SRC has big plans in strategic metals
CEO eyes $35M investment in pilot plants to capitalize on commercial demand
Mike Crabtree hopes almost a decade of research and development has laid the groundwork for an entirely new industry in Saskatchewan, one he and others believe will only become more important to a changing global economy.
Saskatchewan Research Council scientists have been quietly looking into more efficient and sustainable ways to produce and refine “strategic metals,” a group that includes not only the 17 rare earth elements but also lithium.
Crabtree, who took over as chief executive of the provincial Crown corporation last spring, said technology is laboratory-proven and on the verge of commercialization, likely through one or more private-sector partners.
“What does the future look like? The future is about rare earth elements (and) lithium,” Crabtree, whose background is in petroleum engineering, said during a recent interview at SRC’S headquarters at Innovation Place, on the U of S campus.
“Consumption will just skyrocket,” he said of the metals, which are used not only to produce handheld electronic devices such as cellphones, electric car batteries and motors, but also by various countries’ defence industries.
Over the next two years, SRC is looking to spend about $35 million to build a pair of pilot plants, one for extracting lithium from various brines and the other for extracting and then separating rare earth elements from ore, including uranium tailings.
The proposed lithium plant would use “ionic sieves” to concentrate lithium in brines, either found deep underground or produced as a byproduct of the petroleum industry, to the point where it can be economically precipitated out.
SRC’S rare earth technology starts by crushing any one of three common ores known to contain low concentrations of rare earths to create a mixture of the elements that can be sold or, using additional technology, separated into its constituent parts.
While Crabtree said Saskatchewan is unlikely to ever match other countries’ strategic metals output, the aim is to demonstrate that SRC’S new technologies can be both price-competitive and more sustainable than existing production methods.
“We’ve built a system we can upscale and commercialize,” Crabtree said, acknowledging that securing funding for the pilot plants is likely the biggest hurdle
SRC must cross to get its laboratory-scale technology into the field.
It’s a notion the provincial government has been quick to get behind, most recently in its new Saskatchewan growth plan — which includes an aggressive two-year target for a rare earth plant and a pledge to look at ways to support a viable lithium extraction industry.
The plan also floats some other technological trial balloons, chief among them the prospect of having a small modular nuclear reactor up and running in the province by the middle of the next decade — the most specific government pitch on nuclear power to date.
Despite what their name suggests, rare earth elements are not all that rare. Crabtree said rare earths and lithium are abundant but not typically found in large concentrations, which makes attempts to extract them expensive and time-consuming.
Jeremy Harrison, the government’s trade and export development minister and one of the growth plan’s chief architects, said there has not been a need to produce rare earths in the province, but various factors are changing that.
“We’ve come to the recognition and conclusion — I know I certainly have — that this is an area where there is a huge opportunity for the province,” Harrison said, adding that “economic realities” make production in Saskatchewan a priority.
Ongoing trade uncertainty with China, which produces around 90 per cent of the world’s rare earth element supply, means customers, especially the U.S. defence industry, are keen for a more stable, homegrown supply, he said.
“We just think that all of these things add up to the reality (that) we could have a very sustainable and economic and successful rare earth production stream here in this province,” Harrison said, adding that talks with unnamed private sector players are underway.
The Saskatchewan NDP has criticized the government’s growth plan for being short on details and failing to focus on health care and education funding, but is generally supportive of using technology to advance new industries in the province.
Crabtree is similarly enthusiastic about SRC’S technology, saying what is believed to be the country’s second-largest research and technology organization believes the resource is present, the technology is workable and the market will only get bigger.