This story was originally published on Yale e360. It is reproduced as part of Climate Desk’s collaboration. Can metals found in seawater be mined and mined sustainably? Oakland, California-based company says yes. It is not only extracting magnesium from ocean waters, but also from industrial waste brine.
[[{“value”:”This story was originally published by Yale e360 and is reproduced these as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Can metals that inevitably occur in seawater be mined, and can they be mined effectively? A company in Oakland, California, says yes. Additionally, it extracts magnesium from ocean water and from industrial waste brine in a carbon-neutral manner. With funding from the Defense Department and with the assistance of the government, Magrathea Metals is building a larger-scale facility to produce hundreds of tons of the metal over the course of two to four years. The company has produced little amounts of magnesium in pilot projects. It claims to be operating a facility that will produce more than 10,000 tons every by 2028.
Magnesium is much lighter and stronger than steel, and it’s important to the aircraft, automobile, steel, and defense industries, which is why the government has bankrolled the venture. Best then, China produces about 85 percent of the world’s magnesium in a dirty, carbon- rigorous process. Finding a way to use alternative energy to produce magnesium internally is not only a strategic and economic issue, it’s also one. ” With a flick of a finger, China could shut down steelmaking in the US by ending the export of magnesium”, said Alex Grant, Magrathea’s CEO and an expert in the field of decarbonizing the production of metals.
” China uses a lot of coal and a lot of labor”, Grant continued. ” We do n’t use any coal and]use ] a much lower quantity of labor”. The approach is affordable in part because the business can use solar and wind energy during off-peak hours when it is least expensive. In consequence, Grant estimates that their metal will cost about half as much as ore from conventional ore producers.
There are approximately 18, 000 desalination plants, worldwide, taking in 23 trillion gallons of ocean water a year.
Magrathea—named after a planet in the hit novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—buys waste brines, generally from desalination plants, and allows the water to evaporate, leaving behind magnesium chloride salts. Next, the salts are separated from the molten magnesium by a electric current that is next cast into ingots or machine components.
While people have huge extracted minerals and chemicals from ocean water for millennia, researchers around the world are now expanding their scope as the demand for lithium, cobalt, and other metals used in battery technology has increased. Companies are frantically looking for fresh deposits in doubtful locations to prevent orebody mining and reduce pollution. Salty water or brine appear to be the next frontier for crucial minerals and chemicals.
Brines can be found in a variety of sources: Little recent research examines the potential for extracting metals from saline wastes from industrial sources, including coal-fired power plants that discharge waste into tailings ponds, wastewater pumped out of oil and gas wells, produced water, wastewater from hard-rock mining, and desalination plants.
A technician pours a magnesium ingot at the Magrathea Metals facility in Oakland, California. Alex Grant
Large-scale brine mining may have harmful effects on the environment, such as the need to dispose of some waste, for instance. Possible effects are unknow because there are now no large-scale operations. The process is also anticipated to have a number of positive effects, most notably that it will result in the production of useful metals without the extensive land disturbance and the development of acid-mine drainage and other pollution as a result of hard-rock mining.
According to the Brine Miners, a research center at Oregon State University, there are approximately 18, 000 desalination plants, worldwide, taking in 23 trillion gallons of ocean water a year and either forcing it through capillary membranes—in a process called reverse osmosis—or using various methods to separate water molecules from impurities. Every day, the plants produce more than 37 billion gallons of brine—enough to fill 50, 000 Paralympic- size swimming pools. That solution contains significant amounts of copper, zinc, magnesium, and other important metals.
According to OSU estimates, brine from desalination plants contains$ 2.2 trillion worth of materials.
The desalination plant’s brine disposal has often been a challenge. Desal plants discharge that waste back into the ocean where it settles on the seafloor, where it can harm marine ecosystems. Because the brine is so concentrated, it is toxic to both plants and animals, but inland desalination plants either bury their waste or pour it into wells. The problem is simply getting worse as desal plants grow more and more expensive, and these processes are further increasing the cost of an already pricey process.
Finding a profitable and secure way to use brine will help solve plants ‘ waste issues and encourage them to adopt a round economy, where waste from one business activity is used as feed for a new activity. According to OSU estimates, brine from desalination plants contains$ 2.2 trillion worth of materials, including more than 17, 400 tons of lithium, which is essential for making batteries for electric vehicles, appliances, and electric energy storage systems. In some cases, the remaining waste stream may be made less harmful by mining brine for lithium and other metals and minerals.
Manufacturers have extracted magnesium and lithium from naturally occurring brines for several decades. In California’s Salton Sea, which contains enough lithium to meet the nation’s needs for decades, according to a 2023 national analysis, companies have drilled volcanic wells to generate the energy required for separating the metal from brines.
