The study found that mining technology can reduce the amount of energy needed to access critical minerals vital to modern energy technologies and capture greenhouse gases along the way. The study was published in the journal “US Department of Energy”.
Converting the world’s energy to low carbon technologies
A mining technology developed by researchers at the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin could reduce the amount of energy needed to access critical minerals vital to modern energy technologies and capture greenhouse gases along the way.
Converting the world’s energy to low-carbon technologies and sources will, in part, require vast amounts of lithium, nickel, cobalt and other critical minerals that exist in low concentrations in the Earth’s crust. The extraction of these elements requires a lot of energy and produces waste that can negatively affect the environment and generate significant amounts of greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide (CO2).
This research could turn these emissions into a tool by using CO2 to weaken rock containing critical minerals, reducing the amount of energy needed for mining. The ultimate goal is to significantly reduce emissions produced during mining by safely storing them in rocks, and potentially even make mining carbon negative – storing more carbon than it produces – by introducing and storing CO2 emissions from other industrial operations.
This CO2 storage is possible because of the way ultramafic rocks, which usually contain critical minerals, react with carbon. CO2 chemically reacts with rock and mechanically disrupts its structure, making mineral extraction easier and less energy intensive. This reaction also partially changes the rock into limestone, incorporating carbon dioxide into the mineral structure and permanently storing it.
“Mining processes create a lot of CO2 as a byproduct,” said Estibalitz Ukar, a research scientist with the Bureau of Economic Geology at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences, adding, “If you can capture what’s being produced in the mine, it can come with a low-carbon operation emissions, which is good, but we want to use the CO2-reducing properties of ultramafic rocks to help eliminate even more CO2.”
Ukar leads a team of scientists working to perfect the mining technology, which is supported by a $5 million grant from the US Department of Energy’s Energy Projects Agency. The three-year project will work to refine the mining method in the lab for two years before attempting a full-scale field test in partnership with the Canada Nickel Company. The field test is planned to take place in one of 20 newly discovered ore bodies near the US-Canada border that are expected to be a significant new source of critical minerals in North America.
The project would also make lower grade deposits more economically viable, an important step towards increasing the available supply of critically produced minerals domestically.
“Demand is high now, but we will see a huge increase in the next three to five years as we move to lower emission technologies such as electric vehicles,” Ukar said, adding: “We need to meet demand by finding creative ways to reduce costs and emissions, find new sources of metals and make the mines of the future more sustainable. And we have to do it fast.”
The project is part of the Mining Innovations for Negative Emissions Resource Recovery program, a new initiative to develop market-ready technologies that will increase domestic supplies of critical elements needed for the transition to low-carbon or zero-carbon energy.
The research brings together the expertise of scientists from the Bureau of Economic Geology and the Department of Geological Sciences at the UT Jackson School, as well as researchers from the UT Departments of Petroleum & Geosystems Engineering and Aerospace Engineering & Engineering Mechanics; Columbia University; University of Bern; and Carbfix, an Icelandic project using a similar method of storing CO2 in basalt.
Several groups from the Bureau of Economic Geology are part of the project. These include the Gulf Coast Carbon Center, a world leader in carbon monitoring to ensure its safe storage. The team also includes experts from the agency’s TexNet seismic monitoring system, who will help determine whether the new mining method is causing seismic activity.
“Reducing energy emissions in an affordable and reliable way that the global population can afford is a big challenge,” said Bureau of Economic Geology Director Scott Tinker, adding, “This research program, if successful, could be one of . several approaches to help accelerate this effort. An integrated team is critical to success.”
In addition to the MINER support, Ukar received a separate $1 million grant from the DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory to find locations in the US where this new mining technology could be used. If successful, the technology could be useful in mining operations around the world.
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