Battery Metals

In December of last year, the US Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) first  announced its selection of scientific teams to explore the feasibility of extracting critical minerals from ocean macroalgae.

In July this year, Blue Evolution announced a groundbreaking advancement in sustainable biomining after it partnered with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Virginia Tech to develop a revolutionary method for sustainably extracting critical minerals and rare earth elements from seaweed.

The company operates seaweed farms in California and Alaska, and this month finalized a joint venture with the Māori Iwi Tribe to scale regenerative seaweed farming in Aotearoa, New Zealand.

From biofuels to rare earths

Blue Evolution CEO Beau Perry has been working with ARPA-E since 2017, first on large-scale systems for cultivation of seaweed for biofuels in Kodiak, Alaska, testing new hardware to grow seaweed in abundance, sustainably and economically.

Alaska is unparalleled in the US in terms of seaweed farming because of its size, environmental conditions and infrastructure. Perry noted both the state and the public are much more receptive to seaweed farming than to mining projects.

“It’s a relatively new industry. In post-war Japan, the coastal seaweed the Japanese had harvested for a long time was kind of destroyed…A British woman had closed the life cycle on nori in the early 50s. Seaweed farming was fairly new as a major agricultural sector, but now we grow, globally, 30 million tons of it,” Perry told MINING.com in an interview.

More than half of it is grown in China, but also Japan, Korea, Philippines, Indonesia.

The United States only entered the market ten years ago, and Perry said the US has grown a couple thousand tons so far.

Of over 10,000 species of seaweed worldwide, 300 species have been commercialized. Blue Evolution is working with six different species – four that they are growing in Alaska. Perry said seaweed has the potential to enter multiple markets because of its sustainability.

“It soaks up a lot more carbon than any terrestrial biomass per area, and it really only needs sunlight and seawater,” he said.

“We were looking [at] how to render biofuels from seaweed. PNNL was doing very in-depth content analyses of different samples of different species from different locations in our farmer network. We worked with different farmers that we’ve helped set up in Alaska, including the first ever commercial farm in Kodiak.”

The team started to find some unusual levels of minerals designated as in the strategic interest of US economic development and national security, but Perry said what got the Department of Energy’s attention was the rare earths.

The discovery is a positive development for a nascent North American rare earths market and taps into the broader issue of the glaring lack of domestic production. China has a near monopoly on mining and refining the group of 17 metals that are crucial to the development of smart electronic devices and wind turbines, and which are notoriously difficult to extract and expensive to process.

“This was sort of a beautiful accident, and it’s all a function of what’s in the water where the seaweed is growing,” Perry said.

“They’re a prolific sponge – they soak up nitrogen, phosphorus, carbon, and a lot of minerals, and so in this first pass at the content analysis, we got a certain set of signals around REEs and precious metals,  like rhodium and palladium and scandium.”

Each species of seaweed is metabolically prone to take up a certain set of minerals, and Perry noted some are really fascinating.

“We’ve seen sort of peaks and flat lines from different locations around the globe, and now we’re starting to fill in the puzzle of which seaweed could grow where to get what minerals,” he said.

“It’s clear that each one is taking up some combination of precious minerals, REEs, and these other strategic minerals.”

The team has preliminary data and is working to understand which species, where, how they are grown, and determining scalable extraction methods.

“There’s kind of this matrix of ‘what am I growing the seaweed for?’ I think critical minerals past a certain scale will always be part of that based on what we’re seeing,” Perry said. “ In certain locations, that might be the primary one if we find a species that really soaks this stuff up. We’re talking parts per million, and even parts per billion as a baseline. It’s perfectly standard in mining.”

Doubling seaweed value

Perry said the company is forging ahead with a “very critical mineral centric expedition” to find if there are places to focus on critical minerals and develop farms that are primarily oriented towards producing them.

“It’s possible that the critical minerals are disruptive to seaweed farming economics generally. They could double the value of the biomass,” he said.

