The Elements of Innovation Discovered
The Elements of Innovation Discovered
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Researchers from the Birmingham Energy Institute, along with several partners, are supporting a new grant-funded project to recycle rare earth magnets from electronic waste, electric motors, and wind turbines for the United Kingdom's critical minerals supply chain. Secure Critical Rare Earth Magnets for UK, or SCREAM, is a 3.4-million-pound (US$4.1 million) UK Research and Innovation funded project that will establish a recycled source of rare earth magnets in the UK to...
Recognizing the meteoric rise in demand for minerals and metals critical to electric vehicles, renewable energy, and the American economy at large, the U.S. Department of Energy is requesting public input on the development and implementation of a $675 million critical materials research, development, demonstration, and commercialization program. Funded by the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, this program is being established to address vulnerabilities in the...
The challenge of reducing emissions from the mining industry as a whole is ongoing and especially vital for the metals needed in renewable power and de-carbonized transportation. Taking center stage in this push, the electric vehicle space is being tasked to evaluate the overall environmental impact of EV battery life cycles. Scalable solutions are needed by 2030 for the anticipated first wave of batteries soon reaching end-of-life to keep them out of the toxic waste stream....
As part of its nationwide scan for domestic sources of critical minerals, the U.S. Geological Survey is investing just over $1 million to gain a better understanding of the potential for cobalt, nickel, niobium, rare earths, manganese, platinum group elements, and other essential metals in Missouri, Montana, and Minnesota. In 2022, the U.S. Department of the Interior allotted more than $74 million to the USGS Earth Mapping Resources Initiative, or Earth MRI, a partnership...
From flashlights to supercomputers, tin is the glue for an electronic age Lost in the clamor for lithium, nickel and other metals needed for the batteries powering electric vehicles and modern electronics, or the rare earth elements that turn stored energy into motion, is the enormous need for a much more modest metal that is so fundamental to the advancement of technology that it almost goes unseen – tin. While other technology metals are critical to certain products and s...
General Motors, Stellantis, and Tesla moving further up battery supply chain With the batteries powering the electric vehicle revolution demanding more lithium than miners can produce, the price of this lightest metal in the universe rocketed more than 1,000% over the span of two years. This has prompted automakers such as Tesla and General Motors to become more directly involved in the mining and refining of the lithium-ion battery namesake. "Price of lithium has gone to...
Russia and China's control of global supplies worry DC lawmakers From its uses in flame retardants that have saved countless American lives to being an important ingredient in batteries poised to be the answer to the challenge of storing intermittent renewable energy, few metals are more critical to the national security and economic wellbeing of the United States than antimony. Described as a metalloid, which means it falls somewhere between metals such as zinc and solid...
Food, water, breathable air, shelter, and clothing – these fundamental elements of human survival here on Earth will be even more critical for early Mars colonists. With delivery fees measured in millions of dollars and wait times for rush orders being at least six months, Red Planet pioneers are going to need to be able to produce their own survival goods. Researchers at the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia are developing a process that co-produces two of t...
Ask anyone, "who invented the lightbulb?" and most would be able to answer Thomas Edison. Ask anyone, "who invented the telephone?" and some would be able to answer Alexander Graham Bell. Ask anyone, "who invented the lithium-ion battery powering your smartphone and laptop?" and perhaps scant few would be able to answer John Goodenough. Along with his colleagues Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino, Goodenough was jointly bestowed the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the...
The U.S. Geological Survey has identified 50 minerals and metals critical to the economic wellbeing and security of the United States, uranium is not one of them. This omission of a mineral that plays a critical role in America's energy security does not sit well with a bipartisan group of congressmen that have introduced legislation to rectify this oversight. "Energy security is national security. We should not be reliant on our foreign adversaries like China and Russia to...
As part of a wider initiative to recover critical minerals as byproducts at its current mining operations, Rio Tinto is now producing the tellurium used in thin-film photovoltaic solar panels at its Kennecott copper operation in Utah. "We are proud to deliver a new domestic supply of tellurium to support the manufacturing of solar panels and other critical equipment here in the United States," said Rio Tinto Copper Chief Operating Officer Clayton Walker. This key ingredient...
With its lithium-ion battery materials park in Canada on pace to begin ramping up production in phases beginning at the end of this year, Electra Battery Materials Corp. continues to expand a cobalt deposit in Idaho that could provide the United States with an environmentally sound and socially acceptable domestic supply of this metal critical to electric vehicle batteries. "At a time of heightened geopolitical risk, America has committed to securing a domestic supply of...
