S. Mohammed, P. Ochonma
Earthium,
United States
Keywords: Critical minerals, electrochemistry, adsorption, leaching, extraction
Summary:
Critical minerals are foundational to emerging technologies, energy, aerospace, high-performance materials, and defense applications, making the security and resilience of their supply chain vital to societal and economic advancement. The U.S. is currently imports 100% of some of these minerals from other countries, creating strategic vulnerability for a many industries. Thus, developing innovative, domestically sourced, and commercially viable technologies for separating critical minerals from mines ores and industrial waste is essential for the U.S. energy security and technological leadership. Legacy technologies for extracting and separating critical minerals include pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy. These approaches face the inherent challenges of high operating temperatures and extensive chemicals use which leads to high operating expenditure (OPEX), extensive waste generation that requires further treatment and high emissions. Together, these challenges mandates the innovation for selective, efficient, cost-effective and sustainable separation technologies for critical minerals separation. Earthium addresses the limitations of conventional technologies by developing an electricity driven process integrating electrochemical, chemical and mechanical approaches to separate critical minerals from mined ores, electronic waste and fly ash. The process operates at room temperature with water is the only consumable, as it generates the reactive reagents needed to facilitate the critical minerals leaching, separation and deposition in-situ. Thus, it eliminates the need for external chemical reagents and minimize the hazardous waste generation. Earthium process produce high purity critical minerals a reduced cost compared to their market values, with up to 60%+ cost reduction for some minerals. The process further cuts the CO2 emission of conventional approaches by 90% as the only emission associated with the process is from the electricity use. Hence, Earthium provides a modular, cost-effective and sustainable solution for critical minerals separation.