April 9, 2018 – Skyhaven Systems, LLC was awarded a contract from the Department of Energy to develop a new process for extracting rare earth elements from coal fly ash. Rare earth elements are critical and strategic materials used in defense, energy, electronics, and automotive applications. With China being the largest supplier of rare earth metals, new approaches for recovering rare-earth species from natural and waste sources are increasingly important to reduce our dependence on foreign entities. Coal and coal fly ash are potentially economical sources of rare earth elements. In both mining and recycling applications, new separation and recovery technologies are sought to enable more rapid, flexible, efficient, environmentally-friendly extraction and separations of individual lanthanides from mixtures with the goal of increasing the domestic supply of rare earth elements, and decreasing the costs of processing high purity metals. Skyhaven’s method to recover and separate individual rare earth metals from coal fly ash processing streams involves selective electrodeposition in an ionic liquid solution, exploiting the unique solvating capability of ionic liquids to dissolve stoichiometric amounts of rare earth metal precursors directly into the solution. Electrochemical methods are subsequently employed to recover these metals in a pure form.