{"id":116155,"date":"2026-09-20T05:06:04","date_gmt":"2026-09-20T09:06:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=116155"},"modified":"2026-09-20T05:06:04","modified_gmt":"2026-09-20T09:06:04","slug":"rare-earth-elements-in-coal-ash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/bible-resources\/bible-and-science\/rare-earth-elements-in-coal-ash\/","title":{"rendered":"Rare Earth Elements in Coal Ash: $8.4 Billion in Waste"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='booster-block booster-read-block'>\n                <div class=\"twp-read-time\">\n                \t<i class=\"booster-icon twp-clock\"><\/i> <span>Read Time:<\/span>10 Minute, 43 Second                <\/div>\n\n            <\/div><p>There is a grey hill somewhere near almost every old coal power station. Nobody visits it. Nobody photographs it. It is the ash left over after the coal burned, trucked out, dumped into a landfill or a pond, and then mostly forgotten.<\/p>\n\n<p>That hill may be one of the more valuable things on the property. When researchers added up the <strong>rare earth elements in coal ash<\/strong> across the United States, they landed on an estimate of roughly 11 million tons of them \u2014 worth something in the region of $8.4 billion.<\/p>\n\n<p>That is a big number. It is also not the most interesting thing here. The most interesting thing turned up when the same researchers checked which ash actually gives its metals up.<\/p>\n\n<h2>What is actually sitting in the ash<\/h2>\n\n<p>&#8220;Rare earth elements&#8221; is a group name for seventeen metals with names most of us never learned \u2014 neodymium, dysprosium, yttrium and the rest. They are not genuinely rare in the ground. They are just miserable to separate from everything they are mixed with, and most of the world&#8217;s capacity to do that separating sits in one country.<\/p>\n\n<p>They also sit inside almost everything modern. The magnet in a phone speaker. The motor in an electric car. The generator in a wind turbine. Hospital scanners. Headphones. Take them out of the supply chain and a lot of ordinary objects stop being possible.<\/p>\n\n<p>So when a team at the University of Texas at Austin&#8217;s Jackson School of Geosciences published the first national tally of what is sitting in American coal ash, people paid attention. Their paper, in the <em>International Journal of Coal Science &amp; Technology<\/em> in November 2024, worked from the ash produced between 1985 and 2021 \u2014 about 1,873 million tons of it \u2014 and estimated that roughly 70% is stored somewhere it could in principle be recovered from.<\/p>\n\n<p>From that accessible pile they estimated as much as 11 million tons of rare earth elements, worth about $8.4 billion, which is close to eight times what the country currently counts in its raw domestic reserves.<\/p>\n\n<p>Worth being precise about this: that is a calculated estimate built from ash volumes and measured concentrations, not a measurement of metal anybody has actually pulled out and weighed. Nobody has extracted $8.4 billion of anything. The figure describes what is in the pile, not what has been taken from it.<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"convertkit-form wp-block-convertkit-form\" style=\"\"><script async data-uid=\"6491fb8269\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.kit.com\/6491fb8269\/index.js\" data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" data-no-defer=\"1\" data-no-optimize=\"1\" nowprocket><\/script><\/div>\n\n\n<h2>The richest ash gives up the least<\/h2>\n\n<p>Here is the part that did not make most of the headlines, and it is the best thing in the study.<\/p>\n\n<p>The researchers broke the ash down by where the coal came from. Ash from the Appalachian basin had the highest concentration of rare earth elements of any source they looked at \u2014 about 431 milligrams per kilogram. Ash from the Powder River basin had the lowest, around 264 milligrams per kilogram.<\/p>\n\n<p>Then they looked at extractability \u2014 how much of what is in there can actually be got out. The order flipped. Only about 30% of the rare earths in the rich Appalachian ash could be recovered. In the poorer Powder River ash, it was roughly 70%.<\/p>\n\n<p>Read that twice. The pile that tests richest yields the least. The pile that tests poorest yields the most. Concentration and recoverability are two completely different questions, and the first one \u2014 the one that is easy to measure and easy to put in a headline \u2014 turns out to be the less useful of the two.<\/p>\n\n<p>Those two basins, together with the Illinois basin, account for about 83% of all the ash produced in that period. So this is not a footnote about an odd corner of the data. It is most of the resource.<\/p>\n\n<h2>Why nobody has started digging yet<\/h2>\n\n<p>This is where the story gets honest, and where a lot of the coverage quietly stopped reading.<\/p>\n\n<p>A follow-up study from the same Bureau of Economic Geology group \u2014 Bridget Scanlon, Brent Elliott, and James Hower of the University of Kentucky \u2014 published in June 2026, ran the numbers on Gulf Coast coal and its ash. The headline totals look enormous again: something like $186 billion worth of rare earths in the coal itself, and $1.2 billion in the ash.<\/p>\n\n<p>Then they divided by the tonnage. Per ton, the value comes out at under $5. Their working figures were roughly $3.20 per ton for the coal and about $4.40 per ton for the ash, once realistic extraction yields were applied.