in earlier decades reflected those same constraints. “We didn’t offshore rare earth processing because we couldn’t do it,” Velge says. “It was cheaper and politically easier to let someone else bear the environmental burden.”Potential contamination of groundwater, rivers, and surrounding watersheds is a particular concern in the Koppamurra region, where the deposit sits beneath agricultural land. But Beinke, the AR3 director, says the project will not proceed unless it meets regulatory requirements. “If we can’t demonstrate that, we simply won’t get approval to develop the project,” he says.

Tried-and-true solvent extraction, while chemically intensive, is difficult to replace. Most efforts to improve refining, including the work that will be done at ANSTO, focus on improving existing methods rather than replacing them entirely. That improvement may mean reducing chemical use, improving efficiency, or better controlling waste.

Some researchers, however, are exploring ways to rethink separation at a more fundamental level. New methods include, for example, using biomolecule-based approaches that use short chains of amino acids, known as peptides, to selectively bind specific rare earth elements. Such selectivity, in theory, would require fewer separation steps and chemical inputs, which might reduce waste.But such research is still in the early stages, and companies are wary of the risks involved in scaling new approaches. “[They] would much rather look at something which has been built and demonstrated that it works,” says George Franks, a chemical engineer at the University of Melbourne. “The mineral-processing industry is extremely risk averse.”

So for now, it’s not so much the chemistry of refining that’s likely to change as it is where the refining is carried out. If Australia can build refining capacity while meeting environmental expectations, that success will likely shape how, and where, rare earths are produced in the years ahead. "Source: cen.acs.org"