On May 3 and 4 of this year, Data for Progress and nonprofit consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen surveyed 1,206 likely voters in the United States, asking the question of whether respondents believed that “oil and gas companies should be held legally accountable for their contributions to climate change,” including impacts on extreme weather and public health.
“[V]oters strongly want to see companies held accountable for their harmful actions,” said Grace Adcox, Data for Progress senior climate strategist with Fossil Free Media, as The Guardian reported.
Lawsuits against big oil have been ramping up all over the world. Communities across the U.S. have been suing fossil fuel companies for allegedly misleading the public regarding the climate crisis, and just last week France brought the first-ever criminal lawsuit related to climate.
Currently there are 40 civil lawsuits brought by cities and states in the U.S. against oil majors.
Last year Public Citizen also proposed filing criminal charges against fossil fuel companies.
One argument for this strategy is that oil and gas companies knowing their pollution had potential deadly consequences while delaying climate action could be possible grounds for reckless or negligent homicide charges.
According to Aaron Regunberg, Public Citizen’s climate program senior policy counsel, while the idea received some skepticism, several district attorneys’ offices gave it “real, serious interest,” reported The Guardian.
The Data for Progress poll showed that 62 percent of voters surveyed said fossil fuel companies “should be held legally accountable for their contributions to climate change.” This included 84 percent of Democrats, 40 percent of Republicans and 59 percent of Independents.
The survey also asked, “Knowing what you do now, do you support or oppose criminal charges being filed against oil and gas companies to hold them accountable for deaths caused by their contributions to climate change?” to which 49 percent of respondents said they would “somewhat” or “strongly” support such action, in comparison with 39 percent who indicated they would not.
Regunberg said this shows that Americans may not feel the idea is too “out there.”
Regunberg went on to say that 68 percent of Democrats indicating support for criminal charges being brought against big oil was “huge,” since the party’s districts were more likely to bring that type of legal action. Almost a third of Republicans — 32 percent — said they would back the idea.
“A significant number of Republicans would support these prosecutions, even if none of their party’s leaders have the courage to buck their fossil fuel donors,” Regunberg said, as The Guardian reported.
Adcox added that, while gaining political support for criminal lawsuits against fossil fuel companies might not be easy, the survey indicates it could be possible.
“These national findings show these cases may be able to earn popular support, particularly in blue jurisdictions,” Adcox said.
Fossil fuel companies in the U.S. have not yet been forced to face criminal climate charges, but energy companies have. BP and PG&E both pled guilty to charges of homicide and paid fines and penalties in the billions of dollars.
“The fact that this hasn’t been done before may lead many to say, well, it can’t be done, there’s no precedent. But there was no precedent for anything until there was,” said Chesa Boudin, former San Francisco district attorney, as reported by The Guardian.
With Heat Action Day approaching on June 2, a new report from World Weather Attribution, the Red Cross Crescent Climate Centre and Climate Central has found that the planet experienced 26 more days of “excess” extreme heat on average in the past year, which most likely would not have happened without climate change.
Last year was the hottest ever recorded, according to the European Union’s Copernicus climate observation program.
“Flooding and hurricanes may capture the headlines, but the impacts of extreme heat are equally deadly. That’s why Heat Action Day matters so much. We need to focus attention on climate change’s silent killer. The IFRC is making heat — and urban action to reduce its impacts — a priority and remains committed to working with communities that are at risk of extreme heat through our global network of National Societies,” said International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies Secretary-General Jagan Chapagaina in a press release from IFRC.
Heat Action Day brings attention to the dangers of extreme heat and steps that can be taken to mitigate it. All over the world, Red Crescent and National Red Cross Societies are sharing strategies on a dedicated website. People are also being encouraged to share artwork and hold events that underscore the dangers extreme heat poses to lives and livelihoods.
The ongoing Asia heat wave has been bringing excessive temperatures to Bangladesh, Malaysia, the Philippines, Myanmar and Nepal, causing many deaths and heat-related health issues.
