How Is Mining Harmful To The Environment – Salton Sea 4, a dry steam geothermal power plant operated by CalEnergy, by the Salton Sea in Calipatria, California. The demand for electric vehicles, and for the lithium used in EV batteries, has increased interest in extracting lithium from geothermal wastewater around the Salton Sea.

Mining will always have environmental impacts, but new methods could help reduce them as the world mines more metals for renewable energy.

How Is Mining Harmful To The Environment

In March, President Joe Biden ordered more federal resources directed at mining metals and minerals essential for electric vehicle (EV) batteries, including nickel, cobalt, graphite and lithium. The presidential directive highlighted one of the most controversial truths at the heart of the green energy transition: To switch from dirty fossil fuel energy sources to carbon-free renewables and EVs, we need more mining—historically a polluting business very much

Lithium Mining Projects May Not Be Green Friendly

Mining involves digging ore out of the ground, transporting it to processing plants, crushing it, separating and refining the metals, and then disposing of the waste. Land is stripped bare to make way for mines and surrounding infrastructure, which often use large amounts of energy and water, produce air pollution, and generate hazardous waste.

But a series of emerging technologies, from artificial intelligence to carbon capture, could make extracting the so-called critical minerals and metals needed for this energy transition more sustainable than it is today. With demand for these materials expected to surge as the world moves away from fossil fuels and embraces solar, wind, and EVs, there is growing interest from the US government and the private sector in bringing new technologies to the market, and quickly. In a recent report on assembling US supply chains for the clean energy transition, the Department of Energy (DOE) emphasized the importance of federal support for “environmentally sustainable and next-generation” extraction methods for critical minerals.

Douglas Hollett, special adviser at the DOE on critical minerals and materials, says this reflects the agency’s view that mining critical minerals cannot be a matter of finding the resources we need and mining them.

“It’s: Let’s find it, let’s be more effective at it, and let’s ultimately have the lowest target impacts across the value chain, as we look at everything from the an exploration phase to extraction, processing, then end of life,” when the products that are mined, materials, no longer work, Hollett said.

A Brief History Of Mining

Long before a mine is built, geologists are sent into the field to drill holes in the ground and search for valuable ore deposits. Exploration is typically the least environmentally damaging stage of mining, but there is still room for improvement. A small but growing number of mineral prospecting startups believe they can do so through data mining.

Those startups include KoBold Metals, which uses sophisticated data science tools and artificial intelligence to search for evidence of battery metal deposits in vast amounts of public and historical data, as well as data that the company’ n collected during AI-led field programmes. Backed by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, KoBold aims to boost discovery rates by 20 times compared to traditional field exploration efforts, reducing the amount of land that needs to be disturbed to find new ore bodies.

Holly Bridgwater, exploration geologist with Australian geosciences startup Unearthed, feels KoBold’s goal is “achievable” given the mining sector’s very poor strike rate: Today, geologists estimate that less than one in 100 sites that being surveyed for mining never comes true. a mine.

KoBold is doing fieldwork this summer at several sites in Canada and Zambia where it has found evidence of nickel and cobalt deposits. But chief technology officer Josh Goldman says the company is “two years or more” away from deciding whether any of them are worth mining. If it can use AI to find well-hidden but particularly high-quality minerals, that could reduce the downstream impacts of mining, Goldman said.

Special Report: Why Is Mining Still So Dangerous?

“If you find low-quality resources, you have to mine a lot more material” to extract the metal, Goldman said. “That means you have a lot of extra waste. Finding very high quality resources is critical.”

The discovery of higher quality minerals could reduce the impact of mining, but any traditional mining process will still have significant environmental impacts — especially on the climate. Extracting, crushing and processing rocks is very energy intensive; the mining sector accounts for 6 per cent of world energy demand and 22 per cent of global industrial emissions. Although many mining companies have started to buy renewable electricity and some are experimenting with alternative transport such as hydrogen-powered trucks, the sector still relies heavily on fossil fuels to power its heavy machinery and facilities which consumes a lot of energy.

