By: Jeff Beach (ND Monitor)
Sen. Dale Patten says North Dakota is at the leading edge of rare earth mineral development in the United States and the Legislature is looking to keep it that way.
Patten, R-Watford City, last week offered an amendment on House Bill 1459 that he said he hopes will keep North Dakota at the forefront of developing rare earth minerals, which are needed for products such as electronics and electric vehicles.
China is filling most of the demand for rare earth minerals. But uncertainty over trade with China has increased the interest in developing rare earth minerals in the United States.
President Donald Trump in March issued an executive order to stimulate mineral production, including on federal lands controlled by the Department of the Interior.
Coal seams in North Dakota’s Williston Basin are a potential source, with Dan Laudal, a researcher at the School of Engineering and Mines at the University of North Dakota, telling a Senate committee last week the state could “piggyback” on existing coal mining to produce rare earth minerals.
There was little discussion Monday as the Senate approved the amendment and the bill. It will now go back to the House, which had approved a very different version of the bill.
Patten said last week that he hoped the House would not concur with the changes the Senate approved Monday, which would push the bill into a conference committee for additional tweaks to improve the bill.
The House version proved to be contentious between groups representing landowners and lawmakers seeking to speed up extracting rare earth minerals by modifying existing coal leases.
The amendment approved Monday removes references to coal leases from the bill.
Patten said the new bill accomplishes three things:
Troy Coons, chairman of the Northwest Landowners Association, testified against the previous version of the bill, saying the Legislature was interfering with what should be private contract negotiations between coal companies and landowners. He said the amended bill was better, but not perfect.
“We’re not going to support it, but we’re not going to fight it,” Coons said Monday.
He said the group would like to see the study include some guidance on how contracts with coal companies might be structured. He said he hopes the bill does not go into conference committee for fear that something gets changed in a way that will be detrimental to landowners.
Several entities have been researching where rare earth mineral can be found in the state and the potential for development, including the Lignite Research Council, the Energy and Environmental Resource Center in Grand Forks, the North Dakota Geological Survey and UND.
Jonathan Fortner, interim president of the North Dakota Lignite Energy Council, said one of the goals of his group was to avoid spending a lot of time in court battling over leases.
“This is probably one of the more complicated things we’ve tried to work on,” he said of potentially valuable mineral intermingled, but very sporadically within a coal vein.
But he said it is a great opportunity for the coal industry to diversify away from just producing electricity.
There are 17 rare earth minerals that could be separated from the coal and sent to other facilities for further refining and manufacturing, Laudal said.
Laudal said Thursday a $100 million facility extracting rare earth minerals from about 200,000 tons of coal per year could be done profitably. That’s about 50 times the size of a UND pilot project.
Rare earth minerals are found in their highest concentration at the top and bottom of coal seams, he said. A facility could extract and concentrate a mixture of rare earth minerals.
Rare earth minerals are of potentially high value and shipping just a truckload a week could make the investment pay, he said.
Fortner said with China’s dominance there is not an established market for domestic rare earth minerals, which may make it hard to attract investment.
He said federal incentives or federal contracts, perhaps through the Department of Defense, could help provide some certainty and benefit coal companies and landowners.
“Without more certainty, we won’t have extraction and landowners won’t benefit,” he said.
Patten said having a domestic source of rare earth minerals is seen as a matter of national security and he is hopeful that the federal government could help offset the cost of development in North Dakota.
“I would not be surprised that the Department of Energy says, ‘OK, because of a national security interest, we’re going to provide funding,’” Patten said.
