Instead of continuing to dig tunnels or pits, some scientists are looking to a promising yet challenging source of minerals: seawater.
This story is part of the Grist series Unearthed: The Mining Issue , which examines the global race to extract critical minerals for the clean energy transition. TThe world is on the brink of a new "gold rush." Except this time, countries are rushing to control the minerals required for solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. And instead of continuing to dig tunnels or pits, some scientists are looking to a promising — but challenging — source of minerals that has tormented researchers for decades: seawater. The ocean holds far more than just water and salt. Pretty much every naturally occurring element on the periodic table can be found in seawater, from gold and silver to lithium, cobalt, and nickel. The problem? For most of history, these metals have been out of reach, because they exist at levels so low that it's kind of hard to even wrap your head around. Source: Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute Grist Imagine an olympic-sized swimming pool full of seawater. If you were to separate all the elements, you'd be left with about half a kilogram of lithium, 1.2 grams of nickel, 3 milligrams of cobalt, and similarly small amounts of other sought-after metals. While that might not seem like a lot, the world's oceans contain about 534 trillion olympic-sized pools' worth of water. So, while there might not be much, say, cobalt in that hypothetical pool of seawater, there's a lot of cobalt in the actual seas. In fact, the ocean contains 46 times more cobalt than all of the world's land reserves combined. "When you multiply it by this vast volume of seawater on planet Earth — that's a huge gold mine," said Scott Edmundson, a research scientist at Pacific Northwest National Lab. "There's a gold mine, literally right at our shoreline." For nearly a century, scientists have been trying to tap into the ocean's mineral stores — perhaps none more infamous than the German chemist Fritz Haber. Haber started his career as an idealistic young scientist,…