The Elements of Innovation Discovered
The Elements of Innovation Discovered
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Sulfide leaching may finally bring old copper mines back online by the successful extraction of hard-to-process waste rock. A century-old copper mine in Morenci, Arizona – the largest in the U.S. – still holds nearly 10 million tons of copper trapped in waste rock. With conventional mining no longer viable there, Freeport-McMoRan is investing in sulfide leaching, an advanced chemical method to extract copper from low-grade ores and waste. "That's the equivalent of a major copp...
From space tech-enabled copper exploration in Australia to nuclear fuel made in America, MTN counts down the most popular articles of 2024. Over the past year, Metal Tech News writers delivered more than 500 articles with deep insights into the scientific breakthroughs, mining initiatives, government policies, and market conditions that are shaping the future for technology metals and mining technologies. These articles took readers from material science discoveries in the... Full story
Will the controversial metal find its place in green tech? About 30 years ago, nobody thought much about cobalt. Today, this metal, with myriads of uses, is one of those elements that gets dragged into the spotlight due to the role it plays in electric vehicle batteries, with critics citing the disparity between the environmental and social costs of producing cobalt and the green tech solutions this critical metal enables. But we can't build a clean energy future without...
Federal, private, academic, and public sectors collaborate to find critical minerals through unexpected methods. In the quest for a sustainable and secure supply of critical minerals, North America is turning to unconventional sources that promise to redefine the landscape of resource extraction. As the drive toward a green economy intensifies, innovative methods are emerging to harvest essential minerals through atypical means. These efforts, bolstered by significant... Full story
Researcher Lana Alagha received $875,000 from Rio Tinto to explore gallium and germanium recovery from copper waste streams. In a landmark development for critical minerals recovery, global mining company Rio Tinto has granted Missouri University of Science and Technology professor Lana Alagha $875,000 for a two-year project that seeks to pioneer novel techniques for extracting the highly sought after critical minerals gallium and germanium from waste generated in copper... Full story
Lithium is an indispensable element in the clean energy transition for several key reasons; like all alkaline metals on the periodic table, it has one more electron than it strictly needs, and this tendency to shed electrons makes it well-suited for passing them back and forth between cathode and anode, charging and discharging thousands of times without degradation. Pure lithium does not occur in nature, but traces are found throughout nearly all igneous rocks, mineral... Full story
Looking to break America's reliance on China for rare earths and critical minerals, the U.S. Department of Energy is investing $140 million to develop a facility that extracts these minerals from unconventional sources and then refines them into the metals needed for electric vehicles, renewable energy generation, and other modern technologies. These technological advances are creating new demand for a suite of minerals and metals that are often rare and in short supply. In... Full story
Chosen as one of 16 projects across 12 states, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's "Re-Mining Red Mud Waste for CO2 Capture and Storage and Critical Element Recovery" (RMCCS-CER) project will receive $1 million in funding to advance a technology that may kill two birds with one stone in the race for critical materials. Announced in November, as part of the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) Mining Innovations for Negative...
The U.S. Department of Energy announced $156 million in funding for a first-of-a-kind facility to extract and separate rare earth elements and critical minerals from unconventional sources like mining waste. As rare earths and other critical minerals are key to manufacturing clean energy technologies here in America – such as solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and hydrogen fuel cells – industries from all ends of the supply chain have been seeking to fulfill the...
Coal ash, acid drainage, and tailings for future green economy As the world continues to prime itself for the global energy shift, academia, governments and the private sector are scrambling to extract the valuable minerals and metals necessary to power the low-carbon renewable future – resulting in some truly innovative and unconventional methods. In addition to the rare earths, cobalt, lithium, and other technology metals that capture headline attention, this list often miss... Full story
Pennsylvanian coal helped to fuel America's Industrial Revolution, and mines in the Keystone State have since provided a domestic source of iron ore, cobalt, nickel, and various other metals. Now, researchers at Pennsylvania State University have identified a potential motherlode of battery metals to feed into America's EV Revolution in waste left behind by more than two centuries of mining in the commonwealth. "Preliminary estimates indicate that waste left by coal mining... Full story
From electric vehicles plugged into renewable energy to smartphones connected to 5G networks, new technologies take advantage of the special properties of a suite of critical minerals and metals that are often rare and in short supply. In addition to the rare earths, cobalt, lithium, and other technology metals that capture headline attention, this list includes even more obscure mined materials such as gallium, germanium, scandium, and tellurium. While scarce, these critical... Full story
