The Elements of Innovation Discovered
The Elements of Innovation Discovered
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You won't find many miners on TIME and Statista's inaugural list of 250 companies reducing environmental impact, but one green mining tech company has arrived. Sailing in alongside several hydrogen producers as one of America's top green-tech companies of 2024, deep-sea mining firm Impossible Metals is one of the rare few resource-related organizations to be granted the honor. This year, TIME launched its inaugural list of America's Top GreenTech Companies from an intensive...
An efficient e-waste recycling process is made possible by whey, a byproduct of cheesemaking. Scientists in Switzerland have recovered high-purity gold through a scalable process using food scrap-derived sponges that efficiently adsorb the precious metal from tricky e-waste. The final result is 450 milligrams of 22-carat gold recovered from 20 discarded motherboards. Because the method utilizes industry byproducts, it is doubly sustainable and cost-effective as well. Gold...
The Metals Company and SGS have produced nickel from harvested polymetallic nodules. As part of The Metals Company's (TMC) pilot-scale processing, the world's first nickel sulfate has been produced from polymetallic nodules harvested from the seabed, further solidifying the resource's promise for battery markets. "The production of the world's first nickel sulfate from deep-seafloor nodules is an important milestone, confirming that our custom flowsheet configuration can be de...
Car and battery manufacturers are getting in on the critical minerals mining business. There has been an increasing trend of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) for electric vehicles, and the batteries that power them are moving upstream in the global metals supply chain to secure deals for their own feedstocks of critical minerals – entering into mineral offtake agreements directly with mining companies, investing in mining projects, and joint mining ventures. Until r...
Dods’ “Vital but Vulnerable: UK Critical Minerals Policy” report cautions that more needs to be done. Dods Political Intelligence, an advisory service, has published a report to provide context and evaluation of current critical mineral policies in the United Kingdom. These are increasingly crucial for contemporary defense manufacturing, which acts as a deterrent against conflict. Meanwhile, global economies in a rush to transition to green industries are going to colle...
Inlyte Energy's endeavors to bring back sodium-metal-halide batteries. Lithium-ion batteries are today's most common energy storage technology, with uses large and small, ranging from smartphones and other electronic devices to electric cars and stationary. But science is far from resting on this standard – battery efficiency and durability are still in high demand. With sodium easier to source and exponentially cheaper than lithium, a redesigned sodium-metal-halide battery m...
Japan's Kajima Corp. is well on its way to supplying the world with carbon-negative concrete. A little over an hour from Tokyo, nestled in the mountains near Nagano, a house has been built in Karuizawa with the world's first carbon dioxide-removing concrete walls produced by replacing a percentage of the cement content with an industrial byproduct and adding a CO2-absorbing admixture of dicalcium silicate. Karuizawa is one of Japan's oldest and most famous forested mountain re...
New material bridges anti-gravity tech and super-sensitive instruments. Flying cars and personal jetpacks notwithstanding, a new carbon-based material is bringing us closer to stable levitation technologies with no need for mechanical or electrical assists. Today's levitation uses electrically manipulated magnetic fields, superconductors or diamagnetic (magnetically repelled) materials to float above magnets. The primary use for this is in developing super-sensitive...
Cheap and safe, water-based organic redox flow batteries are coming – an interview with Quino Energy's founder Eugene Beh. Quino Energy CEO and co-founder Eugene Beh is a chemist and physicist with an impressive history of accolades from Harvard to Stanford and back again and deep expertise in electrochemical systems, be it a postdoctoral fellowship working on aqueous organic flow batteries at Harvard University or inventing and commercializing a redox flow desalination t...
Partnership addresses various options to create value in mining waste through remining and restoration. Regeneration Enterprises and Cobalt Blue have partnered up to tackle the growing inventory of legacy mine sites and waste. The partnership's projects are expected to transform these sites into ecological assets by producing much-needed green energy minerals through climate-positive means. The focus is on identifying new value in waste by remining and restoring sites,...
Syrah makes large natural graphite sale to Indonesia, steps closer to developing a battery anode global supply chain outside of China. Syrah Resources has delivered a 10,000 metric ton shipment of natural graphite fines from its flagship Balama graphite operation in Mozambique to BTR New Energy Materials in Indonesia, its first large volume natural graphite sale to a battery supply chain participant outside of China. This sale follows an initial trial container shipment to...
U.S. Department of Energy is funding a Critical Materials Supply Chain Research Facility support a resilient and secure domestic supply chain. The Department of Energy is funding a Critical Materials Supply Chain Research Facility that will help support a secure domestic supply of minerals and materials critical to economic prosperity, national security, and the green energy transition in the U.S. This week, the DOE's Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM)...
The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy continues support of growing U.S. green hydrogen. The U.S. Department of Energy has announced a $750 million infusion into clean hydrogen to significantly reduce its cost, beat out China for global leadership in hydrogen, and develop American energy independence through expansion of the industry. Clean hydrogen adoption by some of the country's most energy-intensive and CO2-emitting sectors is an essential part of the green...
