Here is the text from the article.
Rare Earth Salts hopes to expand
Scott Koperski Daily Sun news editor Feb 24, 2018
A Beatrice company that harvests rare earth elements from a variety of feedstocks is planning to grow its operation north of Beatrice.
Rare Earth Salts announced last June that the company successfully separated its first commercial unit of rare earth oxides, which are used in a wide range of applications, from radar systems to cell phones.
Rare Earth Salts Chief Technology Officer Joseph Brewer said the company uses new techniques to extract useful elements from different substances, including would-be mining waste and recycled fluorescent light bulbs.
“We developed an in-house proprietary technology for refining high value metals, and those metals are called rare earths,” Brewer said. “China does the bulk of production globally right now. We would be a new methodology of doing that separation. Right now, globally, a process called solvent extraction is utilized by most every production company out there.
“We’re using a very different technology than that. Also, we believe our technology is substantially greener than competing technology on the market today and we also believe our technology can produce purified rare earths at a much lower cost per unit.”
The material Rare Earth Salts harvests arrives via semi in the form of a fine powder.
Rare Earth Salts separates and refines rare earth elements to high purity. The company says this process is environmentally-friendly and projects significantly reduced the costs, in comparison to standard processing. The end product is used in a wide variety of technologies, with one up and coming area being electric vehicles.
The company’s initial production feedstock is sourced from recycled fluorescent light bulbs material supplied through the company’s commercial agreement with Rare Earth Recovery Sciences.
Brewer said the process results in very little waste.
“When we’re processing that through, about 85 percent of the incoming feedstock is going to be leaving the facility as product,” he said. “The remaining 15 percent, one of the things we’re looking at doing is generating a salt from it that we’re going to use internally with our processing. Essentially, what we’ll be doing is generating a sodium chloride salt that we utilize within our system. That’s going to be the major use for that incoming waste material as it were. It’s actually going to be fed back into our system.”
Rare Earth Salts currently processes 24 metric tons per month from its facility at Highway 77 and Hickory Road, north of Beatrice.
It plans to increase production, which will require an expansion to the facility that will be driven, in part, by a partnership with a Chilean mining company.
Rare Earth Salts and Minera BioLantanidos (MBL), the first Chilean rare earth company, announced a commercial agreement last April to produce separated rare earth oxides from MBL’s ionic clay deposit.
The companies expect to produce 15 high purity rare earth oxides, with a final product expected in the first half of 2019.
MBL will produce a 95 percent pure Rare Earth Oxide Concentrate in Chile. The concentrate will be shipped to the Rare Earth Salts facility for separation and purification using its proprietary technology.
“We’re expecting a significant ramp up in operations by the second half of this year,” said Rare Earth Salts CEO Cameron Davies. “We expect our initial sales to be forthcoming and I think what’s most important about the work that’s been done out there is that we continue to project to have the lowest cost, both from a capital and operational side in the industry. We’re going to have a third-party do an independent validation of that, and we expect to have that done in the first half of this year.”
Davies said the company has nine employees and is looking to hire more. Four of the current employees work out of a lab at the business campus south of Southeast Community College.
Brewer said the company is considering a consolidation of its research and production divisions, but no plans to move have been reached.
“It’s a constant discussion point around here, is how much you tie the two together and moving the lab facility up north takes up space, too, which could be used for production,” he said. “We’re kind of still in discussions regarding how best to situate our lab side of things. Research and development is always ongoing, so we’re kind of looking at how we best tie together our research and production.”
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