<\/p>\n\n<p>Under $5 a ton is not a business. It does not pay for the trucks, never mind the chemistry. The researchers&#8217; own read on it is that this is unlikely to support a company that exists only to pull rare earths out of waste. As Elliott put it, if you are already mining the coal, the rare earth elements could be a side hustle \u2014 you need to find some way to use the byproducts before it is worth doing at all.<\/p>\n\n<p>So the honest version of the story is narrower and more interesting than &#8220;America breaks the global rare earth monopoly.&#8221; The value is genuinely there. It is only reachable by someone who is already working in the waste for some other reason.<\/p>\n\n<h2>What changed in September 2026<\/h2>\n\n<p>On 18 September 2026, Worcester Polytechnic Institute announced a five-year, $3.3 million award from the National Science Foundation&#8217;s Growing Convergence Research programme, led by Mingjiang Tao with co-investigators Carrick Eggleston and Yan Wang, and partners at George Mason University, UC San Diego, UMass Amherst and the University at Buffalo.<\/p>\n\n<p>Their angle is the one part of this that is genuinely new: stop trying to out-muscle the chemistry, and copy something that already solved it.<\/p>\n\n<p>Diatoms \u2014 single-celled algae \u2014 pull dissolved silicon out of plain seawater and build glass shells out of it, at ordinary temperatures, with no furnace and no harsh acid. Sea sponges do something similar. So do plants. They use biological molecules and organic scaffolds to gather scattered material and assemble it into structure, under mild conditions, quietly, all the time.<\/p>\n\n<p>The team wants to borrow that trick to recover rare earths and silica from coal ash, red mud (the waste left from refining aluminium) and mine tailings. And they have said plainly that part of the work is studying whether it can scale economically at all. That is a research programme, not a solution. It is worth saying so.<\/p>\n\n<h2>The pile nobody looked at<\/h2>\n\n<p>What strikes me about all of this is not the money. It is where the money was.<\/p>\n\n<p>It was not somewhere new. Nobody had to drill deeper or go further. The most strategically desperate material in the country turned out to be sitting in the one place nobody had bothered to assess, because it had already been classified as leftovers. The category &#8220;waste&#8221; did the work that a fence would have done. It kept people from looking.<\/p>\n\n<p>That is not a new observation, just a newly measured one. There is a very old line \u2014 old enough that stonemasons were the natural reference point \u2014 about a stone the builders looked over, judged useless, and set aside, which turned out to be the exact stone the whole building needed. Long before anyone could measure milligrams per kilogram, people had already noticed that discarded and worthless are not the same word, and that God seems to have a persistent habit of starting in the discard pile. It shows up in the people, too. <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/bgodinspired-news\/bgodinspired-sports-news\/arthur-hancock-iii-dies-at-83\/\">Arthur Hancock III, passed over to run his family&#8217;s farm, went off and bred the colt no buyer at auction wanted<\/a> \u2014 and that colt won the Kentucky Derby.<\/p>\n\n<h2>What this is actually good for<\/h2>\n\n<p>The practical takeaway from the science is smaller than the headline and more useful.<\/p>\n\n<p>First: measuring the obvious thing is not the same as measuring the useful thing. The richest ash was the wrong ash. If the researchers had stopped at concentration, they would have pointed the whole industry at the pile that gives up the least.<\/p>\n\n<p>Second: the value here is only available to someone already in the mess. Not to a newcomer with a clever idea and no reason to be standing there. That is an unglamorous rule and it holds well outside geology.<\/p>\n\n<p>Third \u2014 and this is the one worth carrying around \u2014 the reason nobody had counted the rare earths in coal ash before 2024 is not that it was hard. It is that nobody thought to ask. That happens more than we would like to admit. <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/bible-resources\/bible-and-science\/hidden-earthquakes-antarctica-wrong-frequency\/\">Antarctica turned out to be full of earthquakes nobody had heard<\/a>, for years, because the instruments were listening at the wrong frequency. The signal was never missing. The question was.<\/p>\n\n<p>Which makes the grey hill a fair thing to think about for a minute. It does not look like anything. Most valuable things do not, at first \u2014 including, fairly often, the parts of our own lives we have quietly filed under leftovers. If that thought lands, <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/what-is-my-purpose\/\">our free What Is My Purpose? assessment<\/a> is a decent place to poke at it for a few minutes.<\/p>\n\n<h2>What Do You Think?<\/h2>\n\n<p>If the ash that tests richest is the ash that gives up the least, should the money go to the biggest pile or the most cooperative one? Put your answer in the comments \u2014 no geology degree required.