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Rare earths are once again drawing international attention. Today, Mrima Hill in Kenya finds itself in this spotlight, following the announcement of a bidding process for development. It comes with a condition increasingly attached to such deals: the minerals must be processed domestically. It is the right ambition, but will only pay off if Kenya is clear-eyed about what makes a processing industry last.
The case for domestic processing is obvious: bringing skilled jobs and business to local suppliers, enabling the country to keep more of the value its resources generate. But those benefits will be written into the winning bidder’s contract. What is less certain is the longevity of a processing operation. That depends heavily on the technology chosen, the evidence behind it and the skills and knowledge of the people operating it.
In a laboratory setting, it is relatively straightforward to demonstrate that a process can work on a particular sample under defined conditions. However, a commercial plant has more variables and factors impacting its operations, including changes in input composition, equipment wear, and utilities management. This is the real test of long-term sustainability: can a process deliver consistent, economic output, without costs or resource use spiraling? This is the evidence bidders must bring to the table.
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This evidence starts with what leaves the plant. A mineral concentrate and a separated rare-earth oxide are different achievements, sold to different buyers. A credible proposal should say which stages would happen in Kenya, what the processing capacity would be, and what the market would look like for the final product. Repeated samples that pass a customer’s qualification testing are meaningful proof.
An important consideration in evaluating processing capabilities is the system’s recovery rate. A high recovery in one step can hide losses elsewhere. What matters is how much of each target element makes it from ore to a saleable product. Hitting a purity target means little if recovery or production rate falls away, leaving wasted resources and lost value.
To optimize recovery processes, refining companies need representative samples of a given deposit. Two ores with similar rare-earth content can behave differently depending on their overall mineral compositions and impurities.
Isolated testing stages are not strong enough indicators to stand alone. Integrated pilot operations show how the stages work together at a level of scale. Recycled water can carry impurities that accumulate over repeated cycles and degrade product. Short runs miss these effects, so pilots need to run long enough to expose them – with every run logged in full and assessed for techno-economic effectiveness.
Kenya is not starting from scratch, as it can build on processing knowledge developed elsewhere. Experience in operating a plant in qualifying its product with customers, can shorten the learning curve. That experience is worth most when it helps Kenyan engineers and operators develop a process suited to Mrima Hill’s material.
Much has changed in the past five years. Rare-earth processing is no longer confined to a few very large complexes built around many-stage solvent extraction. In the United States, the chain is being split into smaller, specialised steps that can be built, permitted and qualified separately. ReElement Technologies, using a chromatography-based separation developed at Purdue University, has secured air permits for four production lines at a compact refinery in Marion, Indiana, treating both ore concentrates and recycled magnets. Further down the chain, and Eutectix converts rare-earth oxides and fluorides into high-purity metals and alloys at its plant in Arizona. Energy Fuels has adapted an existing licensed uranium mill in Utah to separate rare earths from monazite.
For Kenya, this modularity is the opportunity. A project need not build everything at once to keep value at home. A staged plan – concentrate first, then a mixed rare-earth product, then separated oxides as volumes and skills grow – is now credible, provided each stage has a named buyer. Specialist metal and alloy makers such as Eutectix are exactly the customers whose specifications Kenyan oxide would have to meet. Their requirements should shape the process from the outset, not be discovered after the plant is built.
New processing approaches could make domestic refining feasible in more places. Separation processes that are less energy and chemical intensive, resulting in a small infrastructure footprint, would empower Kenya with more freedom to choose where and how capacity develops. Showing those gains across the whole operation would strengthen the investment case.
An efficient separation stage can still sit downstream of energy-intensive grinding or drying. Comparisons should therefore use the same feed and product quality, and measure the energy, fresh water and chemicals used per tonne of saleable product.
Waste deserves the same scrutiny. A smaller volume isn’t automatically simpler to manage, what matters is its composition stability over time. At Mrima Hill, testing should also establish where naturally occurring radioactive elements end up and how they would be managed. Cost estimates should include treatment, maintenance and downtime, and, importantly, show what happens when feed quality dips or chemical prices climb. Refining systems that are able to reduce their waste through process efficiency or recycling efforts may offer relative advantages for the local communities.
Three directions stand out. The first is regenerating reagents rather than buying them. Conventional plants use acids and alkalis once and discharge them as salty effluent. My research group has developed electrochemical routes that use electricity to produce the acid and base a process needs from a salt solution, so they can be regenerated and reused in a loop rather than trucked in. The second is putting carbon dioxide to work. My group is developing molten salt electrolysis routes that use carbonates as opposed to chlorides or fluorides to produce REE metals, eliminating halide-based emissions. Electrochemical separations and tailored sorbents offer new energy- and material-efficient possibilities for separating REEs, as an alternative to multi-step solvent separation routes.
None of these gains’ transfers automatically to Mrima Hill. Its weathered carbonatite is rich in iron and manganese oxides and phosphate minerals, and it carries thorium. Each of these can consume reagent, foul membranes or sorbents, or turn up in the wrong stream. Demonstration should therefore use representative Mrima Hill samples, run as a closed loop over many cycles with recycled water and reagents, and report results per tonne of saleable product – electricity, fresh water, make-up chemicals and residue – backed by a full mass balance showing where the thorium and any uranium end up. Energy Fuels’ processing of monazite, which also carries uranium and thorium, at a licensed mill in Utah shows that radioactive by-products can be managed within the process, but only when licensing and monitoring are designed in from day one.
Above all, keeping more value in Kenya means keeping the knowledge there. Operators need the experience to spot when conditions are drifting before it shows in the product, laboratory teams need reliable and trusted measurements, and technicians need to keep the equipment running efficiently. Written procedures only go so far without practical experience behind them. Training should start during testing and commissioning, while the process is still being established.
As the facility matures, partnerships with technical institutions should give Kenyan teams access to operating procedures and ongoing specialist support. The aim should be an evergreen skills pipeline, with each generation of local engineers equipped to solve problems independently.
Newer processes are less forgiving of thin skills than older ones, not more. Solvent extraction comes with decades of accumulated operating know-how; an electrochemical cell, a chromatography column or a regenerated-reagent loop does not yet. Their performance drifts in ways that stay invisible until they become expensive: a membrane slowly fouling, a sorbent losing capacity, an impurity building up in a recycled stream. Running them reliably takes people who understand why the process works, not only how to operate it – electrochemists, analytical chemists, process-control engineers, and maintenance technicians who know how to care for these emerging materials and processes and fight corrosion.
In my experience training students and engineers, people learn fastest when those who will run a process help develop it. Kenyan engineers and chemists should be in the laboratory and at the pilot from the first test on Mrima Hill ore, with placements in operating plants abroad and joint programmes with Kenyan universities, so that local institutions can train the next cohort themselves. Contracts should make this transfer measurable: named Kenyan roles at each stage, operating knowledge documented and handed over, and a date by which Kenyan staff run the plant and its analytical laboratory without expatriate supervision. The laboratory deserves particular investment. A country that can independently verify the quality of its own product negotiates from a stronger position.
The opportunity at Mrima Hill is real, but its promise still has to be proven in practice. Kenya should back the bidder that can show testing on the deposit’s own material, output that meets a customer’s standard, all under a cost structure that holds up under realistic conditions and trained local operators to keep the plant running. That is what will separate a good first shipment from a lasting industry.
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