From Waste to Wealth: unlocking Alabama’s coal ash potential

American Renewable Metals has been awarded funding from the Alabama Research and Development Enhancement Fund for a project titled “From Waste to Wealth: unlocking Alabama’s coal ash potential.”

Coal combustion residuals — coal ash — accumulated for decades at utility sites across the Southeast. They are stored, monitored and managed as a liability. They also contain rare earth elements and other critical minerals in concentrations that, with the right processing, are worth recovering.

The reserve nobody counts

When the United States tallies its critical minerals position, the conversation is almost always about new mines: where to open them, how long permitting takes, what it costs. That framing skips a large body of material that has already been extracted, already been processed once, and is already sitting in known locations with known ownership.

Coal ash is the clearest example. No new excavation. No new permitting for a mine. The material is inventoried, contained, and in many cases actively costing money to keep that way.

What the project covers

• Characterizing representative Alabama coal ash streams for recoverable content
• Adapting ARM’s selective leaching front end to the specific matrix
• Running recovered solution through the continuous separation train to high-purity product
• Establishing what the economics look like at deployable scale

The wider point

Turning an impoundment from a containment cost into a feedstock changes the arithmetic for the utility and adds domestic supply at the same time. That is the case ARM has been building since 2019, and coal ash is where it is most immediately testable at volume.