A $40B critical mineral supply chain could start in Pennsylvania

(The Center Square) — Pennsylvania has a mine pollution problem. America has a critical mineral shortage.

And both problems may get solved as researchers find these critical and strategic elements in the polluted waters that come from acid mine drainage. If all goes well, Pennsylvania could become a leader in boosting national security — while potentially creating billions of dollars in value from environmental hazards.

“You don't need hundreds of billions of dollars to do this; you just need tens of thousands to capture rare earths that have no domestic sourcing at this point,” Bernie Lynch, project manager for the SCORE Consortium, said during a July meeting of the Department of Environmental Protection’s Citizens Advisory Council.

SCORE, which received a Department of Defense designation as a community support program, is working to create a domestic supply of scandium in America within three years by extracting it from mine and industrial waste.

Scandium is one of 30 elements prioritized by the DoD and is used in alloys, ceramics and fuel cells. Other elements, like lithium, gallium, and neodymium, have military, tech and medical uses, but are non-existent in American supply chains, leaving the country dependent on countries like China for sourcing and processing.

So far, SCORE has received $6 million from defense funding and match partners; Lynch described the designation as a deputization for the country’s military-industrial base to support the department's goals.

“We’re growing supply chains by sourcing directly out of e-waste,” she said. “There is sufficient mineral value in our waste stream throughout the U.S. — I don’t want to say we don’t need to mine again, but we don’t need to mine again.”

For scandium, progress is ahead of schedule.

“The funding we received was to do a demonstration scale, meant to be up to 1 ton a year (of recovered scandium),” Lynch said. “What we’ll end up building is 3.5-4 tons a year. In the lab, they were able to create efficiencies that were not expected.”

The goal is to demonstrate the lab results and scale up with larger companies for commercial application.

“Not only can it be real, but we also have the path and knowledge, the team who can do it,” Lynch said. “That’s the point of the consortium.”

SCORE isn’t alone in its work, either.

Carnegie Mellon University has emerged as a hub for critical mineral action, as has Penn State. In 2023, PSU’s Center for Critical Minerals received a $2.1 million federal grant to build a pilot plant to recover rare earth elements, followed by a $5 million grant in 2024 for similar work. House Republicans have also followed the issue, holding a hearing on the critical mineral industry in 2022. And in July, startup Firepoint Energy announced plans to build a waste-coal-to-fuel site in Jefferson County where it hopes to extract $3 billion worth of rare earth minerals and other metals.

Pulling scandium and other critical elements from waste like acid mine drainage and coal ash could be huge for Pennsylvania and the broader Appalachian region.

A SCORE analysis that looked at 61 major coal ash sites in Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania estimated $29-$38 billion in critical minerals and $14 billion in rare earth elements. Over 30 years, they estimate more than 25,000 direct jobs and another 124,000 total jobs when accounting for manufacturing and transportation.

The plan is to keep extraction, processing, refining, and manufacturing close to home.

“We don’t want materials to run cross-country; we want these supply chains as small as we can possibly make them,” Lynch said. “Our goal is, like in Ohio, the ability to pull gallium out of waste there and put it down the road; in that situation, you’re traveling the length of a state and not the length of the nation or the globe.”

Though business groups have long criticized state officials for acting as barriers, the case is different for critical minerals.

“The (Department of Environmental Protection) has been so open to working with the project,” Lynch said. “They understand this as regulators — how do we drive this, can we all work together to figure out how this is regulated, what permits might be required? We want to see it go faster, they want to understand it.”

For Pennsylvania, the vision isn’t to open mines like Nevada, Utah, or North Carolina, but to get proactive in recovering critical minerals in existing waste.

“My call to action to the state: We could be the state that perfects recovery technology, which could be a less environmentally invasive method of still supporting defense, security, and commercial organization need,” Lynch said. “It’s a way to get them stood up very inexpensively — and it’s much faster. Mining can take a decade or more. This can, ideally, occur within a year or two, not 10.”

She expects a flurry of activity soon. Research groups and labs are working on different technologies to pull out critical minerals; they’re in the demonstration stage, and she expects full commercialization within a few years.

The national security breakthrough would reverberate into an economic win and a massive boost for environmental clean-up, especially with acid mine drainage.

“Discharges are on state-owned property: They’re on park lands, the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources lands, game lands — there’s a number of state entities that might be low-hanging fruit,” said Bobby Hughes, executive director of the Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation.

The Coalition helps set up monitoring devices to see where AMD goes, what’s in the discharge, and get long-term data on what’s happening in streams and rivers. If the drainage has critical minerals, it could expand treatment plants in the commonwealth to clean up the water — or remove some of the financial pains that come from the legacy of coal.

“If there could be value in those particular elements on the market, that money gets put back into those treatment plants, there’s not a burden on the state, not a burden on the taxpayer,” Hughes said.

Capturing the drainage and cleaning up the water goes beyond rural communities, too — northeast Pennsylvania holds the headwaters for Philadelphia’s drinking water supply. With less-polluted water that needs less treatment, utility costs for places like Philadelphia could drop, too.

However, more monitoring, mapping of underground mine water pools, and catching more water before it becomes polluted in contaminated areas will be needed.

“We could be moving streams from the federal list of impaired waters, we could have clean streams in our communities that have not seen them in decades, well over six decades,” Hughes said. “There’s this whole quality of life, recreational benefits: swimming, fishing, kayaking — all these things that we have not been able to do for my entire career in many of these places.”

The end of streams running red, yellow, or orange, he argued, would be “a huge shot in the arm for coal communities.”

It’d also represent the reshoring of American supply chains and security for the future.

“We wouldn’t have any technology products anymore without these minerals and elements — and 90% of all of these are controlled by China today,” Lynch said. “We have a China problem someday. It becomes a really important national initiative that everybody in the U.S. should start understanding.”