Chemical process produces critical battery metals with no waste | Hacker News Reader

Chemical process produces critical battery metals with no waste

spectrum.ieee.org

237 pointsstubish31 comments

Lot's of ores are just byproducts of the processing of other ores. Like He production is mostly a consequence of natural gas extraction. If you don't extract the high volume profitable (and often environmentally messy) common ore, you don't get any significant amount of the "rare earths".

   Selenium and Cobalt come from Copper mining
   Indium Germanium and Gallium come from Zinc mining
   Nb Nd Pr Sd come from Iron mining
   Yt Nd etc come from Bauxite and Phosphate mining

An interesting thing can happen (and has with Indium) where the demand for the "byproduct" exceeds the relative demand for the main ore (Zinc) causing the price to rise dramatically (for ITO conductors in LCD displays).

There are other places you can get these metals, but they aren't economically viable. Building an infrastructure for cleanly and reliably processing them in volume is clearly important though.

A bit of a tangent but the same byproduct effect is seen in the production of sherry casks for finishing Scotch.

A lot of sherry bodegas only really exist to churn out barrels for whisky distillers.

I love port and sherry finished scotch but I do feel like it’s cheating the idea of single malt.

Glad they do, those who ignore sherry and their brandies are missing out.

I feel like with a jankier sprite-pack and a sprinkling of Java Swing UI, Factorio could market itself as a multi-thousand/seat/year supply chain education platform.

Olivine is a very interesting mineral indeed. It's stable at higher temperatures than other cheap minerals, leading to olivine sand being used for foundry applications that require resistance to temperatures that would melt quartz. (This is the "refractory sand production" mentioned in the article.) But it's not stable at room temperature in contact with the atmosphere; it has such a strong affinity for CO₂ that it chemically weathers into serpentine, which is mentioned as an alternative later in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpentinization

This has led to proposals to grind up olivine into sand and spread it on beaches to reverse global warming, which would definitely work but seems like it could easily overshoot and kick off a new Snowball Earth event.

And, since it composes most of the volume of the Earth, it's a potential source for enormously more iron and magnesium than we could ever hope to mine from mere crustal mines. Drilling rock out of the mantle poses significant technical challenges, though.

The magnesium hydroxide in the second photo is probably more familiar as "milk of magnesia", but, aside from its use as a source of metallic magnesium, it's used in its own right as a refractory insulator in swaged electrical heating elements and basic (high-pH) foundry applications.

I was unaware that it typically had enough nickel and cobalt contamination to be an economically viable source of those minerals.

The ions of magnesium, nickel and cobalt have almost the same size (iron ions are slightly larger, and manganese ions even larger).

That is why nickel and cobalt may easily substitute magnesium in magnesium minerals, being more enriched there in comparison with nearby minerals containing iron oxides or manganese oxides.

However, even the bigger ions of iron and manganese do not differ much in size of the magnesium ions, which is why in olivine some part of the magnesium ions are substituted with iron or manganese ions, besides the nickel and cobalt ions, because iron and manganese are very abundant everywhere, even if they do not fit as well the crystal structure as nickel and cobalt.

I didn't know that, but that makes sense. And magnesium is resolutely divalent, while iron, manganese, and cobalt are happy enough to be divalent, and nickel, while not as stuck-up as magnesium, strongly prefers it.

BTW, if you haven't seen it, you'll probably be interested in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44698409.

The serpentinization process is an alternate history humanity saver. Here's a crazy long article that has an analysis smack dab in the middle of it: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/olivine-weathering/ .

I seem to remember that one off the Central American countries has actually built a "green beach"; but, for the life of me, I can't find it. I may just be misremembering.

I love seeing the progress in mechanical (real world) tech.

I'm becoming somewhat (although not completely) cynical in a "devil is in the details" kinda way.

It seems we see a lot of hype which either fizzles out, or never seems to make it all the way.

This one us at the pilot plant stage, so at least made it out the lab. I hope it makes it all the way to full size production.

Its the nature of reporting that people want to report "new" things. However if the stuff actually worked it wouldn't be "new" it would just be in use. So instead they report on stuff that is 90% of the way there. Sometimes people figure out the last 10%, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they figure it out but it takes 20 years.

