Researchers explore mining seawater for critical metals
Researchers explore mining seawater for critical metals
The aim is to draw key minerals, including lithium and magnesium, from ocean water, desalination plant residue, and industrial waste brine.
Might as well take out all the plastic while at it.
Actually we're going to replace the metal with plastic.
If I have to have microplastics in my balls, then the fish do too dammit!
And in 10 years: Fishes are dying due to the severe lack of nutrition in sea water after humans exploited it for mining of metals. We're not learning of past mistakes.
lol and what else
this process is already in use in dead sea chemical works and it's about separating magnesium, just this time it uses desalination brine as an input
so it gives some table salt, and depending on what you want it to output, potassium chloride, magnesium salts or metal, gypsum, lithium
Returned brine is damaging to seafloor so returning less salt is a net improvement
Don't worry we already ate most of the fish. The remaining fish don't need all the minerals they once did.
We really are speedrunning this end of all multicellular life thing, huh?
Since a lot of people seem to be jumping to extreme conclusions about this based on specious assumptions, here's how the process works according to the article:
Magrathea — named after a planet in the hit novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — buys waste brines, often from desalination plants, and allows the water to evaporate, leaving behind magnesium chloride salts. Next, it passes an electrical current through the salts to separate them from the molten magnesium, which is then cast into ingots or machine components.
that description is also not entirely accurate, because they're separating magnesium chloride by crystallization i guess, maybe some other methid, and then dry it, melt it, electrolysis gives magnesium metal and chlorine gas. just like in conventional process
And killing sea life along with it
itt people who under no pretext will read the linked article
This was a Donald Duck comic when I was a kid in the 1970s. The smart inventor (Ludwig Von Drake) was trying to mine gold from the ocean, but the energy cost was too great and so it was done at a loss.
We try this once in a while, and it's still too expensive.
Since a lot of people seem to be jumping to extreme conclusions about this based on specious assumptions, here's how the process works according to the article:
Magrathea — named after a planet in the hit novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — buys waste brines, often from desalination plants, and allows the water to evaporate, leaving behind magnesium chloride salts. Next, it passes an electrical current through the salts to separate them from the molten magnesium, which is then cast into ingots or machine components.