In Bangladesh, the extreme heat has affected more than 120 million people, and Myanmar experienced its hottest temperature ever recorded of 118.8 degrees Fahrenheit on April 28.
Heat waves most affect those who work outside, as well as vulnerable populations like the old, young and poor.
“This report provides overwhelming scientific evidence that extreme heat is a deadly manifestation of the climate crisis. This wreaks havoc on human health, critical infrastructure, the economy, agriculture and the environment, thereby eroding gains in human development and decreasing wellbeing – especially for poor and marginalized communities in the global South,” said Aditya V. Bahadur, Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre director, in the press release.
In the study, the researchers looked at the top 10 percent of temperatures for each country studied during the period 1991 to 2020. They then examined the 12 months from May 15, 2023 to May 15 of this year in order to find out the number of days temperatures were within or above the previous range.
Using peer-reviewed methods, the scientists then looked at how climate change had influenced each of the excessively hot days.
Their conclusion was that, over the past year, “human-caused climate change added an average of 26 days of extreme heat (on average, across all places in the world) than there would have been without a warmed planet,” the report said.
The report also said that, in the 12 months of the study period, approximately 80 percent of the world’s population — about 6.3 billion people — experienced a minimum of 31 days of extreme heat, AFP reported.
Across 90 countries, 76 extreme heat waves occurred, with all continents except Antarctica affected. Five of the most impacted countries were in Latin America.
“That’s a lot of toll that we’ve imposed on people,” said Andrew Pershing, one of the study’s researchers and Climate Central’s vice president for science, as The New York Times reported. “It’s a lot of toll that we’ve imposed on nature.”
The report highlighted that, without climate change’s influence, Ecuador would have recorded roughly 10 days of extreme heat instead of 180; Panama 12 rather than 149; El Salvador 15 not 163; Guyana 33 rather than 174; and Suriname an estimated 24 instead of 182 sweltering days of excessive heat.
“Extreme heat is known to have killed tens of thousands of people over the last 12 months, but the real number is likely in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. Unlike sudden ‘event’ weather disasters, heatwaves kill more slowly and less obviously; they are often exacerbators of pre-existing medical conditions,” IFRC said.
While you may get noticeable joy from feeling the soil outside on your fingers or seeing your first tomatoes pop up on the vine, even indoor gardening can bring some helpful benefits for your well-being, according to a new study.
Researchers from the University of Helsinki, Natural Resources Institute Finland and Tampere University have uncovered the benefits of microbial exposure that happens during urban indoor gardening.
Previous studies have unearthed the benefits of exposure to natural materials rich in microbes, like soil, on the human microbiota, but the researchers in this study looked specifically at whether urban, indoor gardening could have any similar impacts.
When using a microbially rich gardening soil for their indoor gardens, the study participants experienced an increase in microbiota diversity on the skin, plus some anti-inflammatory benefits. The findings were published in the journal Environment International.
“One month of urban indoor gardening boosted the diversity of bacteria on the skin of the subjects and was associated with higher levels of anti-inflammatory cytokines in the blood,” Mika Saarenpää, doctoral researcher from the University of Helsinki’s Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, said in a statement.
As Saarenpää explained, these benefits were found in a trial using a growing medium similar to soil found in a forest.
But some participants were given a microbially poor soil made with peat, which is a common type of growing medium that has become controversial. That’s because harvesting peat means destroying peatland ecosystems, an important carbon sink, as reported by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
For the gardeners using a peat-based soil, there were no changes to skin microbiota or anti-inflammatory blood molecules.
Participants used flower boxes and store-bought peas, lettuces, beans, mustard, garlic and ginger plants (in a variety of forms, such as seeds, rhizomes and bulbs). Participants using the microbially rich soil experienced the benefits within only about a month of indoor gardening.
Gardening equipment provided for the participants consisted of a plastic planter, lamp, bulb, spray bottle, crop species and growing medium. Environment International
The increased diversity in skin microbiota is important, as the researchers noted this can contribute to immunoregulation.
