Exciting Prospects for High-End Jobs at Rare Earth Facility in Jamaica

PROFESSOR of Supra-molecular Chemistry and Dean of the Faculty of Pure and Applied Sciences at the University of the West Indies Dr Ishenkumba Kahwa says Jamaica's venture into the extraction of rare earth metals from red mud presents exciting prospects for high-end jobs.

"The beautiful thing about the project is that it has the potential to generate high calibre jobs; there is extraction, making of products, separation of the rare earth elements. There are about 17 of them; the kind of skill we are going to need is quite interesting; so it will attract high-value jobs, so we are very excited about it," Professor Kahwa told the Jamaica Observer following Monday's ground-breaking ceremony for the US$3-million pilot plant to be constructed on the premises of the Jamaica Bauxite Institute (JBI) at Hope Gardens in St Andrew.

Professor Kahwa also expressed confidence that Jamaica had the expertise to staff the project, which will be shared jointly with personnel from Japanese company Nippon Light Metals who are funding the effort.

"We do have capacity, [as] in my own research group we have trained about 13 PhD graduates, and a good number of those are on rare earth chemistry; so we have people to manage the chemistry. We have students who are in the system. Now, once they know jobs will open up they will be sufficiently excited, so the capacity is here," he told the Observer.

"What we are seeing today is an excellent opportunity for us to be able not only to exploit our own resource, but we have the expertise that can be directed towards preparation and development of materials that are of high value," he added.

In the meantime, Professor Kahwa, who has been on the cutting edge of research in the area, said the project's potential impact on the environment was negligible.

"There are environmental concerns, but they are not concerns that we cannot manage, I am not worried in the least about that," he said.

In the meantime, he said the University of the West Indies, and Jamaica by extension, was no stranger to the subject area. "Our work at the University of the West Indies has spanned quite a period of time. I came here 1987 and the university was already involved in the research on rare earths, looking at basically the composition and the potential and so forth. There were other players as well, ALCAN (aluminium producer) was doing a lot of work. In fact, they have a patent for the extraction of rare earth from red mud," Professor Kahwa said.

He, however, noted that Jamaica's extraction work in the early 90s was short-lived because of China's trade which had the lion share of the industry.

"The Chinese have deposits in this stuff, they really flooded the market and the prices of rare earth went down substantially; so we shifted gears from extracting the metals to value-added products. So we have been making materials that can be used in biomedicine for diagnostic purposes, as catalysts, as laser material things like that," Professor Kahwa said.

With China's present state, however, Jamaica's window of opportunity might be bigger, he pointed out.

"They (China) have environmental issues and therefore they have restricted their imports, and hence the price of rare earth has gone back up again. Not only that, but if you need large quantities you might have a challenge sourcing those. So areas that were not particularly attractive, such as rare earths in red mud, are now attractive as a source of those elements. The price of it now is sufficiently good to actually warrant efforts to try and extract it," Professor Kahwa told the Observer.

Meanwhile, he said Jamaica would still have to work on creating niche markets. "... We have to optimise that process, because the Chinese are still there with their very cheap source, there are other countries like Australia, Africa and America that have some, so the question is how we actually put things in a way that actually is economical and makes money for us," Professor Kahwa said.
 

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