Rare Earth Elements: Overview of Mining, Mineralogy, Uses, Sustainability and Environmental Impact
By N. Haque, A. Hughes, Seng Lim, Christina Vernon. 2014
525 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Rare earths are used in the renewable energy technologies such as wind turbines, batteries, catalysts and electric cars. Current mining, processing and sustainability aspects have been described in this paper. Rare earth availability is undergoing a temporary decline due mainly to quotas being imposed by the Chinese government on export and action taken against illegal mining operations. The reduction in availability coupled with increasing demand has led to increased prices for rare earths. Although the prices have come down recently, this situation is likely to be volatile until material becomes available from new sources or formerly closed mines are reopened. Although the number of identified deposits in the world is close to a thousand, there are only a handful of actual operating mines. Prominent currently operating mines are Bayan Obo in China, Mountain Pass in the US and recently opened Mount Weld in Australia. The major contributor to the total greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint of rare earth processing is hydrochloric acid (ca. 38%), followed by steam use (32%) and electricity (12%). Life cycle based water and energy consumption is significantly higher compared with other metals.
Subfields: Geochemistry and Petrology, Inorganic Chemistry, Mechanical Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/55df2f6ab00d39a625e635966e6cf87e6c4a4cac
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In Mechanical Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Platinum Group Metals: A Review of Resources, Production and Usage with a Focus on Catalysts (2021, methodology): “b [7] c [8] d [11] e From Table 2, method of calculation is described below.”
- Separation of uranium and thorium from rare earths for rare earth production – A review (2015, background): “A number of reviews on rare earth resources, productions, applications, etc. have been conducted in the last a few years (Anon., 2012; Chakhmouradian and Wall, 2012; Binnemans et al., 2013; Haque et al., 2014; Xie et al., 2014).”