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Mamadou S. Diallo
Visiting Associate in Environmental Science & Engineering
Caltech
Mining Critical Metals and Elements from
Seawater-An Overview of Recent Advances
The availability and sustainable supply of technology metals and valuable elements is critical to
the global economy. There is a growing realization that the development and deployment of the
clean energy technologies and sustainable products and manufacturing industries of the 21st
century will require large amounts of critical metals and valuable elements including rare-earth
elements (REEs), platinum group metals (PGMs), lithium, copper, cobalt, silver, gold and uranium.
Most of the critical metals and elements that are currently utilized in industrial manufacturing
and energy generation, conversion and storage are produced through the mining, extraction and
processing of mineral ores. Because there is a significant lag time between the discovery of new
virgin ores and the commissioning of new mines, current and future shortages of critical metals
and elements cannot be addressed by just opening new mines and mineral/metal extraction and
processing facilities. Moreover, mining has a heavy environmental footprint, that is, it requires
significant amounts of land, energy, and water and generates a lot of wastes. During the last
two decades, advances in industrial ecology (e.g. material flow analysis), water purification
(e.g. desalination) and resource recovery have established that seawater and desalination plant
brines are important and largely untapped sources of critical metals and elements.
In this seminar, I will give an overview of recent advances in seawater metal mining. Following
the introduction, I will discuss the potential of oceans as sources of critical metals and elements.
I will then analyze the thermodynamics and energy requirements of metal mining from seawater
followed by an overview of recent work on the development of a new generation of separation
materials, modules and systems for the selective extraction of critical metals and elements from
seawater using uranium as model system. I will then discuss the integration of metal/uranium
extraction systems into existing and future desalination plants. I will conclude my seminar
by providing an outlook for a model “Seawater Factory of the Future” that integrates water
production with energy generation and resource recovery including metal mining.
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm | WEDNESDAY, MAY 27, 2015
Guggenheim 101 - Lees-Kubota Lecture Hall
RESNICK SUSTAINABILITY INSTITUTE AT CALTECH | RESNICK.CALTECH.EDU
Mamadou S. Diallo
Visiting Associate in Environmental Science & Engineering
Caltech
Dr. Mamadou S. Diallo is an Associate Professor and Director of the Laboratory
of Advanced Materials and Systems for Water Sustainability of the Graduate School of
EEWS (Energy, Environment, Water and Sustainability) at the Korea Advanced Institute
of Science and Technology (KAIST). He is also a Visiting Associate in the Environmental
Science and Engineering Department of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science
at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Prof. Diallo was trained both as a chemical/environmental engineer and a physical
chemist. He holds an Engineer Diploma in Mineral Engineering from Ecole Nationale
de L’ Industrie Minerale (Rabbat, Morocco), a Master of Science degree in Chemical
Engineering from Colorado School of Mines, a Master of Science degree in Chemistry and
a Ph.D. degree in Environmental Engineering from the University of Michigan. Prof. Diallo
also completed post-doctoral training in Computational Chemistry at Caltech.
His current research interests and activities focus on the preparation and
characterization of multifunctional membranes for sustainable chemistry, engineering
and materials (SusChEM) including (i) water treatment and desalination, (ii) CO2 capture
and conversion and (iii) critical metal and resource recovery. In 2007, Prof. Diallo cofounded the start-up company AquaNano, LLC to scale-up and commercialize a new
generation of high performance polymeric media for water treatment and environmental/
industrial separations.
In addition to his professorial and entrepreneurial activities, Prof. Diallo also serves as (i)
Associate Editor for the Journal of Nanoparticle Research, (ii) a member of the Editorial
Advisory Board of Environmental Science and Technology (ES&T) and (iii) a member of
the Advisory Board of the Critical Materials Institute (CMI), a US DOE sponsored Energy
Innovation Hub led by the Ames Laboratory.
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm | WEDNESDAY, MAY 27, 2015
Guggenheim 101 - Lees-Kubota Lecture Hall
RESNICK SUSTAINABILITY INSTITUTE AT CALTECH | RESNICK.CALTECH.EDU