Supra awarded DoD contract to advance scandium recovery
The US Department of Defence's (DoD's) Defence Logistics Agency has awarded Texas-based Supra Elemental Recovery a Phase 1 Small Business Innovation Research contract to advance the recovery of scandium.
Under this Phase 1 effort, Supra will evaluate the feasibility of applying its separation platform to relevant feedstocks in support of potential future scalability.
Scandium is a key mineral utilised in advanced aerospace, energy, and commercial technologies, and developing domestic processing capabilities strengthens national supply chain resilience. The research effort aims to evaluate novel separation and processing technologies to support domestic supply chain diversity.
Supra, which is a spin-out company of the University of Texas, is supported by private-sector industry partners in its efforts to recover scandium at high purity and scale to meet domestic demand.
“The US has scandium resources onshore. Supra’s proprietary platform utilises advanced chemical separation technology to selectively recover target elements from industrial feedstocks. The underlying technology has been validated in peer-reviewed research and is tunable across other minerals and feedstocks,” confirms Supra CEO and co-founder Katie Durham.