<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"convertkit-form wp-block-convertkit-form\" style=\"\"><script async data-uid=\"6491fb8269\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.kit.com\/6491fb8269\/index.js\" data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" data-no-defer=\"1\" data-no-optimize=\"1\" nowprocket><\/script><\/div>\n\n\n<h2>Share This<\/h2>\n\n<ul>\n<li>The richest coal ash in America has the most rare earth metals in it and gives up the least. The poorest ash gives up the most. Nobody checked until 2024. https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/bible-resources\/bible-and-science\/rare-earth-elements-in-coal-ash\/<\/li>\n<li>$8.4 billion in rare earth elements is sitting in American coal ash. The catch nobody mentions: it works out to under $5 a ton. Real value, almost unreachable. https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/bible-resources\/bible-and-science\/rare-earth-elements-in-coal-ash\/<\/li>\n<li>Scientists want to copy how algae and sea sponges build glass out of seawater, and use it to pull rare earth metals out of coal waste. $3.3 million, five years, no furnaces. https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/bible-resources\/bible-and-science\/rare-earth-elements-in-coal-ash\/<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<h2>Questions People Ask About Rare Earth Elements in Coal Ash<\/h2>\n\n<h3>How much are the rare earth elements in US coal ash worth?<\/h3>\n\n<p>A 2024 study from the University of Texas at Austin&#8217;s Jackson School of Geosciences, published in the International Journal of Coal Science &amp; Technology, estimated as much as 11 million tons of rare earth elements in accessible United States coal ash, worth approximately $8.4 billion. That is close to eight times the country&#8217;s current raw domestic reserves. The figure is a calculated estimate based on ash volumes and measured concentrations, not a measurement of metal that has been extracted.<\/p>\n\n<h3>Why is nobody extracting rare earth elements from coal ash already?<\/h3>\n\n<p>The economics are marginal. A June 2026 study from the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin found the value works out to under $5 per ton \u2014 roughly $3.20 per ton for coal and $4.40 per ton for coal ash once realistic extraction yields are applied. Researchers on that study have said this is unlikely to support a standalone extraction industry, and is more plausible as a secondary revenue stream for companies already processing coal or coal ash for other reasons.<\/p>\n\n<h3>Which coal ash has the most recoverable rare earth elements?<\/h3>\n\n<p>Concentration and recoverability run in opposite directions. Appalachian basin coal ash has the highest concentration of rare earth elements at about 431 milligrams per kilogram, but only around 30% of it is extractable. Powder River basin ash has the lowest concentration at about 264 milligrams per kilogram, but roughly 70% is extractable. The Appalachian, Powder River and Illinois basins together account for about 83% of all US coal ash produced between 1985 and 2021.<\/p>\n\n<h3>What are bio-inspired methods for extracting rare earth elements?<\/h3>\n\n<p>They are extraction techniques that copy how living organisms gather scattered minerals. Diatoms, sea sponges and plants use biological molecules and organic scaffolds to collect dissolved silicon and build complex silica structures under mild conditions, without high heat or harsh chemicals. In September 2026, a Worcester Polytechnic Institute-led team received a five-year, $3.3 million National Science Foundation Growing Convergence Research award to adapt those processes to recover rare earth elements and silica from coal ash, red mud and mine tailings.<\/p>\n\n<h3>Are rare earth elements actually rare?<\/h3>\n\n<p>Not in terms of how much exists in the earth&#8217;s crust. The seventeen rare earth elements are reasonably abundant, but they occur scattered and mixed with other materials rather than in concentrated deposits, which makes separating them difficult and expensive. The bottleneck is processing capacity rather than geological scarcity, and most of the world&#8217;s processing capacity is concentrated in a small number of facilities.<\/p>        <div class=\"booster-block booster-reactions-block\">\n            <div class=\"twp-reactions-icons\">\n                \n                <div class=\"twp-reacts-wrap\">\n                    <a react-data=\"be-react-1\" post-id=\"116155\" class=\"be-face-icons un-reacted\" href=\"javascript:void(0)\">\n                        <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/booster-extension\/\/assets\/icon\/happy.svg\" alt=\"Happy\" title=\"\">\n                    <\/a>\n                    <div class=\"twp-reaction-title\">\n                        Happy                    <\/div>\n                    <div class=\"twp-count-percent\">\n                                                    <span style=\"display: none;\" class=\"twp-react-count\">0<\/span>\n                      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But the richest ash gives up the least, and that strange gap is the real story behind the numbers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":116156,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_wp_convertkit_post_meta":{"form":"-1","landing_page":"0","tag":"0","restrict_content":"0"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226,3550],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bgodinspired-science-news","category-bible-and-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116155"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":116157,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116155\/revisions\/116157"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}