Geological Society of America

1 D4. Economic Geology: Ore Deposits and Extractions Related to Critical Minerals

Sunday, 15 October 2023
8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
333

DEVELOPING AN INTERNALLY CONSISTENT THERMODYNAMIC PROPERTY DATABASE FOR REE AQUEOUS AND SOLID SPECIES

Paper number: 1-5
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 8:55 AM – 9:10 AM

Authors

Ruiguang PAN Presenting Author
Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, IN
Chen Zhu
Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, IN
Alexander Gysi
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Socorro, NM
Lei Gong
Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, IN
George Miron
Paul Scherrer Institute, Villigen PSI, Villigen
Laura Waters
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Socorro, NM
Nicole Hurtig
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Socorro, NM
Artaches Migdissov
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM

Abstract

Rare Earth Elements (REE) are critical (minerals) metals for the transition from fossil fuels to renewable and clean energy. The International Energy Agency predicts that we need seven times more REE in 2040 than that at the 2020 level. Understanding the solubility, speciation, and transport properties of REE in various ore formation, extraction, chemical processing, and recycling processes are crucial for discovering more REE deposits and recovering REE from mining and industrial wastes. Such understanding will be greatly aided by geochemical modeling of geological, environmental, and chemical engineering processes. However, the accuracy of the geochemical modeling results relies on the quality of thermodynamic databases [1]. To complement a program of experimental studies by the team [2-3], this study embarks on developing an internally consistent thermodynamic database for REE aqueous and solid species ranging from surficial Earth to deep crustal conditions (e.g., from 25 °C and 1 bar to 1000 °C and 5 kbar). This presentation will discuss the inventory of currently available datasets, the research needs, and an example of an extensible experimental database (ThermoExp_REE) generated to optimize thermodynamic data in the REE-P-O-H system. This work is part of our new efforts to extend the MINES and SUPCRTBL thermodynamic databases [4-5] to supercritical conditions and make the REE dataset widely available to the community for geochemical modeling softwares (SUPCRTBL, PHREEQC, GEMS, etc.) and applications.

Reference:

[1] Zhu, C. and Nordstrom, D. K. (2022). Flying Blind: Geochemical Modeling and Thermodynamic Data Files. Groundwater, 60(6), 699–700.

[2] Gysi, A.P., et al. (2023). What controls the mobility of rare earth elements (REE) in critical mineral deposits in acidic vs. alkaline hydrothermal fluids?. In Goldschmidt 2023 Conference.

[3] Banerjee, D., et al. (2023). High temperature monazite-(Nd) solubility experiments to predict Nd complexation at variable pH and salinity in supercritical fluids. In Goldschmidt 2023 Conference.

[4] Gysi, A.P., et al. 2023, MINES thermodynamic database, version 19.1. https://doi.org/10.58799/mines-tdb.

[5] Zimmer, K., et al. (2016). SUPCRTBL: A revised and extended thermodynamic dataset and software package of SUPCRT92. Comput. Geosci. 90, 97–111.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 55, No. 6

doi: 10.1130/abs/2023AM-393119

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