Friday is here, and the weekly column 'A Taste of Science for the Weekend' is back — issue #57.
This time: olivine, NMC, and a remarkable Cinderella story.
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Although you may never have encountered it in its pure form, olivine is one of the most abundant materials in nature.
It is composed of silica (oxygen and silicon), combined with varying amounts of iron and magnesium.
A high magnesium content gives it an olive-green color — hence the name.
It is considered one of the oldest materials in the universe, and can be found even on Mars and in various meteorites.
In industry, it is used to produce refractory tiles and in processes such as steel manufacturing.
Although a variety of it known as peridot is considered a semi-precious gemstone, olivine is generally regarded as a coarse, unremarkable material.
And this is where things get interesting.
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A small New Zealand company called Aspiring Materials has developed an advanced chemical process through which it extracts some of the most sought-after metals in the world from olivine.
The feedstock for the process is olivine powder — essentially the waste left over from industrial sand production.
It is washed in sulfuric acid, then soaked in caustic soda in tanks for many hours at a controlled temperature.
At the end of the process, three products are obtained from the olivine:
~50% silicate, used in cement production.
~40% magnesium, an important material in the iron, steel, and other industries.
The remaining ~10% is a mixture of various metals containing a small quantity of NMC.
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NMC is a compound consisting primarily of nickel, with the addition of manganese and cobalt, and it is critical to battery manufacturing.
Nickel is capable of storing large amounts of energy — the primary function of a battery.
Cobalt's role is to stabilize the nickel and make it safer to use, while manganese reduces the material's resistance so that electricity flows through it more efficiently.
The NMC content in olivine is approximately 1%.
That may sound small, but given that the raw material is waste and that every product of the process has commercial value, this is an extremely profitable extraction method.
Even the solution remaining at the end is separated into acid and base, which are fed back into the production process — making this one of the cleanest and most efficient manufacturing processes in the world.
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Today, NMC supply comes primarily from third-world countries, from which it is shipped to China for final processing.
The West's dependence on countries with poor human rights records and unstable governance, combined with its reliance on China as the actual supplier of finished products, has driven a frantic search for alternative sources for its batteries.
Demand is only growing with the shift toward electric vehicles with large battery packs, and even if this solution cannot meet demand in full, it can certainly serve as an important supply source.
Shabbat Shalom 😊
In the video: the world's largest commercial olivine mine, owned by Norwegian company Sibelco.
Video credit: Sibelco Group YouTube channel.
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