Mining Critical Metals and Elements from Seawater: Opportunities and Challenges
Abstract
The availability and sustainable supply of technology metals and valuable elements is critical to the global economy. There is a growing realization that the development and deployment of the clean energy technologies and sustainable products and manufacturing industries of the 21st century will require large amounts of critical metals and valuable elements including rare-earth elements (REEs), platinum group metals (PGMs), lithium, copper, cobalt, silver, and gold. Advances in industrial ecology, water purification, and resource recovery have established that seawater is an important and largely untapped source of technology metals and valuable elements. This feature article discusses the opportunities and challenges of mining critical metals and elements from seawater. We highlight recent advances and provide an outlook of the future of metal mining and resource recovery from seawater.
Additional Information
© 2015 American Chemical Society. Published: April 20, 2015. Mamadou Diallo thanks the KAIST EEWS Initiative (Grant No. NT080607C0209721), the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) (MEST grant No. 2012M1A2A2026588), the US National Science Foundation (NSF) (CBET grants 0948485 and 0506951) and the Caltech Dow Resnick Bridge Program for funding his research programs on sustainable chemistry, engineering and materials (SusCHEM). The authors declare no competing financial interest.Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 60180
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20150911-085916908
- NT080607C0209721
- KAIST
- 2012M1A2A2026588
- National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF)
- CBET-0948485
- NSF
- CBET-0506951
- NSF
- Caltech Dow Resnick Bridge Program
- Created
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2015-09-11Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field