US DOE: Recovering High Energy-Value Materials from Wastewater

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The US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program has been stimulating, funding, and supporting early-stage energy technologies and companies for several years now, since it was formed in 2009 under the Obama administration. From cutting-edge batteries to next-gen solar, ARPA-E aims to be ahead of the curve and help America advance future tech before others. The latest announcement from the US Department of Energy (DOE) regarding ARPA-E is an interesting one, with the program focusing in on innovative wastewater work.

ARPA-E “is considering issuing a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) to support the development of new technologies to recover high energy-value materials from wastewater. These new technologies would aim to reduce reliance on foreign imports, domestic energy demands, and greenhouse gas emissions associated with conventional sourcing and waste stream treatment. The purpose of this announcement is to facilitate the formation of new project teams.”

As far as I remember, I’ve never heard of such a thing before. Reducing reliance on foreign imports by recovering high energy-value materials from wastewater? Interesting….

“The anticipated goal of the program is to develop technology to recover multiple critical minerals and/or ammonia-based products from domestic wastewater sources. Critical minerals of highest interest are those designated by DOE as the 12 most energy and supply-chain relevant metals, including lithium, cobalt, and rare-earth elements.” Lithium and cobalt from wastewater? Fascinating. Well, this is all new to me. So let’s just jump into the plans and what they’re looking for at ARPA-E:

Several technical categories are foreseen to achieve this objective, including:

1. New functional-materials development to address the difficulty of separating and concentrating target ions of similar size, charge, redox potential, and solubility within the complex and harsh conditions of a target wastewater matrix;
2. Process derisking to enable continuous or repeated cycles of efficient recovery of a market-valuable product in minimal steps; and
3. Process integration to ensure technologies are capable of energy-efficient and continuous recovery of market-valuable product in a real wastewater matrix, and that the process is scalable to anticipated wastewater flow rates.

For all categories, the final recovered products will need to include at least two targeted high energy-value materials, have greater than 90% recovery efficiency, and be commercially viable in the U.S. market. ARPA-E held a workshop on Ammonia and Critical Minerals Recovery in August 2024, and more information on this topic can be found here.

The Teaming Partner List for this anticipated NOFO is being compiled to facilitate the formation of new project teams, and is available on ARPA-E eXCHANGE, ARPA-E’s online application portal. It will be updated periodically until the close of the Full Application period to reflect new Teaming Partners who have provided their information. ARPA-E strongly encourages outstanding scientists and engineers from different organizations, scientific disciplines, and technology sectors to submit their information to form new project teams. Interdisciplinary and cross-sector collaboration spanning organizational boundaries enables and accelerates the achievement of scientific and technological outcomes that were previously viewed as extremely difficult, if not impossible.

I’m very curious to see if this can become a serious way of coming up with lithium, cobalt, and rare-earth element supplies in the US. We will see. For more details, you can head here. And here’s an Applicant Profile form.

Featured image by Offenburg from Pixabay.