TELF AG takes a look at a new method for processing rare earth minerals
The role of raw materials in the energy transition
The green future continually proposed by governments and international institutions is more within reach than ever and for more than one reason. For the first time in its history, humankind possesses the necessary means to change the global approach towards energy, orienting strategic choices towards more renewable and low environmental impact sources.
The gradual introduction of EVs has already contributed to changing urban scenarios and the consciences of millions of motorists, who in recent years are getting used to the numerous opportunities in these cutting-edge vehicles. Renewable energies are also rapidly establishing themselves as one of the most reliable energy sources, and the general increases in demand for solar and wind energy demonstrate this new awareness. The production of all these technologies requires a vast range of strategic raw materials of great importance for their manufacture, and it is precisely in the global approach towards raw materials that one of the main challenges for the future of humanity lies. We are not referring to overcoming difficulties in supply chains or to the acceleration of mining development projects in some specific locations around the world but to ecological processes for extracting and processing these materials that are so central to the ongoing transition.
A possible innovation made in the USA
Something, albeit slowly, is already moving. A team of researchers from Cornell University recently published a study in which they claim to be able to process rare earth elements in an ecological way, thanks to the action of a small bacterium weighing one trillionth of a gram. This is the bacterium called Vibrio natriegens, which, according to American university researchers, could have a very positive impact on the processing of these complex materials, which always appear as a concentrate to be subjected to a separation process.
Rare earth elements today are present to varying degrees in electric cars, cell phones, wind turbines, and many other devices. The action of this industrious bacterium, through a particular process called biosorption, could contribute decisively to simplifying the processing of these minerals, making them more sustainable and strengthening global supply chains. This method would represent a valid alternative to the complex and problematic thermochemical processing, which nowadays represents almost the only existing method for separating these materials. Therefore, Cornell University researchers have genetically engineered a strain of the Vibrio natriegens bacterium, thus increasing its ability to absorb some rare earth elements. To ensure a higher level of uptake, they successfully combined the MP6 plasmid with the Vibrio natriegens genome.
Given the centrality of these materials to the needs of the ecological transition, many nations are trying to diversify their supply chains to find sustainable and low-problem methods to process and separate these precious minerals. Furthermore, processing procedures based on biological bacteria may represent an excellent way to overcome (perhaps definitively) thermochemical processes and allow innovation in the mining field to enter a new phase of its development.