With the investment world being more exposed, and the research funding incentives, I seriously doubt it's just about reporting what people want to click. If I've learned anything in the last 15 years I've been paying attention - hype is more important than fundamentals for investment.

No doubt you're correct about Aspiring's incentives, but I don't think Laurie Winkless at IEEE Spectrum gets a payout if they close an investment round.

Usually they report on stuff that is 10% of the way there, because there's 1000× more of it.

You probably have to go quite a long way into answering "is it feasible" type questions, before you can answer "is it cost effective" questions. Maturing a technology will typically take many steps, each with exponentially increased costs. Finding the money for the initial (cheapest) steps may be a lot easier, especially since the pay-off may prove to be higher than expected.

Research is akin to gambling. You cannot predict which bets will pay off, but if you can win on average, it's worth betting as many times as you can afford.

So far it sounds reasonably environmental friendly and good that they have a pilot plant running.

A few questions remain unanswered though: What can the current plant already do? It sounds like a multi-day sequential process per batch. How many batteries could that give?

The mixed metal product also contains nickel-manganese-cobalt. But certainly with a lot of other stuff and not in the exact ratio you would put in a battery. Even if we were to continoue with NMC batteries (LFPs are more common today). It looks like a first concentration step to get the interesting 10% of the rock. What separation process still remains? I expect a concentrate still to be much more useful than bare rock.

What are the overall economics? I understand that you won't need the separate mining as Olivine is considered waste and has already been piled up. But is that an economic benefit? (cheaper?) Environmental? Or time to market? (you don't need another mining permission for more capacity).

Is it just a more green but more expensive extraction from unused Olivine? Or will this replace all other dirty extractions mining soon? (too good to be true)

No mention of pricing in the article ; how much does a battery manufacturer have to pay to source NMC from the "traditional" sources ? How much does the "recylced" version costs ?

(I don't know where you can get that type of infos, and neither SEs no LLMs help, so I must be missing the right keywords :/ )

I've often thought of the difference between science and engineering as, "can we do it?" Vs "how much will it cost to do it?"

Engineering is the science of “good enough”.

The most important lesson I got from 5 years of Engineer School was the Pareto principle a.k.a. The 80-20 rule

I sometimes split it up a little further.

Science, "can it even be done?"

Engineering, "can we do it?"

Business, "what's it going to cost? can we afford it?"

Marketing, "what can we sell it for?"

Sales: "we already sold it for December, it will be ready, right ?"

Consultant (present for 3 seconds at start of project): "Delivered first commercial system for X revolutionizing Y market."

Australia has an unenviable track record of promising sounding companies that get funding from government sources and soon go belly up.

Poor implemenation, poor quality control, complacency and the lack of educated personnel all contribute to this.

Meanwhile, the technology is studied, improved and transferred by enterprising Chinese and soon becomes a billion dollar company in Guangdong.

Good thing they're in New Zealand

It appears that power input from intermittent sources could be fairly easy to accommodate with this process. A battery could be added to run things that can't be turned off, like circulation pumps, etc., otherwise it could all be solar or wind powered.

Could be incredible for carbon sequestration. They’ve given olivine a value and the process produces olivine dust purified of potentially toxic metals that can still be used to capture co2.

No, it consumes olivine dust; it doesn't produce it. Olivine dust is full of potentially toxic metals, but as long as you aren't inhaling it, you don't have to worry about them. Olivine isn't water-soluble.

I mean that it leaves us with the co2 absorbing part already ground up with metals removed.

Aren't the metals the CO₂-absorbing part? Olivine is the fayalite–forsterite–tephroite continuum. Fayalite is Fe₂SiO₄. Forsterite is Mg₂SiO₄. Tephroite is Mn₂SiO₄. (Admittedly, as metals go, those aren't very toxic.)

If you remove the metals from olivine what's left over is silica. Like, quartz. It doesn't absorb CO₂.

> The plan is to add two more reaction chains in parallel, so that the process can run continuously, shortening the runtime from three days to one.

That’s screaming for someone to optimize down to 2.5 days so they can do 2 cycles per week per machine. I wonder if the contents have to sit in each stage for 24 hours or 8 hours, because that may mean higher hardware utilization by two shifts of workers.

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