Funds 5 national labs to streamline critical minerals recovery process.

In yet another round of funding, the U.S. Department of Energy announced $5.3 million in grants for five cutting-edge projects intended to advance research supporting the domestic production of rare earth elements and other critical minerals that are key to manufacturing clean energy technologies such as solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and hydrogen fuel cells.

Under the purview of DOE's Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, the FECM has tasked the National Energy Technology Laboratory to oversee the projects.

The projects will initially leverage the unique expertise of five DOE national labs to develop technologies that improve sensing and characterization of unconventional and secondary sources that contain rare earth elements and other critical minerals.

The selected projects will focus on technologies, methodologies, and approaches to detect and quantify rare earths and other critical minerals contained in unconventional sources such as coal and coal mine wastes, metals mine tailings, as well as water produced from oil and gas production.

The selected national labs include:

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will receive $1.2 million to develop a machine learning tool to identify hot zones for rare earths and critical minerals in mine tailings, particularly on coal and sulfide tailings.

Los Alamos National Laboratory will receive $1.2 million to work with partners at the Wyodak coal mine in Wyoming to develop a machine learning tool for mine-scale assessment of rare earths and critical minerals.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will receive $1.2 million to develop a drone-based real-time artificial intelligence analysis survey technology to determine the quantity of critical minerals in coal, coal-related and energy-related waste streams.

Sandia National Laboratories will receive $1.2 million to assess the extractability of critical minerals, including rare earths, from major oil and gas shale formations across the US. Specifically, in-situ extractability of these metals using its newly developed extraction system.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory will receive $500,000 to characterize critical minerals from energy production waste streams, from initial exploratory drill samples to final waste material after extraction.

DOE says that improvements in these areas will help reduce the costs and time it would ordinarily take to evaluate and produce critical minerals, which is key to accelerating domestic production for the nation's clean energy goals.

Further details for each national lab project can be read here.