“We know that urbanisation leads to reduction of microbial exposure, changes in the human microbiota and an increase in the risk of immune-mediated diseases,” Saarenpää said. “This is the first time we can demonstrate that meaningful and natural human activity can increase the diversity of the microbiota of healthy adults and, at the same time, contribute to the regulation of the immune system.”
As a bonus, the indoor garden required little money or space to start, and many of the participants expressed interest in continuing with their gardens after the experiments ended, with some even planning to switch to outdoor gardening.
“We don’t yet know how long the changes observed in the skin microbiota and anti-inflammatory cytokines persist, but if gardening turns into a hobby, it can be assumed that the regulation of the immune system becomes increasingly continuous,” Saarenpää said.
Allie “Nokko” Johnson is a member of the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, and they love teaching young tribal members about recycling. Johnson helps them make Christmas ornaments out of things that were going to be thrown away, or melts down small crayons to make bigger ones.
“In its own way, recycling is a form of decolonization for tribal members,” Johnson said. “We have to decolonize our present to make a better future for tomorrow.“
The Coushatta Reservation, in southern Louisiana, is small, made up of about 300 tribal members, and rural — the nearest Walmart is 40 minutes away. Recycling hasn’t been popular in the area, but as the risks from climate change have grown, so has the tribe’s interest. In 2014, the tribe took action and started gathering materials from tribal offices and departments, created recycling competitions for the community, and started teaching kids about recycling.
Recently, federal grant money has been made available to tribes to help start and grow recycling programs. Last fall, the Coushatta received $565,000 from the Environmental Protection Agency for its small operation. The funds helped repair a storage shed, build a facility for the community to use, and continue educational outreach. But it’s not enough to serve the area’s 3,000 residents of Native and non-Native recyclers for the long haul.
Typically, small tribes don’t have the resources to run recycling programs because the operations have to be financially successful. Federal funding can offset heavy equipment costs and some labor, but educating people on how to recycle, coupled with long distances from processing facilities, make operation difficult.
But those figures don’t truly illuminate the scale of the world’s recycling product. Around 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic have been manufactured since the 1950’s and researchers estimate that 91 percent of it isn’t recycled. In the United States, the Department of Energy finds that only 5 percent is recycled, while aluminum, used in packaging has a recycling rate of about 35 percent. The recycling rate for paper products, including books, mail, containers, and packaging, is about 68 percent.
There are no nationwide recycling laws in the U.S., leaving the task up to states, and only a handful of states take it seriously: Ten have “bottle bills,” which allow individuals to redeem empty containers for cash, while Maine, California, Colorado, and Oregon have passed laws that hold corporations and manufacturers accountable for wasteful packaging by requiring them to help pay for recycling efforts. In the 1960s, the U.S. recycling rate across all materials — including plastic, paper, and glass — was only 7 percent. Now, it’s 32 percent. The EPA aims to increase that number to 50 percent nationwide by 2030, but other than one law targeted at rural recycling moving through Congress, there are no overarching national recycling requirements to help make that happen.
In 2021, Louisiana had a recycling rate of 2.9 percent, save for cities like New Orleans, where containers are available for free for residents to use to recycle everything from glass bottles to electronics to Mardi Gras beads. In rural areas, access to recycling facilities is scarce if it exists at all, leaving it up to local communities or tribal governments to provide it. There is little reliable data on how many tribes operate recycling programs.
“Tribal members see the state of the world presently, and they want to make a change,” said Skylar Bourque, who works on the tribe’s recycling program. “Ultimately, as a tribe, it’s up to us to give them the tools to do that.”
But the number one issue facing small programs is still funding. Cody Marshall, chief system optimization officer for The Recycling Partnership, a nonprofit, said that many rural communities and tribal nations across the country would be happy to recycle more if they had the funds to do so, but running a recycling program is more expensive than using the landfill that might be next door.
