Starting next Wednesday, a 200- to 300-square-foot facility on the grounds of Eastlake's shuttered coal power plant will attempt something no one has done before in the United States: refine coal ash into materials used in defense hardware and semiconductor manufacturing. The pilot project, named Jupiter, will occupy just a sliver of the sprawling former plant site along Lake Erie, but its backers say it could determine whether an entire new industry takes root in Ohio.
The demonstration facility is the work of PHNX Materials, a company testing a process to refine coal ash into products for defense and semiconductor manufacturing, according to Cleveland.com. Eastlake City Council member Kevin Kostelnik told the council on August 25 that Jupiter will demonstrate PHNX's coal ash refining process and called it America's first coal ash refinery facility. Kostelnik said the project will test the company's knowledge and prove whether the process actually works.
Jupiter is expected to run for six months to a year, collecting data the whole time, and is projected to create more than 10 jobs while generating $2 million to $3 million in local economic activity. Kostelnik said the pilot is intended to show that Eastlake is the place that teaches the industry how coal ash refining is done. The facility will not use city money, according to the report, and its backers include the Ohio Department of Development, the U.S. Department of Energy, and private investors.
From Toxic Waste to Semiconductor Inputs
From Toxic Waste to Semiconductor Inputs Coal ash, the material left over when coal is burned to generate electricity, can contain arsenic, cadmium, and mercury. It has long been viewed as an environmental liability, but the same waste can also be converted into cement substitutes, fertilizer, concrete, wallboard, and construction materials, along with the defense and semiconductor-grade materials PHNX is targeting. PHNX's process targets the extraction of critical metals for semiconductor and defense applications, according to a report from Teal. China implemented export restrictions on antimony, gallium, and germanium in December 2024. A U.S. Geological Survey analysis estimated that a complete restriction of China's net exports of gallium and germanium could cause the U.S. GDP to decrease by $3.1 billion.
State backing for this technology predates the Eastlake announcement. In 2025 the Ohio Department of Development awarded PHNX Materials just under $2 million, specifically $1,976,635, to deploy technology for extracting valuable minerals, cement-grade fly ash, and fertilizer from coal combustion byproducts, according to Lakeshore Views & News. That grant required the project to reach completion within 12 or 24 months. The Eastlake pilot is part of the company's coal-ash recovery work.
A Site With a Complicated Grid History
The Eastlake plant, once operated by Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. and later FirstEnergy, had five coal-fired units at its peak. Two were deactivated in 2012, and the final three shut down for good in April 2015. Before that, the plant carried an unusual footnote in American electrical history: Eastlake's Unit 5 unexpectedly shut down on August 14, 2003, an event federal investigators later identified as one of the failures that weakened northern Ohio's power grid ahead of the Northeast Blackout of 2003, which left roughly 50 million people across parts of the United States and Canada without electricity.
For decades before the plant's retirement, nearby residents dealt with a more mundane form of fallout, routinely cleaning up thick layers of fly ash that drifted onto their neighborhoods from the smokestacks, according to the News-Herald. That history gives the site's new mission an ironic edge: the same substance once treated as neighborhood nuisance is now the raw material for a refining process billed as strategically important.
Who Owns and Controls the Land Now
Who Owns and Controls the Land Now Industrial Development Advantage is the property owner at the Eastlake site, according to the company's own project description. PHNX is partnering with IDA on the Jupiter pilot, which will use only a small portion of the larger property. Coal-fired generation has ended at the site, and synchronous condensers there provide voltage support.
IDA is separately evaluating longer-term redevelopment concepts for roughly 65 available acres on the site's southern parcel. The Jupiter demonstration is not expected to alter those longer-term redevelopment plans for the broader property. If the pilot succeeds, PHNX and IDA plan to establish similar facilities at coal-ash sites elsewhere in Ohio and across the country, and the project is expected to provide additional work for Lake County contractors, suppliers, and businesses.
Part of a Bigger Federal Push
Part of a Bigger Federal Push Jupiter is a small piece of a much larger federal effort. In July, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded $75 million across five pilot projects nationwide to scale up domestic recovery of critical minerals from coal-based feedstocks. The scale of the underlying resource is enormous: DOE estimates put more than 2 billion tons of coal ash sitting in landfills and impoundments across the country, containing critical minerals researchers estimate could hold up to $8.4 billion in total value, according to SCS Engineers.
Currently, only about one-third of the coal combustion residuals produced annually in the U.S. are recycled for beneficial uses, primarily in concrete, cement, and wallboard, while the majority remains sitting in landfills or surface ponds, per Environmental Protection Agency data cited by the Harvard Environmental & Energy Law Program. According to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report, 44.7 million tons, or 35%, of the 129 million tons of coal combustion waste generated in 2004 was beneficially used. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says it supports the environmentally sound recycling of coal combustion residuals while regulating their safe disposal. That recycling push is unfolding alongside a shifting federal regulatory picture: in April, the EPA proposed changes that would relax compliance standards and delay groundwater monitoring requirements for legacy coal ash surface impoundments, a walk-back from stricter standards set in May 2024. The rollback has also drawn coverage from other outlets.
Eastlake's project arrives as the city hosts the Jupiter pilot. Jupiter, notably, is not funded with city money, and its organizers frame it as a low-risk test of a technology that, if it works, could reshape how the country handles one of its largest and most persistent waste streams.
