WVU Spins Off AMD Rare Earth Recovery Venture

West Virginia University has approved the creation of Mission Critical Materials LLC to commercialize technology that extracts rare earth elements and other critical minerals from acid mine drainage (AMD).
Developed by WVU’s Water Research Institute since 2016, the process recovers REEs as well as cobalt, nickel and lithium while treating polluted runoff from legacy coal operations. A $5 million, three-year Department of Energy grant will support scaling efforts.
WVU now operates a full-scale, 800-gallon-per-minute facility near Mount Storm that produces roughly a 1% REE pre-concentrate while continuously treating AMD. The next funded stage aims to refine that stream to greater than 90% mixed rare earth oxide and then separate individual oxides for market.
Technical and commercial challenges remain: economics at scale are unproven, AMD feedstock quality varies, and conversion from dilute concentrates to high-purity oxides is capital- and chemistry-intensive. Offtake arrangements and downstream partners have not been disclosed.
If successful, AMD recovery would add an environmentally restorative, non-traditional pathway to U.S. critical mineral supply chains, complementing conventional mining even as global processing dominance persists abroad.