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We don't need to go to the ocean for metals. There are new technologies that can recover metals much less destructively from "unconventional resources" that are

We don't need to go to the ocean for metals. There are new technologies that can recover metals much less destructively from "unconventional resources" that are already exposed or naturally exposed. And some of those mienral resources are ones that can create benefits to the planet, such as carbon dioxide removal. One example is a process using hyperaccumulator plants to draw up nickels from the soil, known as phytomining. Full disclosure, I have been working for the last two years developing this technology, but combining enhanced weathering of olivine for carbon dioxide removal, with nickel phytomining in order to solve two problems at once. Leaving stealth finally after two years, look out next week for an announcement... Will post here.

namibj 3y ago
What do you think of developing electrochemistry to e.g. recover silicon, magnesium, and iron from the very common olivine? Yeah, the other two aren't used much today, but they seem to be superior in specific strength to steel, and mostly not used because they're expensive today (and because silicon is brittle). Similarly, sea salt has many elements of interest; there's a lot of sodium but afterwards a good variety. Desalination plants already concentrate these up.
henearkr 3y ago
Looking forward to reading your post!! Seems exciting!
nyokodo 3y ago
> We don't need to go to the ocean for metals. There are new technologies that can recover metals much less destructively from "unconventional resources" I look forward to hearing how your new technology multiplies current global production of the myriad of metals to the historically unprecedented levels required to enable a transition to renewable energy technologies. If it can’t then you’ll need to define “need” in your statement more carefully.
- matznerd 3y ago
  I can definitely clarify that further, but to restate it, there are new sources and new technologies that can allow us to meet the requirements for the transition. For example, the Salton Sea contains enough lithium dissolved in brines underground to provide lithium to transition 100% of the USA car and truck fleet to electric (18 million metric tons of lithium carbonate = 375 million car batteries). And they are able to tap this "unconventional resource" in a way that doesn't require the massive pools of evaporating waters like in the Atacama desert using a technology called "direct lithium extraction (DLE).". And guess what, they can all so it while generated geothermal heat :) That is a better process, that has positive co-products. There is no shortage of lithium... and rare earths aren't rare, just dirty to process. Copper and graphite are the few transition resources that might be in a shortage, but when prices go up, so too does innovation, and we are seeing that with the production of synthetic graphite. With nickel, the current global production is 3 million tonnes per annum (MTPA). Our minerals are 0.333% nickel, which is well below that ~1.3% that is normally required to make economic sense to extract from. Our mineral source has never been used for nickel to date (making it unconventional). For our olivine minerals around 1 tonne has to be weathered to remove 1 tonne of carbon dioxide, which liberates produces 0.333% tonnes of nickel. We need to weather 300 tonnes of olivine for 1 tonne of nickel. The proposed deep sea nodules in the article only have 1% nickel so you need 100 tonnes of them brought to the surface and then refined to get the nickel. For us the plants essentially do the major refining up from the 0.333% to 1%-2.5%, and are then processed to a bi-ore that is 15%-30% nickel, some of the richest nickel ore on the planet. Carbon dioxide removal needs to be at gigatonne scale, so in pursuit of carbon removal, if we were weathering 1 gigatonne of olivine per year, we would produce 3 megatonnes of nickel as a "by-product." This means we would match the total global production today, while doing carbon removal our main objective... And we have secured multiple gigatonnes of olivine already, and are not limited by this or land use. Humanity currently mines 30-50 billion tonnes of sand today and farms on the order of billions of hectares of acres, though for us today, we are focused on using natural serpentine soils. Is that helpful for you? https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/us-department-energy-analysis-confirms-californias-salton-sea-region-be-rich-domestic https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/us-department-energy-an... https://blogs.gwu.edu/wagnerm/welcome/research/graphite_synthesis/ https://blogs.gwu.edu/wagnerm/welcome/research/graphite_synt... https://www.reuters.com/graphics/GLOBAL-ENVIRONMENT/SAND/ygdpzekyavw/ https://www.reuters.com/graphics/GLOBAL-ENVIRONMENT/SAND/ygd... https://ourworldindata.org/land-use https://ourworldindata.org/land-use https://www.fao.org/sustainability/news/detail/en/c/1274219/ https://www.fao.org/sustainability/news/detail/en/c/1274219/
onthecanposting 3y ago
This is very cool. Just doing napkin math, the US produces 18000tonne of nickel. Wheat yield is close enough to a tonne per acre, so if you got, say, 1% Ni by weight, you would still need 1.8M acres. Wheat grown on the same area would have a market value of around $432,000,000 at $6/bushel and 40 bushel per acre. The nickel at $7/lb would be $277,200,000,000.
- matznerd 3y ago
  Good math, the nickel per hectare target in the field and in the literature through cultivars is around 400 kilograms per hectare (.400 tonnes per Ha). We are using natural serpentine soils that have previously been farmed and are idle now due to low productivity and the natural presence of metals like nickel, and which is the native habitat of these plants. However, to keep your wheat analogy, we currently farm 220 million hectares of wheat globally. If you divide run the back of the napkin math on that, you would produce 88 million tonne of nickel per year. We don't need that scale, because the total global nickel production per year is around 3 million tonnes, meaning you would need "only" around 7.5 million hectares to yield that. However, nickel demand is expected to nearly double over the next 20 years, meaning we would need 15 million hectares, which is somewhere around the land footprint of oats and rye today, and half that of cotton, rapeseed, or sunflowers.

