Aluminum is a critical element used in thousands of important products, but it can often interfere with quick and effective extraction of valuable rare earth elements (REEs) from coal waste byproducts. Because aluminum interferes with the recovery of REEs from some sources, NETL researchers developed an effective, renewable, technology that.
NETL researchers have created a compact, portable device that can be used to detect cobalt at low concentrations in liquids, such as process streams from U.S. coal byproducts like fly ash and to prospect for cobalt in acid mine drainage – an innovation with financial, environmental and geopolitical implications for recovering the element that is currently produced mostly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, China and Zambia.