DARPA Names Teams to Develop Biotechnologies to Purify Critical Elements

Rare earth elements, or REEs, are critical to many Department of Defense systems, including lasers, precision-guided weapons, magnets for motors, and other devices. The United States relies on foreign entities for element separation and purification, making the supply chain vulnerable. Adequate domestic rare earth resources exist, but the cost and hazards associated with the conventional, solvent-based processing needed to purify the elements is a barrier. DARPA's Environmental Microbes as a BioEngineering Resource (EMBER) program aims to use bioengineering methods, including biomining, to improve specificity and selectivity of microbes or biomolecules to separate and purify rare earth elements.

"EMBER was inspired by natural environmental microbes that require rare earth elements (REEs) for their survival, can tolerate extreme conditions, and have evolved uptake mechanisms and unique enzymes to utilize them," stated Dr. Linda Chrisey, EMBER program manager. "We hope to exploit the exquisite selectivity and specificity of these systems to develop scalable processes for REE separation and purification."

Teams will apply synthetic biology methods to engineer organisms and/or biomolecules to enable the specific binding of REEs under harsh conditions, then integrate these technologies into a functioning biomining workflow for purifying individual REEs. The four-year program is divided into three phases, with teams reaching for increasing number and purity of REEs from increasingly complex source materials, culminating in a pilot-scale purification from domestic REE sources.

The selected teams include:

• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• Battelle Memorial Institute
• San Diego State University

"The selected projects each offer a different approach to developing new, safe biomining and bioprocessing methods for REEs that will enhance the use of complex, domestic sources," said Chrisey. "If successful, EMBER researchers will be able to not just purify REEs but also recover other critical metals, including those in recycled electronics."

As DARPA has identified rare earth elements as essential to the national security supply chain, the agency is approaching the need from multiple angles. In addition to EMBER, the Recycling at the Point of Disposal program is evaluating the technical feasibility of recovering multiple low-volume fraction critical elements present in end-of-life electronics hardware, or e-waste. DARPA also has partnered with the U.S. Geological Survey on a competition to explore the potential to speed up the assessment of the nation's critical mineral resources via machine learning and artificial intelligence tools and techniques.

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