SPECIAL REPORT: U.S. Begins Forging Rare Earth Supply Chain

MOUNTAIN PASS, California — From the smartphone in your pocket to magnets powering a growing number of electric vehicles on the road, rare earth elements are the foundational components for some of the most commonly used technologies today.

But over the last three decades, Beijing has held an iron grip on the world’s supply chain for rare earth elements such that nearly all materials — no matter where in the world they are mined — travel to China for refinement before they can be used in technologies.

The Environmental Microbes as a BioEngineering Resource, or EMBER, program is a DARPA initiative to use microbial and biomolecular engineering techniques to separate and purify rare earth mixtures like the ones produced at the Mountain Pass mine, Chrisey said. The program was inspired by microbes found living in harsh, volcanic environments that were using rare earth elements in order to survive, she said.

EMBER will use biomining to mimic this naturally occurring phenomenon. The technique uses microbes to help break down or separate an element of interest from a larger mixture, Chrisey explained. The process isn’t fully developed for rare earths due to “poor specificity and selectivity of the microbes” for the elements, the agency said.

In October, the program announced it had selected teams from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Battelle Memorial Institute and San Diego State University to participate in phase one of the four-year program.

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