ExxonMobil recently announced that it is building one of the largest lithium processing facilities in the world, a state-of-the-art facility that will siphon lithium from salt deep within the Smackover geographical formation, in remote Arkansas. By 2030, the company says it will produce 15 percent of the world’s lithium.
Because desalination brine contains minerals, miners have largely ignored them because desalination is not an inexpensive way to concentrate them. However, innovative technologies and additional developments have made separation techniques more efficient and given businesses the ability to concentrate on this enormous resource.
” Three vectors are converging”, said Peter Fiske, director of the National Alliance for Water Innovation at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley. The value of some of these crucial materials is rising. The cost of conventional]open pit ] mining and extraction is going up. And the security of foreign suppliers, particularly Russia and China, is going down”.
There is also a focus on projects and businesses that can be part of a spiral economy and that receive funding from the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and other places. Researchers studying salt mining believe that the holy grail of desalination, finding more than enough value in its waste brine to pay for the priceless process of producing clean water, is realizable.
Increased filtering techniques are now able to remove much more and much smaller materials suspended in saline water. We then have membranes that are careful to an individual ion, according to Fiske. ” The technology ]allows us ] to pick through the garbage piles of wastewater and pick out the high- value items”. One of the basic concepts driving this research, he says, “is that there is no such thing as wastewater”.
A highly regarded global team has assembled to build a desalination plant and facility to mine its waste for minerals and chemicals while minimizing the amount of material it must dispose of for NEOM, a controversial and extremely expensive modern city under construction in the Saudi Arabian desert. ENOWA, the water and energy division of NEOM, claims that its careful membranes—which include reverse and forward osmosis—will target specific minerals and extract 99.5 percent of the waste brine’s potassium chloride, an essential fertilizer with high market value. The system uses third the energy and has half the capital expenditures of conventional methods of producing potassium chloride. ENOWA claims to be developing additional careful membranes to extract from waste brine other minerals, such as lithium and rubidium salts.
An experimental system has been developed for the Oregon Brine Miner project to desalinate saltwater and extract lithium, unique earth, and other metals. Researchers will create clean hydrogen by breaking apart water’s hydrogen and oxygen molecules using solar energy, which will power the entire process. ” We are trying for a round process”, said Zhenxing Feng, who leads the project at OSU. ” We are not wasting any parts”.
Waste brine containing gypsum and corrosive acid is produced at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Desalination Plant in El Paso, Texas. Jeffrey Phillips/Flickr
The idea of mining desalination brine and various waste is being looked into and used all over the world. At Delft University of Technology, in the Netherlands, researchers have extracted a bio- based material they call Kaumera from sludge granules formed during the treatment of provincial wastewater. Combined with other organic materials, Kaumera—which is both a binder and an adhesive, and both repels and retains water—can be used in agriculture and the textile and construction industries.
” Producers are going to be required to do more and more to make sure the wastewater they dispose of is free of pollutants.”
Another significant- scale Western project called Sea4Value, which has partners in eight countries, will use a combination of technologies to concentrate, extract, purify, and crystallize 10 target elements from brines. Publicly funded labs in the US, including the Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, at Iowa State University, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee, are even researching new methods for extracting lithium and other materials essential for the energy transition from natural and professional brines.
Waste brine is transported to and pumped into an injection also 22 miles away at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Desalination Plant in El Paso, Texas, which produces more than 27 million gallons of fresh water each day from salty aquifers. However, a business called Upwell Water, which has a location close to the desalination plant, first wrings more drinkable water from the brine and turns the leftover waste into gypsum and hydrochloric acid for business customers.
There are challenges faced in saline mining projects. Christos Charisiadis, the salt innovation manager for the NEOM portfolio, identified some potential bottlenecks: higher initial investment for processing facilities, a lack of transparency in innovation by the water industry, which might obscure problems with their technologies, poor understanding of possible economic problems due to a lack of comprehensive lifecycle assessments, complex and inconsistent regulatory frameworks, and fluctuations in commodity prices.
However, Nathanial Cooper, an assistant professor at Cambridge University who has studied metal recovery from a variety of industrial and natural brines, sees the potential in its favor as environmental laws for a variety of industries become even stricter.
Companies that produce wastewater will be required to do more to make sure the wastewater they dispose of is free of pollutants and hazardous materials, he said. Many businesses will have to find ways to recover these items. There is a strong chance of recovering a lot of priceless materials from wastewater and making a circular economy possible.”}]] This story was originally published by Yale e360 and is reproduced these as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Can metals that inevitably occur in seawater be mined, and can they be mined effectively? A company in Oakland, California, says yes. It also extracts magnesium from ocean water and industrial waste brine, as well.
This story was originally published on Yale e360. It is reproduced as part of Climate Desk’s collaboration. Can metals found in seawater be mined and mined sustainably? Oakland, California-based company says yes. It is not only extracting magnesium from ocean waters, but also from industrial waste brine.
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