Ionic Rare Earths Limited (ASX: IXR) is celebrating strong progress at Ionic Technologies International Ltd Belfast facility in the UK, and the development of a Magnet Recycling Demonstration Plant to scale up the technology.
IonicTech is a 100% owned subsidiary based in Belfast UK, which the Company acquired in H1 2022 (formerly Seren Technologies Ltd). IonicTech has developed rare earth element separation and refining technology and applied this to the recycling of spent permanent Neodymium-Iron-Boron (NdFeB) magnets. The process uses a hydrometallurgical process to extract the rare earth elements (REE), then separate the individual magnet REEs within – Neodymium (Nd), Praseodymium (Pr), Dysprosium (Dy) and Terbium (Tb) – and finally refine to high purity individual magnet rare earths oxides (REO).
In September 2022, IonicTech was awarded a grant of £1.72 million from the UK Government’s Innovate UK Automotive Transformation Fund Scale-up Readiness Validation (SuRV) programme, to develop a demonstration scale magnet recycling plant, a significant step towards securing the UK supply of critical rare earth metals for EV manufacture. The magnet recycling Demonstration Plant represents a scale up of the successful pilot plant campaigns completed to date and will provide further data for the development of a commercial facility(s).
During Q1 2023, the majority of the Demonstration Plant equipment was received to the Belfast facility, which is being installed and hydrostatic testing of vessels has now commenced. Commissioning is progressing to schedule and process commissioning will commence throughout April.
IonicTech’s work to date has demonstrated capability for REEs to achieve near complete extraction of REO’s from lower quality spent magnets and waste (swarf) to a remarkable recovery of high value magnet REO product quality exceeding 99.9% REO.
This presents an opportunity for IonicTech to have “first mover” advantage in the industrial elemental extraction of REEs from spent magnets and waste, enabling near term magnet REO production capability to satisfy growing demand from lagging new supply chains.
The technology developed by IonicTech provides considerable benefits over alternative magnet recycling technologies presently being marketed and operated, including hydrogen decrepitation, which simply breaks down spent magnets and swarf to be recast as magnets of lesser quality.
The advantage of the technology developed by IonicTech is to provide a universal method for the recovery of high purity grade rare earth elements from lower quality and variable grade magnets, to be used in the manufacture of high-performance and high specification magnets for EV and wind turbine production.