New mining technology with closed loop membrane electrolysis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMI_ITPgirI

The video goes further in detail but its a open sourced mining technology I developed with our in house membranes. Its closed loop and eco friendly. I call it SEM TECH (salt electro mining) because it uses saltwater and electricity to mine... Very creative ya ya

The two active chemicals are sodium chlorate and hcl. The sodium chlorates are very powerful oxidizers capable of dissolving noble metals like rhodium and iridium. This is similar to people extracting PGMS from catalytic converters using bleach and hcl

So the loop goes as this, positive side acids get regenerated through a cation exchange membrane. The acid leaches and dissolves the heavy metals. The leached solution gets pumped into the negative side to be reduced and plate off the metals as a powder. This powder gets collected at the bottom of a cone tank. The negative depleted solution then goes back to the positive side to regenerate and repeat the cycle. Very simple

But implications are huge. Rare earth elements, precious metals, critical minerals. 53 out of 60 critical minerals can get concentrated in a single step. Most mining processes require high grade ore because the chemicals otherwise cost more than the material they extract. But this process generates the acids on site in situ. Furthermore the process can use cheap inputs like salt. Because the process is closed loop we get 99% recovery rates. There is no losses to occur. Cyanide leaching for example is 50% losses, so is froth flotation and even shaker tables suck at 20% efficiency. Our losses are with only a little left dissolved in the solution as electro plating cant remove 100% of ions. But the solution is simple by adding more ore we just keep adding ions solving that issue. The benefits go on and on. From testing ive done we are extracting at around $50 worth of electricity (at $0.15 per kwh) per ton of ore. And unlike other technologies that only can focus on gold/silver, we can extract the rest of the platinum group metals.

You may ask ok but what do we do with the concentrate powder. This power is in a economically concentrate form to be refined through various traditional methods. But thats where we step in again. We can run this powder through various selective solutions to separate individual or groups of metals and again through the same principle, dissolve, reduce, regenerate the acid. For example with acetic/nitric solution we can dissolve the base metals leaving behind gold platinum etc behind (of course silver and palladium also gets separated in this case with the base metals, but we can use different solutions for that in multiple stages)

The technology is just the start and I see a potential were we electro chemically separate each element in a single solution by simply flowing it through multiple cells. The technology has huge potential

Quote: Originally posted by j_sum1

This sounds interesting. My first thought is that it is energy intensive, but the figures you cite suggest that it is manageable. My second thought are questions about how easily it scales up. But I don't see any obvious obstacles. It does require the ore be crushed to a powder, but that is not unusual. When I get a chance, I will have to watch that video. Thanks for posting.