The green energy transition depends heavily on critical metals like lithium, copper, nickel, and rare earth elements to build batteries, electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels, and modern power grids. Extracting and recovering valuable metals from diverse feedstocks, including end-of-life products, industrial streams, and mineralized waters and brines, allows for those resources to be reused. This can reduce reliance on more destructive mining practices and strengthen the material supply needed to scale renewable energy and energy-efficiency technologies.
Research Project
Metals Reclamation Across Feedstocks
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TRL 1–2
Technology Readiness Level
TRL 1–2 Early stages of innovation focused on foundational science and concept formation
Energy Generation and StorageLearn More
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Methods to extract and recover valuable metals from feedstocks
Project Goals
Informing credible scale-up pathways for recovering key metals
This project aims to advance materials and processes for metals recovery across varied feedstocks (e.g., recycled streams, process residues, and mineralized waters/brines), emphasizing selectivity, recovery efficiency, safety, and operational practicality. We are evaluating options using adoption-relevant metrics, yield, product quality, energy and chemical intensity, and integration feasibility, to inform credible scale-up pathways. The goal is economically viable resource recovery that improves supply security while enabling broader deployment of renewable energy technologies.
Applications
- Battery Materials Recovery: Recovering critical minerals can strengthen supply chains for renewable energy and electric mobility
- Resource Extraction: This enables selective recovery of valuable metals, improving yield while reducing chemical and energy intensity.
- Circular Industrial Processing: This can help transform waste streams into high-quality metal products, improving resource efficiency, reducing environmental impact, and enhancing domestic supply security for clean energy technologies.
Project Status
- TRL 1–2: Early stages of innovation focused on foundational science and concept formation
Why it Matters
Secure, sustainable access to critical metals is essential for the energy transition, from batteries to wind and electrified transport. As demand grows, mining alone cannot meet supply without added environmental and geopolitical risk. Advancing selective, scalable recovery from recycled streams and residues strengthens supply security while reducing waste and emissions, supporting a practical, circular materials economy for long-term renewable deployment.
