Rare earth company Pensana has received approvals for its updated proposal to build a rare earth element (REE) separation facility at the Saltend Chemicals Park in the Humber Freeport, UK. The approval follows Pensana’s announcement of a Front-End Engineering Design (FEED) and value engineering study that was completed for Saltend and its Longonjo REE project in Angola.

In January this year, Pensana entered an agreement with a Norwegian energy provider, Equinor, focused on developing a low-energy method for recycling end-of-life permanent magnets at Saltend. The first phase of plans for the Saltend REE processing facility was granted in April 2021, while this updated proposal includes a site expansion to accommodate the second phase of recycling activities.

At full operation, the US$194M facility will be equipped to produce roughly 12,500tpy of separated REEs, including 4,500tpy of magnet metal REEs, neodymium and praseodymium. In addition, the second phase of operations is expected to recycle up to 4,000tpy of magnet materials, collected from wind turbine nacelles. Initial feedstock for the separator will be sourced from the company’s Longonjo REE mine, as well as a variety of third-party feedstock from other sources.

Neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) permanent magnets are central to the energy transition powering clean energy technology such as offshore wind turbines and electric vehicles (EVs). Ongoing efforts are being made to replace REE magnets as they become more expensive to produce and critically reliant on Chinese supply chains, but currently, no substitution can be made without some loss of performance. Although new REE projects are expected to come online within the next few years, the growing demand for clean energy technology will intensify the search for new REE sources. One option being explored is recycling, which has the potential to become an important secondary source of REEs, but several hurdles remain in place and primary supply growth is expected to be the main growing source of supply.