The Elements of Innovation Discovered
The Elements of Innovation Discovered
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In 1806, Swiss engineer François Isaac de Rivaz invented an internal combustion engine that used a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen as fuel. The first electric car came some 25 years later, long before the modern gas engine in 1885. But then Henry Ford built the inexpensive Model T in 1908, with an internal combustion engine that ran on gasoline at an impressively low $280, while electric cars at their peak in 1912 sold for over $1,000. Considering that hydrogen is the most...
In lieu of aliens or secret government bases, there is a very real and persistent threat on the Moon to future astronauts on NASA's Artemis mission – dust. This powdery substance is far from the commonplace kind we're used to earthside. Lunar dust is the finest fraction of crushed regolith easily disturbed and distributed throughout the low-gravity atmosphere of the Moon. It differs significantly in its origin and properties from terrestrial soil. On Earth, particles are w...
Copper has had a wild ride in 2023, going from expected surplus to deficit within the last few months due to labor disputes, environmental protests, and volatile demand. The supply-demand roller coaster in 2023 was reflected in the price of this energy metal, which dropped from a high above $9,400 per metric ton last January to fluctuating to lows of around $7,800 in May and again in October before rebounding above $8,700 by year's end. Part of the reason for the late 2023...
Silicon Valley-based KoBold Metals is using the latest machine learning technology to expand its search for lithium across four continents that includes projects in the United States, Canada, Australia, South Korea, and Zambia. KoBold's interest in lithium began in Canada, where the high-tech mineral exploration company, backed by funding from Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and others, detected this critical battery metal near Glencore's Raglan nickel mine in northern Quebec. The...
Alongside the industries they complement, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) have been tasked with staying ahead of the curve, assessing emerging market trends and technology, and developing best practices and solutions for the future. Their supportive services and specialized equipment have played an integral role in bringing mining operations into the future. Tomorrow's mines and their backers bank on three pillars – efficiency, safety, and sustainability. This primaril...
Two companies are in close competition to be the first to officially break ground on commercially productive lithium mines in Ontario, Canada – one local and the other Australian – and that's only a taste of Ontario's promise in the North American lithium rush. Green Technology Metals is a lithium exploration company based in Perth with 100%-owned high-grade spodumene assets in Ontario. The company is prepping for its multi-stage C$1.8 billion Seymour project to start out...
The only rare earths mine in the United States – accounting for about 16% of the world's rare earths production – is the Mountain Pass mine in California's Mojave Desert, operated by MP Materials. The mine is partly owned by Chinese interests, which export most of what is produced out of the country for processing. China controls 91% of refining activity, 87% of oxide separation and 94% of magnet production, as recently reported in the Wall Street Journal, a supply concentrati...
On Dec. 12, 2015, delegates from almost every country on the planet signed a landmark climate accord, the Paris Agreement, that united more than 190 parties in support of a legally binding treaty pledging to drive the overall planetary temperature down by slashing the use of fossil fuels and adopting solutions for a massive transition to renewable energy and green transportation. This requires extensive economic and social transformation, measured in five-year cycles of...
The ages of human history have been defined from stone to iron, from hunting to husbandry, and from industry to information. The latest change has come not through any one revolutionary commodity or tool but in an overall shift from resource consumption to one of stewardship. "The argument could be made that, with the clean energy transition, we're exchanging a fossil fuel-based energy system with a metals-based energy system," said Scott Odell, MIT Environmental Solutions...
The Salton Sea geothermal reservoir in Southern California could produce up to 3.4 million metric tons of lithium, which is plenty to make batteries for enough electric vehicles to replace all cars currently on U.S. highways, according to a comprehensive analysis carried out by the U.S. Department of Energy. The analysis, funded by the Geothermal Technologies Office and conducted by DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, confirms the region's significant potential to...
The world's leading lithium producer, Albemarle, is working to revive the Kings Mountain mine in North Carolina, which has been dormant since the 1980s and historically contains one of the nation's largest lithium deposits. Kings Mountain boasts one of the few known hard rock lithium deposits in the United States, and a miner there is expected to produce enough of the namesake metal in lithium-ion batteries to support the manufacturing of approximately 1.2 million electric...
Arguments against the expense and impracticality of space exploration have been ongoing since before the Apollo missions ever got off the ground. In fact, NASA's budget has hovered between a minute 1% and 0.4% of the total federal budget since the 1970s. Missions fail, lose funding, or fall out of favor between presidencies. But there is one assurance that private investors can take to the bank-innovation in the face of space exploration always pays. "You have to innovate, an...
