I'm pleased to be able to talk to you a little bit about some of the unique processing and production challenges associated with rare earths. I'm a process engineer and a metallurgist by background. I've spent many years in the Canadian mining industry working on technology development, and more specifically on the application of technology development.
Rare earth projects, from one perspective, are like any other mine. You have to identify a resource, you have to dig the stuff out of the ground, you have to find a way to concentrate the valuable minerals and to sustainably and environmentally dispose of the material that is not in your value chain, and you have to go through and refine and purify.
Rare earths go through all of those same common steps, but the steps have to be applied a little bit differently. We're still, in many ways, at the stage where that front-end conventional mineral processing, which would be a size reduction and a physical separation, has to be developed for the unique minerals that are associated with the rare earth elements in their atomic matrixes. That's the kind of conventional development that a mining company would have to go through to produce a concentrate of some kind that could be further purified and refined.
The challenge in rare earths, as I know you have heard, is that after you get to that primary concentration of minerals, the challenge is that you don't actually have a rare earth mineral yet, you have a mineral that has a little atomic component of rare earths that then has to be separated by a process called hydrometallurgy. Dr. Papangelakis is going to talk a little bit more about some of those details.
Even after that, in rare earths you have a challenge because the testing that's required to do that hydrometallurgical flow sheet development, and then the actual separation and production of metals, still requires a sufficient sample to be able to test. What that means is that instead of having a couple of kilograms of sample that you might get from a drill core for a copper mine, or a gold mine, or a nickel mine, you have to take hundreds and hundreds of kilograms of material so that you can get a kilogram of concentrate to do the next testing. What that means is for the producers and for the potential operators of these projects, the development costs might be an order of magnitude larger than they would be for a conventional base metal or precious metal mine.
As we look at those things, specifically in those separation technologies, it's that production of an intermediate concentrate, which you can do further testing and development on, that creates the unique challenge to rare earth elements. Then as you do that test work, each of those heavy and light rare earths are very close on the periodic table and they are very difficult to separate. The final separation and refining stage is tremendously more complicated or complex than a typical gold mine might be, where you're just smelting and pouring off a doré bar.
As I mentioned earlier, Canada has some tremendous leadership in expertise around that science and technology and about applying those technologies into the mining industry. We are uniquely placed in the world, with some competition in South Africa, some competition in Australia, around being able to deliver those services effectively.
Similarly, on the environmental side, we have challenges around the often radioactive nature of minerals associated with the rare earths. There is an effective treatment requirement for uranium, for thorium, for some of the aluminiums that are associated with rare earth deposits. There are challenges there and issues around developing and understanding the toxicity. We have some significant efforts still to go through to be sure that we can produce these metals in an environmentally sustainable and appropriate manner.
The metal production piece, as I mentioned, the difficulty in that final separation and producing something that's available for your customer, is really the key to realizing the overall economic benefit to the industry in Canada.
There are no rare earth refining facilities in Canada, and no real research or development facilities to do that last step in the development process. Most of our Canadian companies are forced to go to Mintek in South Africa or to ANSTO to be able to find that capacity at the moment. Part of the objective of the network is to be able to pull some of that together effectively to be able to deliver those things where we have experience and expertise, to be able to provide an infrastructure and a joint capability to deliver that final stage of the process.
In the short term, our objectives are to look at very focused, industry-driven project work that will apply existing technologies that will get us to that early stage production with what we know now. But the longer-term need that we have as an industry is actually to develop better technologies, to develop more appropriate solutions, and to focus on the downstream opportunities there.
There are conversations in the marketplace about substitutions. At the same time, we have an opportunity as an industry in Canada to develop new applications and to look for new opportunities to take advantage of those things. As I mentioned earlier, the long-term true benefit to our science and technology community is the development of those highly qualified persons who are capable of carrying the industry forward to the next generation.
Dr. Papangelakis.