The Elements of Innovation Discovered
The Elements of Innovation Discovered
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DOD invests $2.5 million from the 2024 Defense Appropriations Act for research and development. Talon Metals Corp. is being awarded a $2.47 million research and development contract from the Department of Defense's Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) through its wholly owned subsidiary Talon Nickel (USA) LLC, to support new approaches for extracting nickel, cobalt, and iron from domestic sulfide ores and tailings. DLA will provide the funding over a 15-month period for Talon to... Full story
Travertine Technologies partners with Sabin Metal to build a circular plant in New York that converts waste into valuable feedstock. In a project that will scale industrialized carbon capture technology to convert sulfate waste into valuable feedstock, Travertine Technologies has announced a partnership with Sabin Metal Corp., the largest independently owned precious metals refiner in North America, to build a demonstration plant with $10.7 million in financing that includes $...
Partners with Value.Space to use satellites to assess the risks of mine tailings storage facilities. To help safeguard people, environment, and mineral supply chains critical to the clean energy transition, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) is collaborating with Value.Space to deploy satellite-based monitoring and risk profiling to strengthen the United Nations' mining safety initiatives. The primary objective of this partnership is to lower the risk... Full story
Tellurium devices transform sunlight and heat into electricity. A hot engine and a cool breeze, a cozy living room on a cold winter day, or the warmth of sunshine on your face and the coolness of the earth beneath your feet – there are temperature variations all around. Devices capable of efficiently transforming these thermal dichotomies into clean electricity 24 hours a day without any moving parts would forever change the energy dynamics on Earth. While such a miraculous t...
Indispensable, expensive, and rare – PGMs get a green upgrade. Back in 1950, the first catalytic converter in the United States was a box bolted onto a car's undercarriage to reduce tailpipe emissions. It was patented by French mechanical engineer Eugene Houdry, who was concerned about the effects of automobile exhaust on the good people of Los Angeles. And it would have worked if it had not been for the octane-boosting lead then being added to fuel, which could choke any c...
Projects, initiatives, and technology expand scandium supply chain security. While it may not have quite as strong a chemical bond to its adopted lanthanide siblings as they do each other, scandium does possess similar enough characteristics and is almost always found at the same geological gatherings (deposits) as the rest of its rare earth family. Named for the Latin word for Scandinavia, "Scandia," – as the mineral was thought to only dwell off the Nordic peninsula – sca...
Federal, private, academic, and public sectors collaborate to find critical minerals through unexpected methods. In the quest for a sustainable and secure supply of critical minerals, North America is turning to unconventional sources that promise to redefine the landscape of resource extraction. As the drive toward a green economy intensifies, innovative methods are emerging to harvest essential minerals through atypical means. These efforts, bolstered by significant... Full story
Talon plans to use Circulor's solution to trace the responsibly produced nickel and other critical minerals it mines and processes in the U.S. Poor worker safety, environmental impacts, and human rights violations at Chinese-run nickel mines and refineries in Indonesia have been the subject of a great deal of negative media attention, driving battery manufacturers and electric vehicle makers to seek out stronger assurances of environmental, social and governance (ESG) complian...
High concentrations of REEs occurring near coal could improve domestic supply. "The model is if you're already moving rock, could you move a little more rock for resources towards energy transition?" said co-author Lauren Birgenheier regarding a study of rare earth elements (REEs) found in conjunction with coal-producing regional mines across the Uinta coal belt of Colorado and Utah. This research seeking out alternative sources of rare earths was conducted in partnership... Full story
PowerMaster President Haiku York talks with Metal Tech News about the company's Revolution grinding technology for mining. PowerMaster has launched Revolution, a promising environmentally-friendly crushing technology designed to increase efficiency, lower costs, reduce the carbon footprint, and improve safety at mining operations. The PowerMaster Revolution is a gyroscopic grinder designed to efficiently process various materials, from large ore chunks to fine tailings, all... Full story
Nearly all metals are found within 10% of rocks in Idaho copper deposit; XRF core scans proving to be ideal match for ore sorting analysis. Preliminary results from Idaho Copper Corp.'s use of Veracio's TruScan are beginning to reveal how the use of this automated drill core analysis technology during exploration can maximize the effectiveness of ore sorting technology during operations. By using specialized sensors to identify and reject unmineralized rocks prior to feeding...