DOE bankrolls ultra-lightweight, energy-dense aluminum battery and novel artificial intelligence electrolyte screening system. A collaboration between Wright Electric and Columbia University has been awarded a contract from the U.S. Department of Energy via the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program for a groundbreaking ultra-energy-dense and lightweight aluminum battery brought about by a novel artificial intelligence electrolyte screening system. Founded i...
Pulsar's timely discovery of a massive helium deposit in Minnesota may keep our medical scanners, rockets, and nuclear reactors going. Despite being the second most abundant gas in the universe, there is a definite helium shortage in America, risking the operation of everything from medical diagnostics to cooling nuclear reactors. But the U.S. might finally be in luck – a recently discovered reservoir in Minnesota boasts concentrations pushing 13.8%, the highest the i...
Researchers in Denmark are experimenting with a selenium–silicon tandem solar cell. While an increasingly common clean energy resource for individual homes and grid-scale production alike, solar cells are shockingly inefficient – at best capturing less than 30% of the energy from the sunlight that strikes them. Rasmus Nielsen and his team of physicists and engineers at the Technical University of Denmark have found a possible method to boost that efficiency to 40% by cre...
With the U.S. still out of undersea race to the bottom of international waters, India strives for greener way toward trillion-dollar resource. The United Nations International Seabed Authority (ISA) has approved 31 license applications for permission to explore international waters, with only two belonging to India from 2016. This is in comparison to China's five and Russia's four. Having never ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which led...
Introducing 3D nickel catalysts for faster and cheaper production of hydrogen from water. A team of researchers from Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) in South Korea has developed a new three-dimensional nickel catalyst that shows promise for producing more hydrogen from water at lower costs. The production of hydrogen from water typically involves the use of platinum or other similar precious metals, which pushes up the costs of producing this...
First Tellurium's partnerships promise a safer solid-state technology ready to replace lithium-ion batteries, and a hardy thermoelectric generator. First Tellurium's strategic partners have made headway in the production of two exciting products – a safer lithium-tellurium battery manufactured in partnership with Fenix Advanced Materials and a new tellurium-based thermoelectric generator capable of withstanding temperature extremes while in operation. "This is another key a...
On track for key goal in 2024, headed steadily onward in aims for 2025. Nextgen solid-state battery tech leader QuantumScape has started customer shipments of its Alpha-2 prototype battery cells, on target for its 2024 goal. Toward achieving its mission to transform energy storage with solid-state lithium-metal battery technology, the company began shipping its A0 prototypes to potential automotive customers for qualification at the end of 2022. The company's new Alpha-2...
Hitachi Zosen goes commercial; company sends its all-solid-state batteries into equipment manufacturing space. An as-of-yet undisclosed semiconductor equipment manufacturer has placed the first commercial order for 12 all-solid-state lithium-ion batteries (coined AS-LiB) with a capacity of 140 milliampere-hour from battery pioneer Hitachi Zosen, with future orders on the way as part of a new product. A typical all-solid-state lithium battery can not only store nearly twice as...
The Son Orlandis system is the first vanadium redox flow-based energy storage plant to be built by Endesa; the largest to be paired with solar in Europe. Spanish utility Endesa Enel Green Power España (the largest electricity company in Spain and the second largest in Portugal) has commissioned an energy storage system utilizing a 1.1-megawatt vanadium redox flow battery (VFRB) connected to the 3.34 MW Son Orlandis solar plant in Mallorca, Spain. In 2023, the Balearic...
U.S. CO2 capture and storage startup raises $80 million from Amazon, Saudi Aramco, others. Though behind on production schedule, CarbonCapture's latest major funding round raised $80 million from Saudi Aramco and other big names such as Prime Movers Lab, Amazon, Siemens Financial Services, Idealab X, and Marc Benioff's TIME Ventures. The startup is now reframing its focus on a massive, industrial application of its modular carbon dioxide-capturing designs. CarbonCapture has...
Quino's first-of-a-kind continuous production organic flow battery process. Quino Energy is a start-up developing water-based redox flow batteries that can cost-effectively store up to 40 hours of electrical energy in organic molecules called quinones. The company upcycles coal and wood tar into these molecules, which are commonly used to make a large variety of natural dyes but also happen to be excellent battery reactants. Mid- to long-duration battery storage solutions...
Further research on versatile carbon superstructures constructed at nanoscale could revolutionize energy solutions and clean up carbon's image. Burning carbon may no longer be viewed as the popular energy source, but there is still plenty of work to be done in establishing all that sustainably generated power – work that carbon, by its nature, is well-suited to perform. Superstructured carbons (SSCs) are a unique category of cutting-edge nanomaterial that is fast moving out o...