“Many landfills are in rural areas and many of the processing sites that manage recyclables are in urban areas, and the driving costs alone can sometimes be what makes a recycling program unfeasible,” he said.
The Recycling Partnership also provides grants for tribes and other communities to help with the cost of recycling. The EPA received 91 applications and selected 59 tribal recycling programs at various stages of development for this year, including one run by the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Oklahoma, which began its recycling program in 2010. Today, it collects nearly 50 metric tons of material a year — material that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill.
“Once you start small, you can get people on board with you,” said James Williams, director of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s Environmental Services. He is optimistic about the future of recycling in tribal communities. “Now I see blue bins all through the nation,” he said, referring to the recycling containers used by tribal citizens.
Williams’ department has cleaned up a dozen open dumps in the last two years, as well as two lagoons — an issue on tribal lands in Oklahoma and beyond. Illegal dumping can be a symptom of lack of resources due to waste management being historically underfunded. Those dumping on tribal land have also faced inadequate consequences.
“We still have the issue of illegal dumping on rural roads,” he said, adding that his goal is to clean up as many as possible. “If you dump something, it’s going to hit a waterway.”
According to Williams, tribes in Oklahoma with recycling programs work together to address problems like long-distance transportation of materials and how to serve tribal communities in rural areas, as well as funding issues specific to tribes, like putting together grant applications and getting tribal governments to make recycling a priority. The Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma also partners with Durant, a nearby town. Durant couldn’t afford a recycling program of their own, so they directed recycling needs to the tribe.
This year’s EPA grant to the Muscogee program purchases a $225,000 semitruck, an $80,000 truck for cardboard boxes, and a $200,000 truck that shreds documents. Muscogee was also able to purchase a $70,000 horizontal compactor, which helps with squishing down materials to help store them, and two $5,000 trailers for hauling. Williams’ recycling program operates in conjunction with the Muscogee solid waste program, so they share some of their resources.
Returns on recycled material aren’t high. In California, for instance, one ton of plastic can fetch $167, while aluminum can go for $1,230. Corrugated cardboard can also vary wildly from $20 to $210 a ton. Prices for all recycled materials fluctuate regularly, and unless you’re dealing in huge amounts, the business can be hard. Those who can’t sell their material might have to sit on it until they can find a buyer, or throw it away.
Last year, Muscogee Creek made about $100,000 reselling the materials it collected, but the program cost $250,000 to run. The difference is made up by profits from the Muscogee Creek Nation’s casino, which helps keep the recycling program free for the 101,252 tribal members who live on the reservation. The profits also help non-Natives who want to recycle.
The Coushatta Tribe serves 3,000 people, Native and non-Native, and they have been rejected by 12 different recycling brokers – individuals that act as intermediaries between operations and buyers – due to the distance materials would have to travel.
Allie Johnson said she couldn’t find a broker that was close enough, or that was willing to travel to the Coushatta Tribe to pick up their recycling. “We either bite the cost,” she said, “or commute and have to pay extra in gas. It’s exhausting.”
Currently, the only place near them that’s buying recyclables is St. Landry Parish Recycling Center, which only pays $0.01 per pound of cardboard. A truck bed full of aluminum cans only yields $20 from the nearest center, 90 minutes away. That’s how much the tribe expects to make for now.
Still, the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana is not giving up.
With this new injection of federal money, they will eventually be able to store more materials, and hopefully, make money back on their communities’ recyclables. Much like the Muscogee Creek Nation, they see the recycling program as an amenity, but they still have hopes to turn it into a thriving business.
In the meantime, the Coushatta keep up their educational programming, teaching children the value of taking care of the Earth, even when it’s hard.
For the first time, a NASA satellite has been launched with the purpose of improving the ability to predict climate change by measuring the heat that escapes from Earth’s poles.
The satellite — the first of a pair — is in orbit following lift-off from Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket in Māhia, New Zealand, on Saturday, a press release from NASA said.
