Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: September 11, 2024
PHYTOMINING!
Phytomining is a fascinating new method of using metal-accumulating plants to extract valuable critical minerals from the soil.
Tell Congress to pass a Farm Bill supporting R&D for phytomining in America!
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Reasons For Hope
Phytomining is a newborn technology that grows plants that naturally accumulate metals in their tissues to “mine” the earth for critical minerals.
American startup Metalplant is already cultivating1 10 hectares of nickel-accumulating Odontarrhena decipiens flowers on nickel-rich land in the small Balkan nation of Albania. O. decipiens can reportedly accumulate up to 2% of its dry weight as nickel, and once harvested, the plants can be dried, heated, and sent to a lab to have the nickel chemically extracted. (Nickel is used in many EV battery chemistries and is highly in-demand). Metalplant claims that their process will be able to produce 200 to 400 kilograms of nickel per hectare, comparable to the production at the conventional nickel mines in Indonesia which currently produce much of the world’s supply.
The company is even using enhanced rock weathering to make the entire operation a carbon sink, spreading ground-up olivine on the farm soils. This is a win-win, as olivine reacts with carbon dioxide in the air to form bicarbonate minerals and also contains a bit of nickel itself, potentially boosting the “phyto-mine” operation even more.
This is a really cool idea with extraordinary potential, and it deserves to be researched and developed some more! You’ve probably heard several times by now that Congress is still discussing the upcoming Farm Bill, a huge investment in American agriculture (the U.S. spends an average of $648 billion per year on Farm Bill programs) that’s up for renewal for the first time since 2018. Even more so than our previous Farm Bill-related policy actions on climate-resilient crops, methane-reducing vaccines for cattle, and methane-eating microbes, phytomining is a brand-new invention and not really on the political radar screen yet. That means there’s a really great opportunity here to tell Congress to use the Farm Bill to help promote its research and development!
Tell your U.S. Senators and Representative to pass a Farm Bill supporting R&D for phytomining in America!
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Hat tip to climate scientist extraordinaire Dr. Katharine Hayhoe for alerting us to this amazing new tech in her Substack!