Senate committee hears UND/EERC findings on rare earths in lignite and advances amended ownership study bill

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Monday heard presentations from the Energy and Environmental Research Center and the University of North Dakota on prospects for extracting rare earth and other critical minerals from lignite and then voted, 7-0, to advance an amended version of House Bill 1459 for further consideration.

The presentations and the bill debate focused on the technical potential identified to date, costs and scale for a first commercial concentrating plant, the advantages of extracting minerals from coal before combustion, and unresolved legal questions about ownership of minerals recovered from coal seams.

Tyler Hammond of the Energy and Environmental Research Center said the ERC participated in the U.S. Department of Energy's CoreCM initiative and that phase 1 work in basins including the Williston Basin identified coal intervals with rare-earth concentrations at or above a DOE threshold of about 300 parts per million. "For the record, my name is Tyler Hammond on behalf of the Energy and Environmental Research Center," he told the committee. He said ERC has collected more than 100 samples from potential feedstocks (produced water, clays, fly ash and coal samples, including material from the MHA Nation) and that phase 2 will expand the regional resource assessment and examine permitting and infrastructure challenges.

Dan Lodol, a researcher at UND's College of Engineering and Mines, described a pilot effort in Grand Forks and the pathway to a demonstration commercial…