(437d) Turning Wastewater to Value-Added Products: Mining Critical Elements from Hypersaline Brines and Reducing Materials Usage

The development of human society replies on many essential materials such as lithium, noble metals, and hydrogen. However, many critical materials are limited in abundance in earth’s crust (i.e., lithium is 0.002%), and their unbalanced geographic distribution creates inherent instability in their global economic markets and susceptibilities in their supply chains. For the sustainable future, it is important to recycle and recover materials and wastewater for extracting critical elements and producing value-added fuels, which can then be used in renewable energy applications. Therefore, we are assembling a team to work on a technology platform that converges water-mineral separation technologies, membrane advancement, novel electrocatalysts, and nanofiber innovations to convert waste brines into value-added products and support US circular economy efforts. In this talk, I will go over our current processes on the development and scaling of our critical materials mining technology as well as electrocatalyst innovation for producing low-cost lithium, clean water, green hydrogen.