The Saskatchewan Research Council (SRC) hit an important milestone over the summer, with their Rare Earth Processing Facility producing the first commercial-scale rare earth metals in North America.
Their creation of 10 tonnes of neodymium-praseodymium (NdPr) metals per month represents the best production on the continent, with the facility using materials from clients worldwide.
Mike Crabtree, the CEO and president of the SRC, says the milestone is a big achievement for their work.
"What we've been doing over the last three or four years is building what's basically Canada's first vertically integrated Rare Earth Processing Facility. So taking from monazite mineral right through to neodymium presidium meta. The announcement today is a real milestone. We have commissioned the first part of that process which is the production of the neodymium presidium metals. So the actual smelting of those metals then goes forward to make electric vehicles so this is a real big milestone for us.
Crabtree says it's all come together over the summer with even better production scheduled for the future.
"What we've done is we actually started the commercial production in June just as we were commissioning the furnaces and we were running at a rate of about 7 tonnes per month. What we've done now is we've fully commissioned those units and we're running currently at 10 tonnes per month. That's the rate that we can produce that NdPr metal. By the end of this year, by December into early January, we'll be producing at a rate of 40 tonnes per month and a run rate total of about 400 tons per year of this metal."
While their current work has them producing components for electric cars Crabtree says they have the capability to produce a number of valuable rare earth metals.
"The primary purpose of the plant is to produce this neodymium presidium. Those are the metals that go into electric vehicle magnets, which form basically the engines for electric vehicles. There are 17 rare earth metals in total. So the other 15 have very, very high-value uses as well."
"So there's things like dysprosium, terbium, and samarium that get used in electronics, in high-quality optics, and just about every sort of technological device that we have in the modern world. This plan can be configured to separate singly or a whole range of rare earths as the market demands."
Crabtree says he hopes to see more facilities built in the future as he feels their progress proves this is a viable industry for Saskatchewan.
"What's worth looking at is what we're building here is what we're calling a commercial demonstration plant. It's got three primary reasons why the government of Saskatchewan funded this. It's to prove out the technology, it's to prove out the finance financial liability that profitability and it's to also prove out the markets for this.
"We believe that the next stage on from that will be the building of much larger, fully commercial facilities and that's what we're looking to attract private investment into the province to do to build out that hub, that sector. So SRC will have a key role in managing that process."