I love seeing the progress in mechanical (real world) tech.

I'm becoming somewhat (although not completely) cynical in a "devil is in the details" kinda way.

It seems we see a lot of hype which either fizzles out, or never seems to make it all the way.

This one us at the pilot plant stage, so at least made it out the lab. I hope it makes it all the way to full size production.

So far it sounds reasonably environmental friendly and good that they have a pilot plant running.

A few questions remain unanswered though: What can the current plant already do? It sounds like a multi-day sequential process per batch. How many batteries could that give?

The mixed metal product also contains nickel-manganese-cobalt. But certainly with a lot of other stuff and not in the exact ratio you would put in a battery. Even if we were to continoue with NMC batteries (LFPs are more common today). It looks like a first concentration step to get the interesting 10% of the rock. What separation process still remains? I expect a concentrate still to be much more useful than bare rock.

What are the overall economics? I understand that you won't need the separate mining as Olivine is considered waste and has already been piled up. But is that an economic benefit? (cheaper?) Environmental? Or time to market? (you don't need another mining permission for more capacity).

Is it just a more green but more expensive extraction from unused Olivine? Or will this replace all other dirty extractions mining soon? (too good to be true)

Lot's of ores are just byproducts of the processing of other ores. Like He production is mostly a consequence of natural gas extraction. If you don't extract the high volume profitable (and often environmentally messy) common ore, you don't get any significant amount of the "rare earths".

   Selenium and Cobalt come from Copper mining
   Indium Germanium and Gallium come from Zinc mining
   Nb Nd Pr Sd come from Iron mining
   Yt Nd etc come from Bauxite and Phosphate mining

An interesting thing can happen (and has with Indium) where the demand for the "byproduct" exceeds the relative demand for the main ore (Zinc) causing the price to rise dramatically (for ITO conductors in LCD displays).

There are other places you can get these metals, but they aren't economically viable. Building an infrastructure for cleanly and reliably processing them in volume is clearly important though.

It appears that power input from intermittent sources could be fairly easy to accommodate with this process. A battery could be added to run things that can't be turned off, like circulation pumps, etc., otherwise it could all be solar or wind powered.

Australia has an unenviable track record of promising sounding companies that get funding from government sources and soon go belly up.

Poor implemenation, poor quality control, complacency and the lack of educated personnel all contribute to this.

Meanwhile, the technology is studied, improved and transferred by enterprising Chinese and soon becomes a billion dollar company in Guangdong.

No mention of pricing in the article ; how much does a battery manufacturer have to pay to source NMC from the "traditional" sources ? How much does the "recylced" version costs ?

(I don't know where you can get that type of infos, and neither SEs no LLMs help, so I must be missing the right keywords :/ )

> The plan is to add two more reaction chains in parallel, so that the process can run continuously, shortening the runtime from three days to one.

That’s screaming for someone to optimize down to 2.5 days so they can do 2 cycles per week per machine. I wonder if the contents have to sit in each stage for 24 hours or 8 hours, because that may mean higher hardware utilization by two shifts of workers.

Olivine is a very interesting mineral indeed. It's stable at higher temperatures than other cheap minerals, leading to olivine sand being used for foundry applications that require resistance to temperatures that would melt quartz. (This is the "refractory sand production" mentioned in the article.) But it's not stable at room temperature in contact with the atmosphere; it has such a strong affinity for CO₂ that it chemically weathers into serpentine, which is mentioned as an alternative later in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpentinization

This has led to proposals to grind up olivine into sand and spread it on beaches to reverse global warming, which would definitely work but seems like it could easily overshoot and kick off a new Snowball Earth event.

And, since it composes most of the volume of the Earth, it's a potential source for enormously more iron and magnesium than we could ever hope to mine from mere crustal mines. Drilling rock out of the mantle poses significant technical challenges, though.

The magnesium hydroxide in the second photo is probably more familiar as "milk of magnesia", but, aside from its use as a source of metallic magnesium, it's used in its own right as a refractory insulator in swaged electrical heating elements and basic (high-pH) foundry applications.

I was unaware that it typically had enough nickel and cobalt contamination to be an economically viable source of those minerals.

Could be incredible for carbon sequestration. They’ve given olivine a value and the process produces olivine dust purified of potentially toxic metals that can still be used to capture co2.