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Illinois Tech Professor of Chemical Engineering Sohail Murad has received $450,000 in funding from the for a three-year project using computational methods to assess the feasibility of a new method for extracting high value metals such as lithium, vanadium, manganese, and arsenic from wastewater.  

“Most of the critical metals that are being used in U.S. manufacturing of products such as batteries and semiconductors are being imported from China and Russia,” says Murad.  

These products are considered essential to the U.S. economy and national security, so it is critical to find ways to manufacture them domestically. 

It is well known that these metals exist in certain wastewater streams, including those from oil industry processes in places such as the Permian Basin in the southwestern U.S.  

“If we remove all the lithium just from the Permian Basin waste stream, that would be enough to satisfy the industrial needs of the U.S. many times over,” says Murad. 

Manganese and lithium are present in sea water, meaning the wastewater from desalination plants could also be a potential source. Aqua mining—by extracting the metals from these streams—is also expected to be more environmentally friendly than traditional mining. 

So far, the low concentration of the metals in available water sources has made it difficult to efficiently extract them. 

Some people have tried increasing the concentration through boiling, but this requires high cost and energy input. Murad’s project proposes what he believes is a more effective way to do this using reverse osmosis, a process already used in water desalination.  

“People have talked about getting these critical metals from waste streams, but they have never suggested the combination of methods that we are using,” he says. 

Murad will be doing molecular simulations, which are well-developed models, as proof of concept. 

He’ll be exploring using a zeolite membrane, which is cheap, naturally available, stable in a range of pH levels and temperatures, and which his previous work has shown provides high selectivity for water desalination. 

While low flux rates have prevented zeolites from being used in commercial desalination, the metals that Murad is looking to extract are already very expensive, so there is more room to increase the extraction cost compared to desalination, where the product is water. The national security interest means that there are additional larger picture considerations beyond cost as well. 

“We think that we’ll be able to figure out whether our method is feasible or not, and then the next stage will be to find experimental partners to see if we can do a demonstration unit,” says Murad.

Disclaimer: “Research reported in this publication was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under Award Number DE-SC0025289. This content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the U.S. Department of Energy.” 
Sohail Murad, “Exploring the Feasibility of Aqua-Mining for Recovery of Critical Metals Using Computational Molecular Modeling,” U.S. Department of Energy; Award Number DE-SC0025289.