Grant: Canada Research Chairs

To address the climate crisis, many of the world’s heating, transportation and manufacturing systems – now typically powered by fossil fuels – must instead operate on electricity supplied by carbon-friendly renewable sources. This mass electrification will not happen without a major boost in the production of so-called battery and energy metals, such as copper (used in electric wiring) and rare earth elements (key components in permanent magnets used in motors, generators, etc.). However, securing these metals is becoming increasingly complex due to a range of economical, environmental, and social challenges. To ensure safe and responsible supplies of these critical metals, their extraction must transition from processing higher-grade ores using traditional energy-, water-, and chemical-intensive methods to treating lower-grade ores and waste with innovative methods that produce minimal environmental impact and low carbon footprint. The long-term objective of my CRC research is to advance this transition at multiple steps of the raw materials processing life cycle, from ore size reduction, to metal extraction, to safe disposal of generated waste. Recent developments in omics-based techniques (genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics) and large dataset analytics and machine learning provide unique opportunities to achieve this transition. My CRC research will use these innovative methods to develop microbial-based processes for extraction of critical metals and management of the environment impacts of metal release from mine waste. The proposed research will focus on the following three themes: 1) Microbial-assisted ore size reduction to reduce energy consumption prior to heap leaching; 2) Extraction of critical metals, such as rare earth elements (REE), from mine waste to reduce its environmental impact; (3) Prediction of metal leaching from mine waste to reduce associated environmental pollution. Canada is well positioned to be the world leading producer of critical metals and exporter of state-of-the-art metallurgical technologies. The findings of the proposed CRC research will contribute to ensuring safer, cleaner, and more efficient supplies of battery and energy metals critical to the global transition to a low-carbon economy.