| Project Detail |
The U.S. mining industry faces the rapid depletion of high-profit deposits, increased mining and processing costs, and expensive management and accumulation of tailings. These factors result in a reduced return on investment from conventional mining methods. The current global conventional mineral supply also cannot support the U.S. transition to 100% renewable energy. The lack of energy-relevant minerals poses a significant supply chain risk, especially with regard to batteries, renewable generation, and transmission. The U.S. may look toward unconventional minerals (i.e., CO2-reactive minerals) and carbon-negative mining methods to meet the demand.
Project Innovation + Advantages:
Columbia University (Columbia) will use innovative processes to enable increased domestic production of energy-relevant metals from CO2-reactive minerals at potentially lower costs than the state of the art. The work will focus on feedstocks from the Tamarack Project, leading to domestic production of nickel, copper, and cobalt and smaller amounts of platinum, palladium, and gold. Activities will leverage Columbia’s hydrometallurgical leach technologies for these minerals. The technology has significantly lower environmental impacts and may enable economic recovery of off-specification concentrates that are not accepted for smelting. This ex-situ processing will have no impact on the CO2-reactive capacities of waste rock and may improve the capacity of tailings for carbonation. Columbia will explore the application to other mineral processing opportunities.
Potential Impact:
The MINER program aims to use the reactive potential of CO2-reactive ore materials to decrease mineral processing energy and increase the yield of energy-relevant minerals via novel negative emission technologies. |