namibj 3y ago

What do you think of developing electrochemistry to e.g. recover silicon, magnesium, and iron from the very common olivine? Yeah, the other two aren't used much today, but they seem to be superior in specific strength to steel, and mostly not used because they're expensive today (and because silicon is brittle). Similarly, sea salt has many elements of interest; there's a lot of sodium but afterwards a good variety. Desalination plants already concentrate these up.

henearkr 3y ago

Looking forward to reading your post!! Seems exciting!

nyokodo 3y ago

> We don't need to go to the ocean for metals. There are new technologies that can recover metals much less destructively from "unconventional resources" I look forward to hearing how your new technology multiplies current global production of the myriad of metals to the historically unprecedented levels required to enable a transition to renewable energy technologies. If it can’t then you’ll need to define “need” in your statement more carefully.

matznerd 3y ago
I can definitely clarify that further, but to restate it, there are new sources and new technologies that can allow us to meet the requirements for the transition. For example, the Salton Sea contains enough lithium dissolved in brines underground to provide lithium to transition 100% of the USA car and truck fleet to electric (18 million metric tons of lithium carbonate = 375 million car batteries). And they are able to tap this "unconventional resource" in a way that doesn't require the massive pools of evaporating waters like in the Atacama desert using a technology called "direct lithium extraction (DLE).". And guess what, they can all so it while generated geothermal heat :) That is a better process, that has positive co-products. There is no shortage of lithium... and rare earths aren't rare, just dirty to process. Copper and graphite are the few transition resources that might be in a shortage, but when prices go up, so too does innovation, and we are seeing that with the production of synthetic graphite. With nickel, the current global production is 3 million tonnes per annum (MTPA). Our minerals are 0.333% nickel, which is well below that ~1.3% that is normally required to make economic sense to extract from. Our mineral source has never been used for nickel to date (making it unconventional). For our olivine minerals around 1 tonne has to be weathered to remove 1 tonne of carbon dioxide, which liberates produces 0.333% tonnes of nickel. We need to weather 300 tonnes of olivine for 1 tonne of nickel. The proposed deep sea nodules in the article only have 1% nickel so you need 100 tonnes of them brought to the surface and then refined to get the nickel. For us the plants essentially do the major refining up from the 0.333% to 1%-2.5%, and are then processed to a bi-ore that is 15%-30% nickel, some of the richest nickel ore on the planet. Carbon dioxide removal needs to be at gigatonne scale, so in pursuit of carbon removal, if we were weathering 1 gigatonne of olivine per year, we would produce 3 megatonnes of nickel as a "by-product." This means we would match the total global production today, while doing carbon removal our main objective... And we have secured multiple gigatonnes of olivine already, and are not limited by this or land use. Humanity currently mines 30-50 billion tonnes of sand today and farms on the order of billions of hectares of acres, though for us today, we are focused on using natural serpentine soils. Is that helpful for you? https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/us-department-energy-analysis-confirms-californias-salton-sea-region-be-rich-domestic https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/us-department-energy-an... https://blogs.gwu.edu/wagnerm/welcome/research/graphite_synthesis/ https://blogs.gwu.edu/wagnerm/welcome/research/graphite_synt... https://www.reuters.com/graphics/GLOBAL-ENVIRONMENT/SAND/ygdpzekyavw/ https://www.reuters.com/graphics/GLOBAL-ENVIRONMENT/SAND/ygd... https://ourworldindata.org/land-use https://ourworldindata.org/land-use https://www.fao.org/sustainability/news/detail/en/c/1274219/ https://www.fao.org/sustainability/news/detail/en/c/1274219/

onthecanposting 3y ago

This is very cool. Just doing napkin math, the US produces 18000tonne of nickel. Wheat yield is close enough to a tonne per acre, so if you got, say, 1% Ni by weight, you would still need 1.8M acres. Wheat grown on the same area would have a market value of around $432,000,000 at $6/bushel and 40 bushel per acre. The nickel at $7/lb would be $277,200,000,000.

matznerd 3y ago
Good math, the nickel per hectare target in the field and in the literature through cultivars is around 400 kilograms per hectare (.400 tonnes per Ha). We are using natural serpentine soils that have previously been farmed and are idle now due to low productivity and the natural presence of metals like nickel, and which is the native habitat of these plants. However, to keep your wheat analogy, we currently farm 220 million hectares of wheat globally. If you divide run the back of the napkin math on that, you would produce 88 million tonne of nickel per year. We don't need that scale, because the total global nickel production per year is around 3 million tonnes, meaning you would need "only" around 7.5 million hectares to yield that. However, nickel demand is expected to nearly double over the next 20 years, meaning we would need 15 million hectares, which is somewhere around the land footprint of oats and rye today, and half that of cotton, rapeseed, or sunflowers.