There is a story told about a miner who found copper cans in his garbage garbage in the early days of mining. The wastewater of copper mining had fluid through their land, he said, and turned copper steel cans.
The story can be apocryphal, but the process is real and is called cementation. Montana Resources, the mining company that plays from the Anaconda copper company, still uses this alchemical trick in a process in its continental mine in Butte, Mont.
Next to the mine is Pit Berkeley, which is full of 50 billion gallons of a highly acidic toxic beer. Montana resources I had liquid from the well, which allows cascade in scrap iron batteries. Iron becomes copper and is collected for production.
Although the methods to eliminate water metals have been around a long time, in recent years the global struggle for critical metals for manufacturing and technological advances has given a new generation of technologies and extraction processes.
One of the sources rich in minerals on which researchers focus is wastewater, including the brine of desalination plants, oil and gas fracking water and wastewater of mining. The researchers at Oregon State University estimate the brine of desalination plants alone contain metals valued at approximately $ 2.2 billion.
“Water is the 21st century mineral body,” said Peter S. Fiske, director of the National Alliance for Water Innovation in the National Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory of the Energy Department. “Technology now allows us to choose wastewater trash and choose high value items.”
Research on rare earth extraction, a set of metal elements, from waste, extends widely, since the need to induce the issue is significantly. Researchers at Indiana Geological and Water Survey at the University of Indiana, for example, are studying the potential for rare earth mining in coal waste, including flying ashes and coal tailings. And researchers from the University of Texas in Austin have created membranes that mimic natives to separate the rare earth from waste.
Mining wastewater are not only cheaper and faster than starting new mines, but is also cleaner.
Among the large awards transmitted by water in the well next to Butte are two light elements of rare earth (rees), neodymium and proseodimio. They are vital for small and powerful magnets in electric vehicles, for medical technology and for defense purposes, such as precision -guided missiles and satellites. A single F-35 combat plane USA 900 pounds of metals of rare earth.
“We are turning a giant responsibility into something that contributes to the defense,” said Mark Thompson, Vice President of Environmental Affairs of Montana Resources. “There is some high -level metallurgy here. Real things of Egghead.”
This is a critical moment for research in national production of rare earths. The United States not only remains far behind China, but the commercial war of President Trump has stimulated China to threaten to further restrict mineral exports from the rare land as a result of Trump’s tariffs. Experts in the critical mineral security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies say that the great gap would allow China to expand its defense capabilities much faster than the United States.
Both Greenland and Ukraine are the focus of the attention of the Trump administration largely because countries have significant deposits of rare earths.
Trump also has just ordered the government to move towards the extraction of large portions of the ocean fund, even in international waters, for its mineral wealth.
There are 17 types of metals known as strange lands, all of which have a leg that is found in the Berkeley well. They are not rare in prevalence, but they are called because they are scattered in small concentrations.
Rare earths are classified into two types: heavy and light. Heavy rare earths, such as disposio, terbio and ititrium, have a greater atomic weight and are usually more rare, which means they sell in narrower quantities and are prone to shortage. Light metals, on the contrary, have a lower atomic weight.
The drainage of the acid mine is a highly toxic pollutant created when the pyrite that supports sulfur in the rock is exhibited to false oxygen and water mining. The drain then oxidizes and creates sulfuric acid and poises the river pathways. It is one of the country’s biggest environmental problems, and tens of thousands or abandoned mines have contaminated 12,000 miles of streams.
However, acid also dissolves Zurtc, copper, rare earths and other minerals outside the rock and inside the water, providing an opportunity for the right technology to extract them, which did not exist until recently.
Paul Ziekiewicz, director of the Water Research Institute of the University of West Virginia, has investigated the water of the well in Butte for 25 years. He and a team of researchers from Virginia Tech and L3 Process Development, a chemical engineering firm, developed a method to extract critical metals from the drainage of acid mines in the coal mines of Western Virginia, the same process used in Butte. Large and densely woven plastic bags are filled with a mud -shaped mud from the water treatment plant. Water is perceived slowly, leaving a prone of approximately 1 to 2 percent rare earths that need greater refinement, with chemical processes. The final step in the patented process is an extraction with solvenents that creates pure elements of the Earth.
“One of the beautiful things about the drainage of acid mines is that the concentrates we obtain are particularly enriched in heavylands,” Dr. Go. Ziemkiewicz said. “Light are not so valuable.”