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have devised a unique method to help curb the looming shortages of critical minerals and metals by making it easier to separate them from ore and recycled materials with a chemical process called sulfidation. This processing technique, as written about in a paper they published in the journal "Nature," allows the metals to remain in solid form and be separated without dissolving. This would avoid the typical but costly liquid s...
Powering up its mission to become the world's leading manufacturer of electric vehicles, Volkswagen Group has established a European public company to consolidate activities along the EV battery supply chain – from processing raw materials, to developing a unified Volkswagen battery, and managing the five European gigafactories the company has in the pipeline. The German automaker's new battery business will be headquartered in Salzgitter, Germany, which is the site of V...
A team of researchers at the University of Exeter, Minviro, the British Geological Survey, and the Circular Economy Solutions Unit has recently determined the benefits of utilizing a life cycle assessment (LCA) or "cradle to grave" evaluation in the ongoing endeavor to facilitate and improve green mining techniques. Generally used to assess the environmental impacts associated with the life cycle of commercial products, from extraction to the use and disposal of said...
A team at the Center for Multidimensional Carbon Materials within the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea, including students at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, have achieved growth and characterization of large area, single-crystal graphene that has no wrinkles, folds or absorption layers. This could be said to be the most perfect graphene that has been grown and characterized, to date. "This pioneering breakthrough was due to many contributing...
As the world aspires to move away from fossil fuels and minimize carbon emissions, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a new method to generate clean hydrogen fuel using scrap aluminum and water. Hydrogen fuel cells function by combining hydrogen and oxygen in an electrochemical process to produce electrical energy and water. While an incredible source of energy, with the only byproduct being water vapor, the extraction of hydrogen is not...
Idaho-focused mining company Perpetua Resources Corp. and Ambri Inc., a battery technology company born from research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have forged a partnership that will help advance the antimony-based liquid-metal battery technology that can provide the large-scale energy storage needed to decarbonize electrical grids in the United States and around the world. "This agreement is a meaningful step in support of the current administration's goal...
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has thus far focused the automaker's efforts on manufacturing electric vehicles and the lithium-ion batteries that power them. This could change as a shortage of the minerals and metals critical to lithium batteries threatens to slow production and drive up the costs of EVs. "Price of lithium has gone to insane levels!" Musk tweeted on April 8. "Tesla might actually have to get into the mining & refining directly at scale, unless costs improve." In a...
Since its invention nearly 140 years ago, the modern steam turbine has represented the apex of efficiency when it comes to converting thermal energy into electricity. Now, engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and National Renewable Energy Laboratory have created a heat engine with no moving parts that exceeds the efficiency of the turbines used in today's coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants. Reminiscent of the photovoltaic solar cells that convert...
Researchers in Australia and the United States have proven that gallium in its liquid form can economically capture and convert substantial quantities of carbon dioxide greenhouse gas emissions. The process, reported in the Oct. 6 edition of Advanced Materials Journal, uses liquid gallium to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen and a high-value solid carbon product that can be sold to manufacturers of batteries, aircraft, or construction materials. "We see very strong...
From the advancements of technology during the Bronze Age to the computers and telecommunication systems of today's Big Data Era, tin has been critical to human progress for at least 5,500 years. Sometime around 3500 BC, Sumerians living in modern day Turkey and Iran discovered that mixing a little tin with copper created bronze, an alloy that produced much more durable weapons and tools than those cast from copper alone. This cutting-edge discovery offered a strategic and...
An unsung war hero that saved countless American troops during World War II, an overlooked battery material that has played a pivotal role in storing electricity for more than 100 years, and a major ingredient in futuristic grid-scale energy storage, antimony is among the most important critical metalloids that most people have never heard of. While antimony may not be part of the common lexicon, humans have been using this semi-metal for more than 5,000 years. "For example,...
The envisioned green future where every North American is driving a battery-powered electric vehicle charged with renewable energy could be undermined by cobalt, a somewhat scarce and controversial metal that makes lithium-ion batteries better. "Cobalt is considered the highest material supply chain risk for electric vehicles in the short and medium term," the U.S. Department of Energy penned in an April report. This risk has automakers, lithium-ion battery manufacturers, and...
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering are working with Powdermet Inc., an Ohio-based nanomaterials and advanced materials research and development company, to develop manganese-bismuth-based materials as an alternative to rare earths in permanent magnets. The motors in most electric vehicles made today contain rare earth permanent magnets, which leverage the naturally occurring strong magnetic force offered by rare earths such as neodymium o...