From being the priciest and hardest-to-come-by, lithium-ion battery metal during the budding energy transition to a massive surplus and wavering demand, cobalt mining has had a nail-biting year as sales have stalled and prices have begun to fall (global benchmark cobalt prices have dropped by more than half since May of last year). Cobalt is a lustrous ferromagnetic metal with a high melting point used increasingly in renewable energy technologies, such as wind turbines and...
Each year in Canada, roughly 200 active mines contribute to billions of tons of mining waste. The estimated number of tailing storage facilities surveyed worldwide is over 12,000. While considered industrial waste, these facilities also contain a number of useful minerals at a concentration deemed too low to be worth extracting-until now. Enter biomining, which covers several biological separation technologies offering eco-friendly recovery of valuable and strategic materials...
The minerals commodities industry may be worth trillions, but it has lost billions in less than a decade to fraud perpetrated by industry insiders due to roughly half of the world's mining companies and their warehousing networks still relying on paper documents. This industrial blind spot has been made public by a series of news reports of fraud in metals trading, with the latest incidents having revealed devastating inadequacies in the records and storage systems of...
Massachusetts-based battery tech company Factorial Energy has spent the last six years focused on solid-state electric vehicle batteries that are safer and have up to 50% higher energy density than lithium-ion batteries, all while driving down costs to be competitive with conventional EV battery pricing. The company's flagship product is its proprietary Factorial Electrolyte System Technology (FEST), which utilizes a solid-state electrolyte designed to perform safely and relia...
The growing list of critical minerals and conflict elements like cobalt are drawing intense focus and demand for alternative sources. Investors and consumers are increasingly focused on the environmental, social and governance (ESG) credentials, provenance, and indirect emissions of these supply chains. If done right, prioritizing urban mining – specifically moving recycled materials upstream in supply chains – could provide cheaper domestic supply with a lower emissions foo...
London-based Asteroid Mining Corp. has developed the Space Capable Asteroid Robotic Explorer (SCAR-E) as a ruggedly built, adaptable, and low-cost walking and climbing robot available initially for commercial use across a range of destinations on Earth ahead of its primary task of exploring the solar system. The company developed the SCAR-E six-legged robot to outperform Spot, Boston Dynamic's robot dog. "We are coming for you Boston Dynamics," proclaimed Asteroid Mining CEO...
The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy launched a unifying Critical Materials Collaborative this week to "harness and unify critical materials research across America's innovation ecosystem." Building on momentum from the 2023 DOE Critical Materials Assessment, the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office has announced plans to fund up to $10 million to establish a Critical Materials Accelerator Program. Projects funded...
May be the tech for unifying green energy future and the not-so-often green methods of producing lithium. Researchers at Princeton have developed a surprisingly efficient and environmentally friendly method of extracting lithium from brines and seawater using specialized string. While technologies such as direct extraction from lithium-rich geothermal waters is shaping up to be a way to produce the silvery-white critical mineral necessary for rechargeable batteries without...
U.S. supply chains for critical minerals in energy, automotive, aeronautic and defense markets are up against the challenge of establishing credible "green credentials" amidst sweeping company promises, increased standards and new regulations. The arbitrary nature of voluntary initiatives, combined with ill-defined industry certification, has made it difficult to compare resource provenances and prove against human rights violations and other practices damaging to the...
Mining – especially regarding copper, lithium, and other critical minerals – is one of the most water-intensive industries, and the sector is facing increased operational risks, including community competition for supply. With rising scarcity, industrial utilization of water is typically the first to be constrained, as with the shutdown of aluminum processing in São Paulo, Brazil, during the record-setting 2014–2017 drought. Investor scrutiny of water stewardship has since...
At T-minus 25 days until the launch of the Psyche, the technicians behind this first mission to a metal-rich asteroid beyond the orbit of Mars can barely contain their excitement. "It's getting increasingly real," said Henry Stone, Psyche's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "We are counting the days. The team is more than ready to send this spacecraft off on its journey, and it's very exciting." No stranger to playing the long game,...
While lithium has been the poster child for optimism and controversy in equal measure, nickel has its own crucial role to play in the batteries powering the clean energy future – increasing range and capacity – but is traditionally carbon-heavy to produce. For nickel, the industry's focus has been twofold – obtaining enough and moving the needle between untenable quantities of emissions from mining and processing and the battery and alloying metal's necessary inclusion in ne...
Lithium is an indispensable element in the clean energy transition for several key reasons; like all alkaline metals on the periodic table, it has one more electron than it strictly needs, and this tendency to shed electrons makes it well-suited for passing them back and forth between cathode and anode, charging and discharging thousands of times without degradation. Pure lithium does not occur in nature, but traces are found throughout nearly all igneous rocks, mineral...