“This new information — and we’ve never had it before — will improve our ability to model what’s happening in the poles, what’s happening in climate,” said Karen St. Germain, Earth sciences research director at NASA, as AFP reported.
The two cube satellites in NASA’s Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment (PREFIRE) mission — called CubeSats — are each the size of a shoebox, the press release said. They will measure how much heat our planet radiates from two of its coldest and most remote regions.
Technicians integrate NASA’s PREFIRE payload inside the Rocket Lab Electron rocket payload fairing on May 15, 2024. Rocket Lab / NASA Kennedy Space Center
St. Germain explained that, since small satellites answer precise scientific questions, they can be seen as “specialists,” while larger satellites are “generalists,” reported AFP.
“NASA needs both,” St. Germain said.
DATA from the mission will assist researchers in better predicting how Earth’s weather, seas and ice will change as the planet warms, the press release said.
“NASA’s innovative PREFIRE mission will fill a gap in our understanding of the Earth system – providing our scientists a detailed picture of how Earth’s polar regions influence how much energy our planet absorbs and releases,” St. Germain said in the press release. “This will improve prediction of sea ice loss, ice sheet melt, and sea level rise, creating a better understanding of how our planet’s system will change in the coming years — crucial information to farmers tracking changes in weather and water, fishing fleets working in changing seas, and coastal communities building resilience.”
Communications have been successfully established with the satellite by ground controllers. After the other CubeSat is launched, scientists and engineers will conduct a 30-day period of checks to ensure both PREFIRE satellites are working properly, after which they are expected to be in operation for 10 months.
“At the heart of the PREFIRE mission is Earth’s energy budget – the balance between incoming heat energy from the Sun and the outgoing heat given off by the planet. The difference between the two is what determines the planet’s temperature and climate. A lot of the heat radiated from the Arctic and Antarctica is emitted as far-infrared radiation, but there is currently no detailed measurement of this type of energy,” the press release said.
The atmosphere’s water vapor content — combined with the presence, composition and structure of clouds — influences how much far-infrared radiation escapes from the poles.
“This is critical because it actually helps to balance the excess heat that’s received in the tropical regions and really regulate the earth’s temperature,” said Tristan L’Ecuyer, principal investigator for PREFIRE and a researcher at University of Wisconsin, Madison, as AFP reported. “And the process of getting the heat from the tropical regions to the polar regions is actually what drives all of our weather around the planet.”
PREFIRE data will allow researchers to locate when and where far-infrared energy is radiating from the Antarctic and Arctic environments into space, the press release said.
“The PREFIRE CubeSats may be small, but they’re going to close a big gap in our knowledge about Earth’s energy budget,” said Laurie Leshin, director of Southern California’s NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in the press release.
Each of the satellites carries a thermal infrared spectrometer — an instrument which uses specially shaped sensors and mirrors to measure infrared wavelengths.
“Our planet is changing quickly, and in places like the Arctic, in ways that people have never experienced before,” L’Ecuyer said in the press release. “NASA’s PREFIRE will give us new measurements of the far-infrared wavelengths being emitted from Earth’s poles, which we can use to improve climate and weather models and help people around the world deal with the consequences of climate change.”
Can metals that naturally occur in seawater be mined, and can they be mined sustainably? A company in Oakland, California, says yes. And not only is it extracting magnesium from ocean water — and from waste brine generated by industry — it is doing it in a carbon-neutral way. Magrathea Metals has produced small amounts of magnesium in pilot projects, and with financial support from the U.S. Defense Department, it is building a larger-scale facility to produce hundreds of tons of the metal over two to four years. By 2028, it says it plans to be operating a facility that will annually produce more than 10,000 tons.
