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In a few years, America may not need to buy critical minerals from China anymore, says synthetic chemist and nanotechnologist James Tour.
Why? Because of a method called flash Joule heating that he and his team have been studying at Rice University.
China currently has a near monopoly on global processing capacity of critical minerals, including rare earths. These are essential to much of our modern economy, from electronics to defense to medical devices. America has access to plenty of rare earth reserves, but very little capacity to process and refine them. Rebuilding these incredibly complex supply chains independent of China is a major uphill battle.
But Tour and his team have pioneered a process that allows quick extraction of rare earths from something we have abundantly available: electronic and industrial waste.
“We realized that we could take certain materials, say industrial waste like fly ash … flash it, and get rare earth elements to come out,” Tour says.
The same method can be used to extract rare earths from mine tailings—the leftover, toxic material of old mines that used to be too expensive to process.
“So there’s huge availability of this. And if you recycle it—metals are infinitely recyclable,” Tour says.
Tour is a professor of chemistry, materials science, and nanoengineering at Rice University. You can find him on X, YouTube, and other platforms: @DrJamesTour
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