The U.S. Department of Energy announced on August 21 that it will allocate $30 million in funding through the bipartisan Infrastructure Act to carry out projects to extract and separate rare earth elements and other critical minerals from coal, coal waste and related byproducts to help the country build domestic supply chains that are critical to the economy, clean energy and national security. The project will fund laboratory and laboratory scale research to test economically viable and environmentally friendly extraction, separation and refining technologies to produce and extract rare earth and critical minerals from unconventional coal resources that can be used in clean energy, defense and commercial and equipment applications.