Magnesium is far lighter and stronger than steel, and it’s critical to the aircraft, automobile, steel, and defense industries, which is why the government has bankrolled the venture. Right now, China produces about 85 percent of the world’s magnesium in a dirty, carbon-intensive process. Finding a way to produce magnesium domestically using renewable energy, then, is not only an economic and environmental issue, it’s a strategic one. “With a flick of a finger, China could shut down steelmaking in the U.S. by ending the export of magnesium,” said Alex Grant, Magrathea’s CEO and an expert in the field of decarbonizing the production of metals.
“China uses a lot of coal and a lot of labor,” Grant continued. “We don’t use any coal and [use] a much lower quantity of labor.” The method is low cost in part because the company can use wind and solar energy during off-peak hours, when it is cheapest. As a result, Grant estimates their metal will cost about half that of traditional producers working with ore.
Magrathea — named after a planet in the hit novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — buys waste brines, often from desalination plants, and allows the water to evaporate, leaving behind magnesium chloride salts. Next, it passes an electrical current through the salts to separate them from the molten magnesium, which is then cast into ingots or machine components.
While humans have long coaxed minerals and chemicals from seawater — sea salt has been extracted from ocean water for millennia — researchers around the world are now broadening their scope as the demand for lithium, cobalt, and other metals used in battery technology has ramped up. Companies are scrambling to find new deposits in unlikely places, both to avoid orebody mining and to reduce pollution. The next frontier for critical minerals and chemicals appears to be salty water, or brine.
A technician pours a magnesium ingot at the Magrathea Metals facility in Oakland, California.
Alex Grant
Brines come from a number of sources: much new research focuses on the potential for extracting metals from briny wastes generated by industry, including coal-fired power plants that discharge waste into tailings ponds; wastewater pumped out of oil and gas wells — called produced water; wastewater from hard-rock mining; and desalination plants.
Large-scale brine mining could have negative environmental impacts — some waste will need to be disposed of, for example. But because no large-scale operations currently exist, potential impacts are unknown. Still, the process is expected to have numerous positive effects, chief among them that it will produce valuable metals without the massive land disturbance and creation of acid-mine drainage and other pollution associated with hard-rock mining.
According to the Brine Miners, a research center at Oregon State University, there are roughly 18,000 desalination plants, globally, taking in 23 trillion gallons of ocean water a year and either forcing it through semipermeable membranes — in a process called reverse osmosis — or using other methods to separate water molecules from impurities. Every day, the plants produce more than 37 billion gallons of brine — enough to fill 50,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. That solution contains largeamounts of copper, zinc, magnesium, and other valuable metals.
Disposing of brine from desalination plants has always been a challenge. In coastal areas, desal plants shunt that waste back into the ocean, where it settles to the sea floor and can damage marine ecosystems. Because the brine is so highly concentrated, it is toxic to plants and animals; inland desalination plants either bury their waste or inject it into wells. These processes further raise the cost of an already expensive process, and the problem is only growing as desal plants proliferate globally.
Finding a lucrative and safe use for brine will help solve plants’ waste problems and, by using their brine to feed another process, nudge them toward a circular economy, in which residue from one industrial activity becomes source material for a new activity. According to OSU estimates, brine from desalination plants contains $2.2 trillion worth of materials, including more than 17,400 tons of lithium, which is crucial for making batteries for electric vehicles, appliances, and electrical energy storage systems. In some cases, mining brine for lithium and other metals and minerals could make the remaining waste stream less toxic.
Ingots comprised of magnesium drawn from seawater by Magrathea Metals.
Magrathea Metals
For many decades manufacturers have extracted magnesium and lithium from naturally occurring brines. In California’s Salton Sea, which contains enough lithium to meet the nation’s needs for decades, according to a 2023 federal analysis, companies have drilled geothermal wells to generate the energy required for separating the metal from brines.
And in rural Arkansas, ExxonMobil recently announced that it is building one of the largest lithium processing facilities in the world — a state-of-the-art facility that will siphon lithium from brine deep within the Smackover geological formation. By 2030, the company says it will produce 15 percent of the world’s lithium.
Miners have largely ignored the minerals found in desalination brine because concentrating them has not been economical. But new technologies and other innovations have created more effective separation methods and enabled companies to focus on this vast resource.