For at least one critical mineral, lithium, there may be a cleaner path forward. Used as an energy carrier in the batteries that power everything from smartphones to electric vehicles, global demand for lithium could rise more than 40 times by 2040 if the world moves quickly away from gas vehicles to electric ones.

For decades, researchers have explored the possibility of extracting lithium from geothermal brines – hot, mineral-rich waters that some geothermal power plants bring to the surface from deep within the Earth to generate energy. The idea, says Michael Whittaker, a research scientist with the Lithium Resources Research and Innovation Center at the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is to power the entire lithium extraction process using carbon-free geothermal energy. Extracting lithium from geothermal brine also has the potential to use much less water than the huge open-air evaporation ponds used to concentrate lithium from the mineral-rich shallow waters that lurk beneath salt flats in the Argentina and Chile.

Environmental Impact Of Iron Ore Mining

Major hurdles must be overcome before large quantities of lithium can be obtained through the geothermal process. Whittaker says the lithium content of geothermal brines is “relatively low” compared to their South American counterparts. In geothermal brine, other elements, such as sodium and potassium, tend to be present in much higher concentrations than lithium, interfering with its extraction. Currently, Whittaker said, geothermal plant operators bring hot brine to the surface and inject the spent brine back underground much faster than lithium can be extracted, which meaning they can’t get as much value out of the process as they could.

Despite technical challenges and commercial difficulties, the DOE and private sector partners see promise in the geothermal approach. Rough estimates based on measurements of brine chemistry and volume suggest that large amounts of lithium lurk beneath a hypersaline lake in Southern California known as the Salton Sea.

“No matter how you slice it, there’s a lot of lithium [under the Salton Sea] that could potentially supply US demand for batteries for EVs for the rest of the decade,” Whittaker said. “And probably several decades after that.”

Some researchers and entrepreneurs believe that the resources needed for the energy transition can be found in the waste from old mines and old mines.

Tackling Threats From Illegal Mining

These include Nth Cycle, a startup that has developed technology for extracting battery metals such as cobalt, nickel, and manganese from mining waste, low-grade minerals, and end-of-life technology including EV batteries. Its core technology, called “electro-extraction,” uses none of the harsh chemicals or high-heat furnaces often found in mining and recycling operations—just electricity, which can come from renewable sources. Metals are selectively extracted from crushed liquefied rock by running that mining waste through a series of electrified carbon filters that founder and CEO Megan O’Connor compares with huge Brita water filters.

O’Connor, who optimized the metals extraction process while completing her doctorate and before founding Nth Cycle in 2017, says the company’s 300-square-foot filtration systems can be transported to mine sites. There, the company’s data shows, they can wrap up to 95 percent of the remaining metals out of material that is considered waste. The company, which raised $12.5 million in a funding round in February 2022, plans to announce its first mining customers later this year.

For nearly a decade, the DOE has been investigating whether rare earth elements, a group of chemically reactive metallic elements used in offshore wind turbines, EV motors, and semiconductors, can be harvested from coal mine waste, such as coal ash In February, the department announced plans to stand up a $140 million extraction and separation facility to demonstrate the idea on a commercial scale. Hollett called the project an “exciting” opportunity to see if the hundreds of coal waste sites in dire need of cleanup could also provide something of value.

“Whether it’s a legacy ash pit or a persistently stubborn acid mine drainage situation, it’s going in the direction of being able to address resources from existing legacy materials,” Hollett said. . “But there is also a theme of restoration here.”

Environmental Impacts Of Space Mining Vs Terrestrial Mining

After miners have extracted everything of value from rocks, the often toxic waste, known as tailings, is usually buried on site. But if the mining took place on certain types of rock – so-called ultramafic rocks, which have a high magnesium content and high alkalinity – those tailings have the potential to absorb carbon from the air.

Testing monitoring and verification processes at a potential mine site in Atlin, British Columbia, in the traditional territory of the Taku River Tlingit First Nation.

“What’s happening in the ultramafic mine tailings that we’re working on is that they’re using CO2 from the atmosphere, and they’re putting that CO2 in.

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