- The US aims to address bottlenecks instead of searching for new rare earths
- Parallel extraction concept seeks profitability despite higher domestic labor and environmental costs
- Distributed processing model tries to reduce the dependence on single vulnerable mine sites
China is responsible for much of the world’s rare earth refining capacity, giving it control over supply chains during trade disputes. This advantage was built up by handling the expensive and messy processing stage on a large scale, often with lower costs and fewer environmental restrictions.
The US has spent years rebuilding its rare earth supply chain, but mining alone has not solved the core problem. Processing remains the sticking point, and which Data center dynamics reports, this is where the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is placing a high-risk bet.
Rare earth elements are not, as the name implies, truly rare, and the United States already has access to large quantities of the ore. DARPA’s new Smash program is moving away from finding new deposits and toward solving the processing bottleneck.
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Almost zero waste sorting
DARPA’s approach centers on what it calls near-zero waste separation across the periodic table. The goal is not just rare earth elements, but up to 80 stable elements that can be recovered from existing ore and waste streams.
“So the challenge is processing, not mining,” said Julian McMorrow, Smash lead and program manager at DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office. “We want to develop technologies to take the industry from wasting over 99 percent of its raw material to using the entire raw material.”
Traditional mining wastes huge amounts of material during refining. More than two tons of ore and 13 tons of water can only produce one kilogram of copper, leaving most of the original material discarded.
Smash explores a parallel processing model that tries to extract almost everything from a shovelful of dirt at once. That concept borrows ideas from industries like oil refining, where multiple outputs are efficiently separated from a single input.
The program also reflects concerns about relying on a single major site, such as the Mountain Pass mine, which once dominated global rare earth production but struggled as refining costs became uncompetitive.
DARPA notes that concentrating production in one place creates vulnerability if disruptions occur. A distributed model using different feedstocks, including mine tailings and recycled materials, could reduce this exposure.
Smash will run as a 48-month effort split into two phases. The first will focus on proof-of-concept experiments, while the second will move towards working prototypes suitable for industrial mining environments.
Even if the technology succeeds in laboratory environments, it can be difficult to scale it economically. Achieving profitability while maintaining strict environmental and labor standards will be the real test.
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