“Three vectors are converging,” said Peter Fiske, director of the National Alliance for Water Innovation at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley. “The value of some of these critical materials is going up. The cost of conventional [open pit] mining and extraction is going up. And the security of international suppliers, especially Russia and China, is going down.“
There is also an emphasis on — and grant money from the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and elsewhere for — projects and businesses that release extremely low, zero, or negative greenhouse gas emissions and that can be part of a circular economy. Researchers who study brine mining believe the holy grail of desalination — finding more than enough value in its waste brine to pay for the expensive process of creating fresh water — is attainable.
Improved filtering technologies can now remove far more, and far smaller, materials suspended in briny water. “We have membranes now that are selective to an individual ion,” said Fiske. “The technology [allows us] to pick through the garbage piles of wastewater and pick out the high-value items.” One of the fundamental concepts driving this research, he says, “is that there is no such thing as wastewater.”
NEOM, the controversial and hugely expensive futuristic city under construction in the Saudi Arabian desert, has assembled a highly regarded international team to build a desalination plant and a facility to both mine its waste for minerals and chemicals and minimize the amount of material it must dispose of. ENOWA, the water and energy division of NEOM, claims that its selective membranes — which include reverse and forward osmosis — will target specific minerals and extract 99.5 percent of the waste brine’s potassium chloride, an important fertilizer with high market value. The system uses half the energy and requires half the capital costs of traditional methods of potassium chloride production. ENOWA says it is developing other selective membranes to process other minerals, such as lithium and rubidium salts, from waste brine.
The Brine Miner project in Oregon has created an experimental system to desalinate saltwater and extract lithium, rare earth, and other metals. The whole process will be powered by green hydrogen, which researchers will create by splitting apart water’s hydrogen and oxygen molecules using renewable energy. “We are trying for a circular process,” said Zhenxing Feng, who leads the project at OSU. “We are not wasting any parts.”
The concept of mining desalination brine and other wastewater is being explored and implemented all over the world. At Delft University of Technology, in the Netherlands, researchers have extracted a bio-based material they call Kaumera from sludge granules formed during the treatment of municipal wastewater. Combined with other raw materials, Kaumera — which is both a binder and an adhesive, and both repels and retains water — can be used in agriculture and the textile and construction industries.
Another large-scale European project called Sea4Value, which has partners in eight countries, will use a combination of technologies to concentrate, extract, purify, and crystallize 10 target elements from brines. Publicly funded labs in the U.S., including the Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, at Iowa State University, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee, are also researching new methods for extracting lithium and other materials important for the energy transition from natural and industrial brines.
At the Kay Bailey Hutchison Desalination Plant in El Paso, Texas, which provides more than 27 million gallons of fresh water a day from brackish aquifers, waste brine is trucked to and pumped into an injection well 22 miles away. But first, a company called Upwell Water, which has a facility near the desalination plant, wrings more potable water from the brine and uses the remaining waste to produce gypsum and hydrochloric acid for industrial customers.
There are hurdles to successful brine mining projects. Christos Charisiadis, the brine innovation manager for the NEOM portfolio, identified several potential bottlenecks: high initial investment for processing facilities; a lack of transparency in innovation by the water industry, which might obscure problems with their technologies; poor understanding of possible environmental problems due to a lack of comprehensive lifecycle assessments; complex and inconsistent regulatory frameworks; and fluctuations in commodity prices.
Still, Nathanial Cooper, an assistant professor at Cambridge University who has studied metal recovery from a variety of industrial and natural brines, considers its prospects promising as environmental regulations for a wide range of industries become ever more stringent.
“Companies that produce wastewater are going to be required to do more and more to ensure the wastewater they dispose of is clean of pollutants and hazardous material,” he said. “Many companies will be forced to find ways to recover these materials. There is strong potential to recover many valuable materials from wastewater and contribute to a circular economy.”
