Christina Lopano , a research physical scientist in the National Energy Technology Laboratory's Research and Innovation Center, will deliver a public talk at 4 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 1, in 112 Walker Building on Penn State's University Park campus.
The free presentation, titled "Characterizing the Critical: REE and CM Speciation in Fossil Energy Waste Materials," is part of the EarthTalks series held by the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute. It will be available via Zoom as well.
Lopano will discuss the reclamation of critical minerals (CMs), including rare earth elements (REEs), from coal-related waste materials. Critical minerals occur in small quantities in fossil energy waste byproducts, driving the exploration of strategic separation and extraction processes to recover them, she noted.
The EarthTalks presentation will highlight research into how advanced characterization techniques involving coal byproducts "can be harnessed to understand the speciation and binding conditions of an array of critical elements in these materials," Lopano said in an abstract. Coal byproducts include coal ash and solids from acid mine drainage.
"The knowledge gained from these characterization efforts has proven to be integral in the development of extraction methods that target the major REE and CM-hosting solid fractions of these materials, resulting in innovative pathways for efficient and economical REE/CM recovery," Lopano said in the abstract.
A mineralogist by training, Lopano uses advanced geochemical characterization to inform mineral reactions across the U.S. Department of Energy mission space. She brings more than 15 years of experience to the analysis and characterization of geochemical reactions in minerals, rocks and cement materials associated with carbon dioxide storage; remediation and reuse of shale resources; and critical mineral recovery.
Lopano and her team recently patented a technology to extract rare earth elements from coal ash material. She received her doctoral degree from the Department of Geosciences at Penn State and her bachelor's degree in geological sciences from Virginia Tech, summa cum laude. She joined the National Energy Technology Laboratory, part of the Department of Energy, in 2009.
Lopano's professional honors include the Professional Excellence Award from the Association for Women Geoscientists in 2022 and the Secretary of Energy's Excellence Award in 2021. She won the latter for her leadership in innovative research and development efforts to recover REEs and CMs from coal waste streams.
Her talk at Penn State is part of EarthTalks' fall 2025 series, "Critical Minerals - A National Economic and Security Imperative," which focuses on the need for a reliable supply chain of critical minerals and the ongoing research to provide them domestically. For more about the series, visit the EarthTalks website.
