Dr. Chen Zhu - "How mineral-water interactions relate to critical minerals, carbon sequestration, and water resources"

Speaker: Dr. Chen Zhu

Title: How mineral-water interactions relate to critical minerals, carbon sequestration, and water resources

Hosted by: Paul Schroeder

Critical minerals are crucial to the deployment of technologies spanning renewable energy, electronics, and beyond. Mineral-water interaction plays a fundamental role in the metal transport in geological systems, formation of hydrothermal and supergene ore deposits, chemical extraction (hydrometallurgy) of ores, recycling of industrial wastes, and environmental impact assessments of mining. In this seminar, I will discuss our research on measuring the solubility of major rare earth element (REE) ore minerals, REE coprecipitation with iron oxyhydroxide, and the development of an internally consistent thermodynamic database for REE minerals and solids. Additionally, I will discuss our geochemical modeling study of experiments that integrate the extraction of critical metals – nickel (Ni) and cobalt (Co) – with CO₂ sequestration. These results highlight a potential pathway to overcome the economic barriers to carbon sequestration and underscore expanded applications of geochemical reaction kinetics. 

The urgent demand for critical minerals presents an opportunity for Earth scientists to advance fundamental research as well. With the advent of non-traditional stable isotopes and SIMS technologies, we have broken new ground in near-equilibrium reaction kinetics – an insight with profound implications for the study of geological processes, as most geochemical reactions operate near equilibrium over geological timescales.