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Posted on: 1/8/2013 12:00:00 AM... The U.S. Department of Energy announced that a team led by Ames Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, has been selected for an award of up to $120 million over five years to establish an Energy Innovation Hub that will develop solutions to domestic shortages of rare earth metals and other critical materials. The new research center will be named the Critical Materials Institute (CMI).

CMI will leverage existing research programs into a larger, coordinated effort designed to eliminate materials criticality as an impediment to the commercialization of clean energy technologies. Challenges that it will focus on addressing include enabling new sources; improving the economics of existing sources; accelerating material development and deployment; more efficient use in manufacturing; recycling and reuse; and developing strategies to assess and address the life cycles of new materials.

Other national labs partnering with Ames include Idaho National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. University and research partners include Brown University, the Colorado School of Mines, Purdue University, Rutgers University, University of California-Davis, Iowa State University, and Florida Industrial and Phosphate Research Institute. Industry partners that have joined to help advance CMI-developed technologies include General Electric; OLI Systems, Inc.; SpinTek Filtration, Inc.; Advanced Recovery; Cytec, Inc.; Molycorp, Inc.; and Simbol Materials.

For More Information:

• Go to CMI Website

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