Published: May 29, 2025 |

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Scientists from West Virginia University continue to find more support for a process that removes and collects rare earth minerals from acid mine drainage.

WVU Water Research Institute Director Dr. Paul Ziemkiewicz said the rare earth recovery project has included the construction of a new acid mine drainage treatment plant near Mount Storm in Grant County.

“It’s a scale unit near Mount Storm and it takes about 800 gallons per minute of acid mine drainage and recovers rare earth concentrates. So we think we have a good technology on our hands, just a matter of scaling that up towards refining,” said Ziemkiewicz on WAJR’s Talk of the Town.

According to Ziemkiewicz, the process involves sifting through more than one million gallons of acid mine drainage per day at the Mount Storm site with densely woven plastic bags. The bags are then filled with a mud-like sludge from the treatment plant with water slowly percolating out, resulting in a rare earth oxide concentrate of nearly 99 percent, and that’s without further refinement with chemical processes.

The hope of WVU WRI researchers is that the AMD treatment process will create a cost-effective solution to extract rare earth elements within the United States.

“Recovering the rare earths from that very diffuse and very low concentration dirt is very expensive and so the nice thing about acid mine drainage is that the rare earths are already in solution, so it’s relatively simple and cheap to concentrate them,” said Ziemkiewicz.

Plans are to expand the refining process with the help of a $3 million grant from the federal EPA.

Ziemkiewicz said the extraction of pure-grade rare earth minerals such as cobalt, nickel, manganese, lithium, and others would be able to be sold for commercial use supporting technologies such as cell phones and any magnetized-based energy sources, as well as batteries that can be used for alternative energy vehicles.

Products created by the WVU WRI’s exclusively patented process could serve sectors such as military defense, commercial infrastructure, and energy production, Ziemkiewicz said.

“Imagine aerospace, satellite applications where you want lightweight and high performance, that’s where you want your rare earths,” said Ziemkiewicz.

Ziemkiewicz and other scientists at the WVU have implemented AMD treatment systems both within the Mountain State and other parts of the country. This includes sites at Decker’s Creek in Monongalia and Preston counties, Bismarck in Grant County, Fola in Clay County, and at Montana Resources’ copper mine in Butte, Montana, all of which are supported by researchers from the WVU WRI and Virginia Tech.

With support on both a local and national level, with the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection showing support back in 2024, a process that aims to create a cost-effective and environmentally friendly solution, Ziemkiewicz and other researchers hope the national support towards the process can continue.

“You don’t have to dig a hole in the ground, you don’t have to wait nine years to get a mining permit, and you don’t have to spend $6 million or more to get the exploration done. Often, you don’t need a whole lot of new construction either,” said Ziemkiewicz.

Source: WV Metro News

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