Abstract
The present chapter displays an overview of rare earth elements properties, deposits, trend charts about global REEs production, reserves from 2009 to 2019, and shows a comprehensive review on the REEs production and consumption of the lead countries like China. In the second part, the author describes how the rapid surge in global energy needs has augmented the demand on coal-based energy and consequently the production of coal combustion products. This chapter further provides the trend charts associated with global volume of coal combustion products (CCPs), their utilization, total production in countries such as the USA from 2009 to 2018, and how this waste could be a potential resource to recover rare earth elements.
From an environmental point of view, the author presents a review about the impact of air emissions and water contamination owing to the inadequate management of the disposal of CCPs as well as limits and regulations for CCPs in the principal producer and consumer countries. Finally, the author emphasizes on the current necessity to make an effort to find new alternative resources for the extraction of REEs. In addition, the chapter present a systematic summary of the primary methods to recover the REEs from CCPs such as alkaline-acid leaching, roasting, physical separation, bioleaching, and ion extraction processes and their advantages and disadvantages were discussed.
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This work was supported by the National Research Council of Science & Technology (NST) grant by the Korea government (MSIT) (No.CRC-15-06-KIGAM).
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Arellano Ruiz, V.C., Parhi, P.K., Lee, JY., Jyothi, R.K. (2021). Investigation on Extraction and Recovery of Rare Earth Elements from Coal Combustion Products. In: Jyothi, R.K., Parhi, P.K. (eds) Clean Coal Technologies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68502-7_13
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