This entire website and company reads like a penny pink sheets stock scam.<p>"Magrathea sells metal using multi-year supply agreements in countries with enforceable contract law. Supply agreements allow our partners to build in magnesium with confidence. We prevent price instability from Chinese trade manipulation so the innovative products of our partners can succeed in the market."<p>There's absolutely no information on the site detailing their tech. Just a lot of buzzwords. Under the News section, it's the typical list headline articles cherry picked to make the company sound better.
Brine mining isn't new, of course. Table salt is the canonical example of a metal compound extracted by evaporating brine, but there's a dozen other elements that are harvested at scale for profit from various brines: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine_mining" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine_mining</a> including Magnesium <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine_mining#Magnesium_and_magnesium_compounds" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine_mining#Magnesium_and_mag...</a><p>If you're in the bay area, you've seen a brine mine dozens of times: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Salt_Ponds" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Salt_Ponds</a>
If you are wondering "how" they are doing this, I believe this company is the externalization of this research: <a href="https://www.innovationnewsnetwork.com/new-method-extract-magnesium-from-seawater/25685/" rel="nofollow">https://www.innovationnewsnetwork.com/new-method-extract-mag...</a><p>(Kind of hard to pin down exactly since they don't say a lot about how they are doing it, but a quick check suggests this is the only "new" thing in extracting magnesium recently and Magrathea is a young company[1])<p>[1] <a href="https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/magrathea-metals" rel="nofollow">https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/magrathea-metals</a>
There used to be a plant near me which did something similar (extract magnesium oxide from seawater), it finally got demolished in 2012 and they're building houses on the land.<p><a href="https://hhtandn.org/venues/287/steetley" rel="nofollow">https://hhtandn.org/venues/287/steetley</a><p><a href="https://co-curate.ncl.ac.uk/hartlepool-magnesia-works/" rel="nofollow">https://co-curate.ncl.ac.uk/hartlepool-magnesia-works/</a>
I love ideas around extracting minerals from seawater since there is just so much. e.g. estimated 4.5B tons of uranium in seawater, ~1000x higher than land sources. Pretty much everything is dissolved in there, but the energy requirements are insane
Of similar interest, magnesium production from accumulated mine tailings : <a href="https://alliancemagnesium.com/en/products/primary-magnesium/" rel="nofollow">https://alliancemagnesium.com/en/products/primary-magnesium/</a>
Ok, hear me out. If stripping these minerals from the land had a negative impact wouldn’t stripping them from ocean water (which is the medium containing life, unlike ore) may also have negative consequences?? Seems to me like a pretty drastic alteration of ocean water chemistry in the long term. What if animal biology expects the magnesium to be available?
If you're wondering about where the name Magrathea comes from:<p><a href="https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Magrathea" rel="nofollow">https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Magrathea</a>
It's not "impossible" to decarbonize the production of aluminum without driving up cost, as the page claims. Once green electricity and hydrogen is cheaper than CO2-emitting energy, this will be possible and even profitable.
There are two major ways of producing magnesium [1]:<p>1) Electrolytic production from anhydrous magnesium chloride, similar to the electrolytic production of aluminum.<p>2) The Pidgeon process, which currently dominates Chinese (and world) magnesium production. It distills magnesium vapor under vacuum from a heated mixture of ferrosilicon and magnesium-calcium oxide (calcined dolomite).<p>The Pidgeon process has a high global warming potential because of the coal used to produce the ferrosilicon input and to heat the retorts. The electrolytic process has a lower global warming potential, especially if using low-carbon electricity, but historically sulfur hexafluoride has been used as a protective cover gas for the metal during electrolytic production. This gas has a staggering global warming potential 23,900 times that of CO2 [2] so incidental leakage of even small quantities can have a high climate impact.<p>The "without mining" part is not novel. Dow Chemical produced electrolytic magnesium from seawater without mining at Freeport, Texas from 1941-1998, until lower cost foreign magnesium made it uneconomical:<p><a href="https://www.chemicalonline.com/doc/dow-to-exit-magnesium-business-0001" rel="nofollow">https://www.chemicalonline.com/doc/dow-to-exit-magnesium-bus...</a><p>Reading the company's rather sparse public info, it looks like this is a revival of the same basic kind of process as Dow used. But since it's focused on certifying a low GWP for its magnesium, the company will not use sulfur hexafluoride. ("We’re piloting a new generation of electrolytic production technology that is inherently carbon neutral, removing the need for coal and carbon-intense reagents like FeSi and SF6.")<p>They don't say it directly but they also must be using clean electricity for the electrolysis, otherwise the metal would still be fairly CO2-intensive.<p>Unfortunately, the latest news item from their news page is about a threat to their business:<p>"State of Utah denies US Magnesium’s request to extend canals into the Great Salt Lake threatening shutdown of the only American magnesium producer"<p><a href="https://sltrib.pressreader.com/article/6830844853434424" rel="nofollow">https://sltrib.pressreader.com/article/6830844853434424</a><p>[1] <a href="https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2295&context=engpapers" rel="nofollow">https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2295&conte...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_hexafluoride#Greenhouse_gas" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_hexafluoride#Greenhouse...</a>