Rare earth minerals – with their sci-fi names like europium and terbium – are a hot topic today. They were central to President Donald Trump’s deal with Ukraine to keep funding its defense against Russian attacks, and their presence in Greenland is part of Trump’s motivation to continue threatening a takeover of the Danish island, as The Washington Post reported this week.
Rare earth elements are a key ingredient in electric vehicle batteries, smartphones, and green energy technologies like wind turbines.
But there are at least two big problems with these minerals. First is access: Several are at risk of supply disruption, according to the U.S. Department of Energy and the European Commission. And second is environmental degradation: Even though rare earths, as they’re sometimes called, are used in green technology, mining them comes at a big environmental cost.
Now, UT-Austin has announced researchers have taken an important step in developing a new method to separate and extract rare earth elements which could help with both issues, by publishing findings on a process that is more efficient and environmentally friendly, according to a UT-Austin press release. (Previous peer-reviewed findings published in 2022 described membrane methods as one of the results of an intense search for more “environmentally safe methods.”)
“Rare earth elements are the backbone of advanced technologies, but their extraction and purification are energy intensive and extremely difficult to implement at the scales required,” said Manish Kumar, a UT-Austin engineer, in the university’s release. “Our work aims to change that, inspired by the natural world.”
Demand for these metals is expected to grow by over 2,600% by 2035, according to UT-Austin. With the increasing growth of technology, it is becoming ever more important to extract and recycle these metals efficiently and sustainably.
Typically, rare earth minerals are mined from open pits in environmentally damaging ways: blasting rocks with explosives, and pumping chemicals into the earth to separate metals, which can cause these chemicals to leak into groundwater and possibly affect waterways, as the Harvard International Review reported.
“Rare earth elements are the backbone of advanced technologies, but their extraction and purification are energy intensive.” – Manish Kumar, a UT-Austin engineer
Researchers at UT-Austin developed artificial membrane channels, which are pores embedded in membranes that act as transport mechanisms in transport proteins. These channels result in a system that transports these rare earth elements but excludes ions like potassium and calcium. Inspired by biology, essentially, the process separates valuable minerals from useless ones in a less disruptive way.
As demand for rare earth elements continues to grow, the effect on the environment will only continue to be exacerbated. The goal, the UT-Austin release said, is to further develop the process to conduct ion separations in the U.S. while using clean energy.
This isn’t UT’s first big contribution to rare earth acquisition – last year, UT researchers found that the national coal ash supply contains plenty of rare earth elements which could help increase the national supply without any new mining.
These developments, and others coming out of UT-Austin, could become very important to the U.S. economically. Such discoveries could decrease reliance on other countries, UT-Austin posits in its press release.
China is the world’s leading rare earth elements producer, with the U.S. being the seventh highest, according to Investing News Network. As the Trump administration continues to discuss tariffs on China, decreasing reliance on rare earth metals from China may be of increasing interest in the U.S.
UT-Austin researchers also hope this technology can be used in the industrial sector, making it easier to conduct ion separations in the U.S. in an environmentally friendly way.
As UT-Austin research associate Harekrushna Behera put it: “This is a first step towards translating nature’s sophisticated molecular recognition and transport strategies into robust industrial processes, thus bringing high selectivity to settings where current methods fall short.”
This article appears in August 1 • 2025.