Norge Mineraler partners with Finnish materials tech company for low-carbon mining and waste management solutions for mine in Norway. Anglo-Norwegian mineral exploration company Norge Mining and Finnish materials technology company Betolar have forged a partnership to explore solutions that increase the sustainability and value of producing critical minerals at the Storeknuten titanium-phosphate-iron-vanadium project in southwestern Norway. Being advanced by Norge Mining's...
Canada's Global Innovation Cluster for digital technologies invests C$3.5 million in surgical mining of high-grade deposits. Mining tech start-up Novamera has received a $2.6 million (C$3.5 million) investment from Canadian technologies accelerator DIGITAL to advance a technology to surgically mine metals from high-grade deposits that have been overlooked because they are uneconomic with conventional mining technologies due to their size and shape. Many high-grade narrow vein...
Space miners develop Earth-friendly tech products as the first step to a future extraterrestrial economy. Plenty of space mining companies have boomed and gone bust in the last decade. In spite of this, "the field has exploded in interest," said Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines. The costs of space travel and exploration have been reduced dramatically due to the privatization of transport. With deep-sea mining still...
Talon and Argonne National Lab are working to transform iron waste products from nickel mines into a superior LFP battery cathode material. A mix of battery types is needed for a rapid and sustainable transition to electric vehicles. While lithium-ion batteries with nickel-cobalt-manganese (NCM) cathodes will continue to be the main choice for longer-range EVs in North America, lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) offers an alternative for lower-cost cars used primarily for...
An efficient e-waste recycling process is made possible by whey, a byproduct of cheesemaking. Scientists in Switzerland have recovered high-purity gold through a scalable process using food scrap-derived sponges that efficiently adsorb the precious metal from tricky e-waste. The final result is 450 milligrams of 22-carat gold recovered from 20 discarded motherboards. Because the method utilizes industry byproducts, it is doubly sustainable and cost-effective as well. Gold...
Partnership addresses various options to create value in mining waste through remining and restoration. Regeneration Enterprises and Cobalt Blue have partnered up to tackle the growing inventory of legacy mine sites and waste. The partnership's projects are expected to transform these sites into ecological assets by producing much-needed green energy minerals through climate-positive means. The focus is on identifying new value in waste by remining and restoring sites,... Full story
Gamblin Artists Colors introduces oil paints pigmented with waste from acidic water draining from old coal mine. Paints throughout the ages have been uniquely colored by crushed gemstones, rare shellfish, and even powdered Egyptian mummies. With that same pioneering spirit, the Portland, Oregon-based Gamblin Artists Colors began recycling dry pigment dust collected by their Torit air filtration system during the 1990s and mixing it into a paint color they called Torrit Grey.... Full story
Largest industrial decarbonization investment ever in US history; will see $6 billion across 33 projects throughout the nation. Stoking the non-emissive fires of industry once again, the U.S. Department of Energy has leveraged another significant share of Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding to inject upwards of $6 billion into 33 projects across more than 20 states to decarbonize energy-intensive industries, reduce industrial greenhouse gas emissions, and invigorate job...
With the money, permits and resources locked in, US Strategic Metals has positioned itself as a desperately needed sustainable domestic battery metals platform Intent on repairing the widening gap representing a nonexistent American electric battery industry, US Strategic Metals (USSM) has transformed from humble beginnings as a mine site cleanup and reclamation business to a one-stop green battery metals platform taking the first steps toward a secure domestic closed-loop...
European steelmakers are looking across the Atlantic for high-quality iron ore mined on Canada's Baffin Island. Due to the combination of high strength, low cost, and the abundance of the minerals and metals from which it is made, steel is the most used metal on Earth. The making of this alloy that serves as the skeleton of modern society, however, is also responsible for roughly 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions. To help reduce the CO2 footprint of this building material... Full story
Massive geothermal lithium reserves give U.S. leverage while superpowers employ protectionist measures around supply chains. There's a new international race, not into space or to establish military superiority, but to secure critical minerals in a worldwide resource grab for the feedstocks that will fuel a global green energy transition. While we're all on the same side – or, in this case, the same planet – the superpowers have been at odds with how to achieve net-zero car...
From Trudeau's visit to Vital REE plant to a Chinese firm buying Vital stock and Canada rare earths, MTN counts down the 10 most popular articles of 2023. From the energy transition driving enormous new demand for technology metals to advances in technologies that make the mining of those materials more efficient and sustainable, 2023 was a big year for tech metals and mining tech news. Here are the 10 most popular Metal Tech News articles of 2023: No. 10 - Trudeau tours Vital... Full story
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...
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...
