Economic Evaluation of Rare Earth Elements Contained in Coal Ash

Abstract

This study aims to introduce and economical review on the possibilities of rare earth elements(REEs) recovery from coal ashes and the analysis of economical evaluation factors based on the data for securing domestic rare earth elements. The cut-off grade of REEs on recovering from coal ash was confirmed to be 1,000 ppm on total rare earth oxides(TREO) basis, and while the economic value of coal ash changed with contents and specific elements of rare earth elements. This shall be resulted in the price differences of rare earth elements required by the current industry, and it probably varies depending on the future demand of rare earth components. For developing of commercial recovery technology on REEs in coal ashes, many researches have been carried out by various analyzing methods, such as evaluation of holding value of REEs in ashes, assessment between supply and demand of industry, comparison of investment and its profitability for the REEs’s production from coal ashes, and so on. Although these methods have been suggested, its recovery system with economical feasibility could not been confirmed up to present. In this reason, the process design of recovering REEs from coal ash shall be researched continuously to solve the problems of the global rare earth market. And also these researches shall be conducted actively in Korea for the purpose of securing the REEs resources and their recovering technologies. · Received : October 1, 2019 · Revised : October 30, 2019 · Accepted : November 15, 2019 § Corresponding Author : Jaeryeong Lee (E-mail: jr-lee@kangwon.ac.kr) Department of Energy & Resources Engineering, Kangwon National University, 1 Gangwondaehak-gil, Chuncheon-si, Gangwon-do 24341, Korea cThe Korean Institute of Resources Recycling. All rights reserved. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 석탄재에 포함된 희토류의 경제성 평가 27 자원리싸이클링 제 28 권 제 6 호, 2019