March 4, 2025 - A Virginia Tech-led team hopes to turn trash into treasure by finding valuable minerals in the waste products from mining and power plant operations.

Some of these treasures have familiar names: aluminum, nickel, zinc.

Others might require borrowing a chemistry textbook: antimony, beryllium, iridium.

These and others, 50 in all, are known as critical minerals — so called because they’re vital to the economy for technologies from batteries to smartphones to solar panels, and yet they have no easy substitute.

While critical minerals, along with a largely overlapping set of 17 elements known as rare earth elements, are in demand, the U.S. is largely dependent on foreign sources. 

Researchers say that sources such as coal waste, fly ash from power plants and slag dumps from iron mines contain critical minerals and rare earth elements, potentially providing a key domestic source for these vital resources.

Extracting them could also provide new revenue for mining companies and help offset the cost of cleaning up legacy waste.

“At some point, this could be a primary product, not a waste product or a by-product. In some cases, this could be worth more than the coal itself, potentially,” said Richard Bishop, a professor of practice in Virginia Tech’s Department of Mining and Minerals Engineering.

Bishop is the principal investigator of Expand Appalachia CORE-CM (for “carbon ore, rare earth and critical minerals”).

Expand Appalachia’s three-year project will incorporate the work of a previous Virginia Tech-led project, Evolve CAPP, while adding teams from Pennsylvania State University and Bluefield State University, along with government agencies and private companies.

Evolve CAPP focused on Central Appalachia — parts of Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky — while Expand Appalachia will canvass a larger area involving 11 states, including into New York and New England. Penn State had a similar earlier project, dubbed CANARY, for its part of Appalachia.

In both projects, researchers collected hundreds of samples from sources such as coal materials left over from mining and power plant operations or, in Penn State’s case, slag dumps around Pennsylvania’s numerous iron mines. 

Researchers plan to analyze these samples to see which critical minerals are present and in what quantities.

Finding critical minerals and rare earths isn’t always easy, in large part because they typically exist in relatively low concentrations. 

Even if they can be found in waste coal and elsewhere, more work would be needed to understand what infrastructure and workforce exist to extract them, Bishop said.

“It’s one thing to have this endowment of mineralization in the ground, but it’s a whole separate issue of how you get it out of the ground and move it to market,” he said.

Nonetheless, it’s potentially a matter of national security. More than 80% of the United States’ critical minerals come from foreign countries, according to the Department of Energy, and China dominates the market.

“The U.S. is dependent on other countries to supply us with these right now, so we’re trying to develop our own domestic supply chain,” said Barb Arnold, a mining engineering professor at Penn State.

The Expand Appalachia team was awarded $7.5 million in Department of Energy funding in early January, one of six regional consortia to be awarded a share of $45 million in all. The team also is backed by $2 million in funding from project partners and stakeholders.

Other partners on the team are the University of Kentucky, West Virginia University, the Bluefield-based engineering firm Marshall Miller & Associates, the consulting firm Bandy Geological, Virginia Department of Energy, Kentucky Geological Survey, Crescent RI, Richmond-based Chmura Economics & Analytics, Gray Energy, the Southwest Virginia-based economic development consulting firm Coalfield Strategies, and the U.S. Geological Survey.

One of President Donald Trump’s first executive orders was to freeze federal funding for a variety of Department of Energy projects pending further administrative review. Bishop said the team still expects to receive the grant, although he noted that governmental reviews could delay it.

“Nonetheless, we are ready to mobilize quickly in this new phase as soon as we get the green light from DOE,” Bishop said in an email.

Trump appears to place a high priority on securing critical minerals. They have even emerged as an issue during negotiations around the war in Ukraine, with Trump proposing that Ukraine grant the U.S. access to what could be billions of dollars worth of critical minerals and rare earth elements.

The rise in value of such resources directly correlates with the advancement of smartphones, televisions and other devices that require them. It marks a change in how critical minerals were viewed not that long ago.

Arnold recalled that in the 1990s, she was involved in work to remove some critical minerals from coal before the coal went to power plants for burning. At that time, the elements were considered hazardous air pollutants.

“We were trying to get them out of the coal and put them in the refuse pile … and now that’s where we’re finding them, back in those refuse piles,” she said.

The Expand Appalachia team’s work today provides an opportunity to clean up legacy waste from coal mining, Bishop said.

Such work is already being done in some places for environmental reasons, and finding critical minerals in that waste could help pay for the cost of cleanup.

“We can create a product out of waste,” Bishop said. “Part of the issue is moving it. We get a little bit more bang for our buck on the economic side if we can extract critical minerals as part of that environmental cleanup.”

Besides looking at existing mines and their waste products, researchers also are collecting drill core samples as companies move into new areas for mining.

Bishop said he hopes Expand Appalachia will show the coal industry the value of extracting critical minerals before they head to waste piles in the first place.

Bluefield State University also is joining Virginia Tech and Penn State’s efforts.

Its role will be relatively small, primarily collecting samples and distributing information about the project to the public, said Cary Harwood, Bluefield’s principal investigator for the project.

The university will focus on a region in and around its home of Mercer County, West Virginia, as well as into Southwest Virginia, including the counties of Buchanan, Giles, Tazewell and Wythe, Harwood said.

“We’ll go to some abandoned areas, mainly in coal,” he said. “Some active coal operations, as well as some exploratory operations, mainly focused on coal. We also have our local aggregate industry, and we’ll sample those as well.”

The university hopes its participation in the program will also help bring more attention to its mining engineering degree program. The school relaunched it last year after it lapsed for several years due to a lack of students.

“As we bring in this research funding, we’ll need additional personnel, additional students to help perform some of the tasks that we’re obligated to do under this program. … Our effort now is to get this information out to the public, get their input, and not just the public but also the industry,” Harwood said.