Abstract
Rare earth elements, by virtue of their role in technological advancements, have become critical commodities over the last few decades. The emerging awareness of environmental pollution associated with primary ore mining and the need for processes to preserve these non-renewable minerals, coupled with the attempt to break China’s monopoly of the REEs production and commercialization, has led to research into alternative sources. The crusade for beneficial use of coal combustion products and the proposal that these CCPs are REE-rich sources have therefore received a widespread attention among other alternatives. This chapter seeks to explain the feasibility of the extraction of REEs from CCPs using ionic liquids. The ability to modify ILs to suit the application necessities allows for extraction at better experimental conditions reducing the overall waste generation of the process. Different types of ionic liquids have been studied for rare earth elements recovery and recycling from secondary sources (scraps, electronic waste) using nonfunctional, monofunctional, and bifunctional ionic liquids. However, the recovery of REEs from the by-products of coal combustion has not been studied in depth despite of them being a rich source of these technological key elements.
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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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Danso, I.K., Cueva-Sola, A.B., Masaud, Z., Lee, JY., Jyothi, R.K. (2021). Ionic Liquids for the 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_25
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