By Aliyah Kovner
Modern life is built on critical minerals and materials. These elements are key ingredients in the technologies that enable a high quality of life, such as the chips and batteries powering our electronics, the medical devices that diagnose and treat diseases, and the infrastructure of the nation’s power grid. The materials are also used to manufacture defense technologies, fuels and chemicals, aerospace vehicles, and automotives.
Although the U.S. has geological resources of many critical minerals and materials (CMMs), some key commodities are only found in challenging forms, either scattered in trace amounts, chemically mixed with other elements, or both. The extraction, separation, and refining processes needed to convert these raw materials into purified products ready for manufacturing are expensive, complex, and energy intensive.
Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are addressing these challenges on all fronts. Drawing on expertise in chemistry, Earth sciences, materials science, technoeconomic analysis, artificial intelligence, process scaling, and biology, teams are developing tools and techniques that will allow industrial partners to identify new critical mineral sources and efficiently extract and process elements from rock, soil, and water — or to recover valuable materials from used products and industrial waste streams.
A team at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced BioProcess Development Unit (ABPDU) recently began engineering organic molecules and entire microbes to extract critical minerals from liquid waste, such as mining wastewater. The biologists and chemists are using AI tools to speed up the discovery and testing phases.
Another project, from bioscientists at ABPDU, the Joint Genome Institute, and the Joint BioEnergy Institute, seeks to design a microbial process to separate rare-earth elements from dissolved e-waste. The scientists are engineering a microbe to selectively bind these elements from their environment in a bioreactor, and designing processes for efficient separation and purification. This work is funded by the Laboratory Directed Research & Development (LDRD) program.