MORGANTOWN – Critical minerals and materials are a key element of everyone’s everyday technology – cell phones, TVs, cars and far more – and the National Energy Technology Laboratory is leading a nine-lab team to accelerate domestic development and commercialization.
The project is called METALLIC – not quite an acronym for Critical Materials Supply Chain Research Facility – and NETL’s Tom Tarka is director and lead principal investigator. “Not to be mistaken for Metallica,” he joked. “Everyone wants to add the ‘a’. I won’t let them.”
The Department of Energy is working at breaking U.S. dependence on foreign sources of critical minerals, he said. The Energy Act of 2020 and the bipartisan infrastructure law contain three provisions to amplify existing investments: a demonstration facility to extract rare earth elements (WVU’ s acid mine drainage project is one awardee); a critical minerals collaborative; and a Critical Minerals Supply Chain Research Facility to address all areas of the critical minerals and materials supply chains.
Critical minerals and critical materials are technically different but they’re lumped together as CMMs to simplify the discussion, he said.
To achieve the goal, the DOE and its Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management put out a request for information about a year ago – what is needed for a facility and collaborative. That led to a lab call to all 17 national labs.
In response, he said, NETL brought together a team of nine national labs – an accomplishment in itself – recognizing the need for the larger group to tackle the full issue, not just pieces.
The Fossil Energy office is receiving $75 million over five years to develop METALLIC. Its mission is to accelerate and de-risk CMM technology development and commercialization and establish a domestic supply chain.
Money is going out to industry and academia to accelerate everything from extracting critical minerals to making a next generation of magnet that uses less CMMS and performs better
METALLIC wants to be the destination for entities and stakeholders with a technology to validate and market, in order to help establish the supply chain, he said. NETL has three sites – Morgantown, Pittsburgh and Albany, Ore., and its efforts will be spread across all three sites.
Just one piece of the puzzle is sourcing. There are pictures of critical minerals mines – huge holes in the ground that raise questions about how truly environmentally friendly EVs and other technology really are, and Chinese-owned mines packed with African laborers working under slave-like conditions.
“Our goal is to come up with novel methods of mining and finding these critical minerals that’s not your grandfather’s mine,” he said. That can involve cleaning up current energy production methods – gob piles, treating AMD and coal ash, extracting minerals from oil and gas extraction produced water, from geothermal brine.
Their eye is on three focuses: new domestic sources, primarly unconventional; recycling – DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Advanced Manufacturing Materials Technical Office is leading that; and more efficient use of minerals.
“We’re making a lot of progress already in unlocking some of those new, unconventional sources that don’t require digging big holes.”
And the timing? “The need is urgent and we know that,” Tarka said. That’s one of the benefits of pooling the resources of all nine labs.
DOE’s goal is to have 50% of domestic supply come from unconventional sources in the next 10-20 years. “I think we’re up to the challenge.” He foresees that in three years we will be producing minerals already, with some commercial application right down the pike after that.
A NETL release on the project lists seven specific METALLIC goals: accelerating deployment of novel processing technology; designing new materials to support extraction from low-concentration sources; minimizing waste generation through process design; reducing CMM usage through advanced alloy development and manufacturing; de-risking adoption of new technology by demonstrating success at various scales; rapidly advancing technology from the bench to deployment for commercialization; supporting the establishment of domestic CMMs supply chains.
Tarka commented in the release, “NETL is also the only national laboratory that is both owned and operated by the U.S. government, which allows its researchers to apply the full weight of the government, irrespective of profit motivations, to build technology that will create an industry that does not yet exist in this country.”
Talking with The Dominion Post, he wrapped up, “How excited we at NETL are to have the honor to lead this group of nine national laboratories. … It really speaks volumes that all these people wanted to come together to solve these urgent problems for the nation.”
Email: dbeard@dominionpost.com