The Butte project is waiting for a word on a subsidy of the Department of Defense of $ 75 million to build a concentrator, the last necessary step to refine the preconcentrated to rare land and start large -scale production.
Zinc is also abundant in the acid drain mixture here and, because it has a higher price, it is important as a way of paying the process. Nickel and cobalt are also extracted.
While the rare earth elements have a lot of demand, China produces a majority and manipulates prices to keep them low, which forces competition. That is why the Department of Defense is financing much of the work in elements of the strange land and other metals. The United States has only one rare earth operating mine, in Mountain Pass, California, which produces about 15 percent of the global rare earth supply.
The Berkeley well has been a festive sore since 1982, when, the Anaconda copper company closed the open mine, turned off the pumps and let the water fill it. Water is so acidic due to the drainage of acid mines that when tens of thousands of snow geese flowed in this regard in their migration in 2016, many landed on the surface and were quickly poisoned. Around 3,000 birds died.
Atlantic and Montana’s resources are required to be required to treat the water from the well to perpetuity to prevent the levels that could cope with groundwater. (Montana Resources extracts the continental well, next to the Berkeley well). The clean water law requires that companies treat the drainage of acid mines, an expensive process. Adding another level of treatment to the Blesshoe plant here is less expensive than building a new one and can compensate for treatment costs or simply get profits.
There are legs of legs of research effort to release metals suspended from water. Mr. Thompson showed a map with lines that radiate from Butte, showing where the water samples had been in the research facilities throughout the country. But the metal production process that is happening now is the first that has proven to be economical.
While the wealth in the mineral soup here knows him for decades, a way of extracting them was difficult to achieve, until Dr. Ziemkiewicz’s team developed the new method. He has been producing strange lands in two mines of coal in Western Virginia, where the drainage of acid mines is a problem. Each mine produces four tons of rare earths per year.
The Berkeley well, however, has a much richer concentration of rare earths in solution and a higher volume of water and is expected to produce 40 tons per year. Dr. Ziekiewicz believes that this process is used in other mines could provide almost all US imports of strange land elements necessary for defense purposes, which, he said, currently amounts to approximately 1,400 tons.
But the demand for rare earths could increase by up to 600 percent in the coming decades, according to some estimates.
In the global effort to clean water and produce critical minerals, Lawrence Berkeley’s laboratory investigates a variety of technology related to the water filter, especially to improve membranes. It operates a particular accelerator called Advanced Light Source, which creates a very bright X -ray light that allows scientists to study membranes for atomic scale.
The laboratory has worked with external researchers to create a new generation of filters, called NANOSOSPONGAS, designed to catch a single target molecule, such as lithium.
“It is an atomic glove,” said Adam Uliana, executive director of Chemfinity, a Brooklyn company that studies the use of nanospongas to clean many different types of waste. “Catch a single type of metal.”
Lithium, cobalt and magnesium are critical minerals, in addition to foreign lands, which have attracted considerable attention of researchers.
The exchange of ions, a technique proven to eliminate metals and water pollution, is gaining interest. Lilac Solutions, a new company in Oakland, California, has developed the specialized resin accounts necessary to extract the lithium from the brine with the exchange of ions and plan to start its first production installation in the Great Lake Salt in Utah.
The company’s technology pumps brine through the ion exchange filters, extracts the mineral and returns the water to its source, a process that David Snydcker, the president of the company, said that it falls very little environmental disturbance. If it shows on scale, it could revolutionize lithium extraction and reduce or eliminate the need for underground and open mines.
Magrathea Metals is a new company in Oakland that manufactures salty salted magnesium bulls that remain after seawater relaxes. The company allows the salmuelas to dry, which leaves the salts of magnesium chloride. An electric current, which can use renewable energy outside the time, the drafts of the solution and separates the salts of the molten magnesium, which is placed in bullion.
Its executive director, Alex Grant, said that this process is extremely clean, thought that it has not yet been used to manufacture large -scale magnesium. The Department of Defense has founded much of its work.
China produces 90 percent of the world’s magnesium. The metal is molten with something called Pidgeon Process -. Heated with coal ovens to around 2,000 degrees, which is highly polluting and carbon intensive. Dr. Fiske expects much more innovation.
“Three vectors converge,” he said. “The value of some of these critical materials is increasing. The cost of conventional mining and extraction is increasing, and the safety of international suppliers, especially Russia and China, is going down.”
