The SEE occurrence Storkwitz and the region
The SEE occurrence Storkwitz fulfills a number of important factors for the successful mining of rare earths. In international comparison Storkwitz is in Germany in a politically extremely stable environment. The infrastructure of the immediate region and the whole of Germany and Central Europe is one of the most modern and best networked in the world. This applies both to the transport of process chemicals and to the removal of the SEE to the processing industry in the German and European high-tech industry. The Central German mining, industrial and chemical region also has highly qualified specialists in both mining and processing chemistry. The area around Storkwitz has little building and the intervention in the landscape can be minimized by adapted structural measures.
The future belongs to the innovative mining and extraction methods
The extraction of the deep-lying SEE should be done by proven methods which can be further optimized or completely newly developed, whereby the prevention of waste clearly stands in the foreground. It is the declared goal of SES AG to supply the extracted substances as fully as possible for industrial use and thus to avoid or at least largely minimize waste streams. It is already foreseeable that a large part of the materials and chemicals needed for extraction can be sourced from other industries where they are no longer needed. In this industry, for example, waste is transformed into new raw materials that find meaningful and truly sustainable uses in the production of new raw materials, namely the rare earths from Storkwitz. Many of the substances produced in SEE extraction can be used for other material and technical processes if material flow management makes sense. Although not every detail can be betrayed here for reasons of competition, it is already foreseeable that a substantial part of the materials resulting from SEE separation can be used as raw material for new industrial products.
Rare earth deposits and their profitability
Rare Earth deposits are known from many parts of the world, but in many of them the valuable materials are present today in a technically, ecologically and economically difficult to obtain form. The seemingly "unlimited", simple and above all cheap supply of world demand with Chinese SEE, which until a few years ago has not only led to the closure of well-known deposits in other countries, there was also apparently no need to research improved methods of extraction. So today only the richest of the so far known SEE deposits are mined and even with these the application rate is rather modest. For example, at the Mount Weld deposit in Western Australia, this output is currently at a relatively low level. In the small but very rich Steenkamps Kraal deposit in South Africa, all ores with less than 5% SEE (!) Were dumped unused. A comparison with the previous innovations in the extraction of other metallic raw materials such as copper and gold shows clearly that the continuous use of much lower recyclables is possible. However, only the most complete extraction of the valuable substances of a deposit also means the truly sustainable extraction of the required raw materials. The current SEE supply through incomplete SEE recovery from known rich deposits means that the urgently needed technical innovations in the area of SEE recovery have not yet taken place! In other words, it is still easier (and cheaper) today to get the required SEE relatively inefficiently from very rich reservoirs, rather than using innovative new techniques to extract as much as possible from the SEE and extract it from lower-grade reservoirs. To consider the known contents of the SEE occurrence Storkwitz alone by today's criteria is therefore a very static approach. He overlooks huge potential for innovation that needs to be mobilized in relation to the exploitation of SEE. Future technical innovations in the field of ecologically and technically optimized SEE production will allow mining of even lower-grade deposits in a larger number of politically stable countries, thereby additionally reducing the current political supply risk of domestic industry.
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