Lot's of ores are just byproducts of the processing of other ores. Like He production is mostly a consequence of natural gas extraction. If you don't extract the high volume profitable (and often environmentally messy) common ore, you don't get any significant amount of the "rare earths".
Selenium and Cobalt come from Copper mining
Indium Germanium and Gallium come from Zinc mining
Nb Nd Pr Sd come from Iron mining
Yt Nd etc come from Bauxite and Phosphate mining
An interesting thing can happen (and has with Indium) where the demand for the "byproduct" exceeds the relative demand for the main ore (Zinc) causing the price to rise dramatically (for ITO conductors in LCD displays).
There are other places you can get these metals, but they aren't economically viable. Building an infrastructure for cleanly and reliably processing them in volume is clearly important though.
rors 5 hours ago [-]
A bit of a tangent but the same byproduct effect is seen in the production of sherry casks for finishing Scotch.
A lot of sherry bodegas only really exist to churn out barrels for whisky distillers.
hinkley 48 minutes ago [-]
I love port and sherry finished scotch but I do feel like it’s cheating the idea of single malt.
bruce511 10 hours ago [-]
I love seeing the progress in mechanical (real world) tech.
I'm becoming somewhat (although not completely) cynical in a "devil is in the details" kinda way.
It seems we see a lot of hype which either fizzles out, or never seems to make it all the way.
This one us at the pilot plant stage, so at least made it out the lab. I hope it makes it all the way to full size production.
bawolff 9 hours ago [-]
Its the nature of reporting that people want to report "new" things. However if the stuff actually worked it wouldn't be "new" it would just be in use. So instead they report on stuff that is 90% of the way there. Sometimes people figure out the last 10%, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they figure it out but it takes 20 years.
phtrivier 4 hours ago [-]
No mention of pricing in the article ; how much does a battery manufacturer have to pay to source NMC from the "traditional" sources ? How much does the "recylced" version costs ?
(I don't know where you can get that type of infos, and neither SEs no LLMs help, so I must be missing the right keywords :/ )
bityard 2 hours ago [-]
I've often thought of the difference between science and engineering as, "can we do it?" Vs "how much will it cost to do it?"
fuzzfactor 3 minutes ago [-]
I sometimes split it up a little further.
Science, "can it even be done?"
Engineering, "can we do it?"
Business, "what's it going to cost? can we afford it?"
Marketing, "what can we sell it for?"
chasd00 1 hours ago [-]
Engineering is the science of “good enough”.
mlok 1 hours ago [-]
The most important lesson I got from 5 years of Engineer School was the Pareto principle a.k.a. The 80-20 rule
1 hours ago [-]
schobi 9 hours ago [-]
So far it sounds reasonably environmental friendly and good that they have a pilot plant running.
A few questions remain unanswered though:
What can the current plant already do? It sounds like a multi-day sequential process per batch. How many batteries could that give?
The mixed metal product also contains nickel-manganese-cobalt. But certainly with a lot of other stuff and not in the exact ratio you would put in a battery. Even if we were to continoue with NMC batteries (LFPs are more common today). It looks like a first concentration step to get the interesting 10% of the rock. What separation process still remains? I expect a concentrate still to be much more useful than bare rock.
What are the overall economics?
I understand that you won't need the separate mining as Olivine is considered waste and has already been piled up. But is that an economic benefit? (cheaper?) Environmental? Or time to market? (you don't need another mining permission for more capacity).
Is it just a more green but more expensive extraction from unused Olivine? Or will this replace all other dirty extractions mining soon? (too good to be true)
hinkley 52 minutes ago [-]
> The plan is to add two more reaction chains in parallel, so that the process can run continuously, shortening the runtime from three days to one.
That’s screaming for someone to optimize down to 2.5 days so they can do 2 cycles per week per machine. I wonder if the contents have to sit in each stage for 24 hours or 8 hours, because that may mean higher hardware utilization by two shifts of workers.
mikewarot 9 hours ago [-]
It appears that power input from intermittent sources could be fairly easy to accommodate with this process. A battery could be added to run things that can't be turned off, like circulation pumps, etc., otherwise it could all be solar or wind powered.
GreenSalem 8 hours ago [-]
Australia has an unenviable track record of promising sounding companies that get funding from government sources and soon go belly up.
Poor implemenation, poor quality control, complacency and the lack of educated personnel all contribute to this.
Meanwhile, the technology is studied, improved and transferred by enterprising Chinese and soon becomes a billion dollar company in Guangdong.
There are other places you can get these metals, but they aren't economically viable. Building an infrastructure for cleanly and reliably processing them in volume is clearly important though.
A lot of sherry bodegas only really exist to churn out barrels for whisky distillers.
I'm becoming somewhat (although not completely) cynical in a "devil is in the details" kinda way.
It seems we see a lot of hype which either fizzles out, or never seems to make it all the way.
This one us at the pilot plant stage, so at least made it out the lab. I hope it makes it all the way to full size production.
(I don't know where you can get that type of infos, and neither SEs no LLMs help, so I must be missing the right keywords :/ )
Science, "can it even be done?"
Engineering, "can we do it?"
Business, "what's it going to cost? can we afford it?"
Marketing, "what can we sell it for?"
A few questions remain unanswered though: What can the current plant already do? It sounds like a multi-day sequential process per batch. How many batteries could that give?
The mixed metal product also contains nickel-manganese-cobalt. But certainly with a lot of other stuff and not in the exact ratio you would put in a battery. Even if we were to continoue with NMC batteries (LFPs are more common today). It looks like a first concentration step to get the interesting 10% of the rock. What separation process still remains? I expect a concentrate still to be much more useful than bare rock.
What are the overall economics? I understand that you won't need the separate mining as Olivine is considered waste and has already been piled up. But is that an economic benefit? (cheaper?) Environmental? Or time to market? (you don't need another mining permission for more capacity).
Is it just a more green but more expensive extraction from unused Olivine? Or will this replace all other dirty extractions mining soon? (too good to be true)
That’s screaming for someone to optimize down to 2.5 days so they can do 2 cycles per week per machine. I wonder if the contents have to sit in each stage for 24 hours or 8 hours, because that may mean higher hardware utilization by two shifts of workers.
Poor implemenation, poor quality control, complacency and the lack of educated personnel all contribute to this.
Meanwhile, the technology is studied, improved and transferred by enterprising Chinese and soon becomes a billion dollar company in Guangdong.