Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Summary of Proposal As the global economy grows to match the anticipated level of prosperity of the world's peak population, that the global primary metal production is predicted to at least double by 2060. Several key commodities like nickel may see up to 20-fold increases in demand as the economy moves toward full electrification. Currently recognized resources of nickel and several other important metals will fall far short of expected demand. Supply shortfalls will cause a surge in exploration for conventional mineral deposit types as well as increased scrutiny of mineralization styles currently regarded as being subeconomic. The proposed research will examine the fundamental geometallurgical controls on the economic feasibility of metal extraction from a variety of rock types not currently regarded as ores and will take the resulting information into large-scale examinations of the controls on future availability and prices of metals including Ni, Cu, Al, and Fe. The proposed research will lay the groundwork for possible future exploitation of unconventional sources of base metals by pursuing three related tasks. First, the distribution of the base metals of interest to a green economy (e.g., Ni, Cu, Co, etc.) will each be determined in a range of natural rock types spanning most of the Earth's crust. Second, preliminary bench-scale experiments will assess the potential for beneficiation and ultimate metal extraction from the key metal-bearing minerals using simple methods like gravitational or magnetic separation, and acid or base leaching. These experiments will be done without immediate regard for profitability but will serve to delineate the overall approaches that might liberate metals selectively or in bulk from each lithology. By creating a matrix of metal distributions and potential techniques of metal extraction from each rock type we will arrive at a ranking of relative ease of extraction of each metal from various earth materials currently regarded as being subeconomic. The third and final component of the proposed research program will be to translate the elements of the matrix comparing deportment to extractive methods into an energetic cost of extraction for each element from each lithotype for each extractive method. Energy consumption will be estimated based on some common assumptions: all processes will be assumed to involve inputs only of electrical energy; chemical reagents will be presumed to be derived ultimately from the chlor-alkali process of electrolysis of brines to produce hydrogen, chlorine, oxygen, or product materials HCl and NaOH. The resulting information will be used to recalibrate system dynamics models of the global resource industry with pricing and market mechanisms that reflect the elasticity of supply.