Engineers seek to extract rare earth metals from scrap

Rare earth metals, such as neodynium and dysporsium, are vital ingredients of the powerful permanent magnets used in the types of electric motor used in electric cars and in the dynamos in wind turbines; they are also used in the electronics of mobile phones and in LEDs. Although quite abundant in the Earth’s crust, they tend to occur at low concentrations apart from in a few locations.

One of these locations is China, which produces 95 per cent of the world’s rare earth metal supply and is the only country that supplies the commercial market. Recently, it has begun to limit exports, and there are concerns that this could lead to bottlenecks as renewable energy and electric vehicle demand rises.

The SINTEF project is one of several devoted to recovering rare earth metals, and uses technology from aluminium smelting — an industry that is well known in Norway; one of the world’s biggest aluminium producers, Norsk Hydro, is Norwegian. Aluminium is extracted from its ore using high-temperature electrolysis, and this technology, the SINTEF team believes, can also be used to recover rare earth metals from permanent magnets.