“If I were to grow at a level where…at a significant scale relative to that market, the amount of critical minerals that will be running through our supply chain will be significant. In some cases, maybe  fundamentally changing the supply picture for specific critical minerals.”

“There are some tricks that we’re going to explore to really enhance the amount of rare earths per ton of biomass. It’s taking these things up all the time.

There are ways to coax maybe orders of magnitude more than we’re finding by accident, not really trying. We can do things at the genetic level, selecting for strains that are going to bioaccumulate more of a given target critical mineral.”

The goal, Perry said, is to really understand what’s possible from an extraction standpoint.

“There’s a certain amount of critical minerals that are economically recoverable from a site, but around it are a million years of sediment that the seaweed will be sort of steeped in, like a sponge. And that yield should actually increase over time, given that the baseline of those minerals should stay the same pretty much over a long period of time. And we’re going to get better at getting the seaweed to accumulate them and getting them out.”

When you think about a seaweed farm as a mine, it’s unlikely to run out anytime soon,” Perry said. “It will be replenished constantly by the ocean. So that, I think, from a mining perspective is pretty radical – I don’t need to spend $100 million to maybe break ground on a mine in 20 years.”

Still, sanctions risks “have reignited buying activity,” said Daniel Ghali, senior commodity strategist at TD Securities. Commodity trading advisor trend followers are adding to their palladium bullish positions, he said. “Fear is the trade.”

Shares of the four biggest palladium producers in South Africa — the world’s second-largest source of the metal — all jumped by more than 10%. One of them, Sibanye Stillwater Ltd., recently announced cuts to palladium output at its US mines due to weak prices.

Palladium has fallen about 37% since the start of last year and almost two-thirds from a March 2022 peak, which miners attribute to a subdued global economy and destocking by manufacturers.

The possibility of removing Russian palladium from the market may tighten the market as “South Africa and the other major producers won’t be able to fill the gap,” said Dan Smith, head of research at Amalgamated Metal Trading.

Gold pared gains after latest data pointed to economic resilience in the US, reinforcing bets that the Federal Reserve may take a measured approach to monetary easing. Rising yields and higher borrowing costs tend to weigh on gold, as the metal doesn’t pay interest.

Palladium rose 5.1% at $1,119.88 an ounce as of 10:38 a.m. in New York. Gold gained 0.3% at $2,723.98 after earlier rising by as much as 1%. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index was down 0.1%. Silver slid while platinum advanced.

Bullion was down as much as 1.5% earlier in the session, with some traders exiting positions amid signs that the precious metal’s recent rally to successive highs may be excessive.

Gold’s relative strength index has been above the overbought level of 70 for the past three sessions, according to Bloomberg data.

A stronger US dollar and rising bond yields also weighed on the metal, whose price has surged by more than 30% in anticipation of the Federal Reserve’s pivot to interest rate cuts. The rally also intensified as uncertainties surrounding the US presidential race and the Middle East conflict grew.

Standard Chartered analyst Suki Cooper expects further upside risk in the coming weeks. The bank sees gold averaging $2,800 an ounce in the fourth quarter, with prices set to average $2,900 for the first three months of next year.

Analysts from Citi Research have a similar outlook. The bank recently upgraded its three-month gold price view to $2,800 per ounce from $2,700 previously, adding that its 6- to 12-month forecast is $3,000.

Robust central-bank buying and expectations of US interest-rate cuts have also underpinned gold’s 33% run this year. Federal Reserve officials continue to opine on the path forward, with Jeffrey Schmid favoring a slower pace of rate reductions and Mary Daly forecasting more cuts.

“Haven demand amid heightened geopolitical risks, as well as uncertainty ahead of the US election in November, have also supported gold’s record-breaking rally,” ING Bank NV wrote in a note.

While the outcome of the US election remains uncertain, Saxo Bank A/S Head of Commodity Strategy Ole Hansen suggests gold and silver are getting caught up in bets of a Republican victory.

Meanwhile, money managers have increased net-long positions in gold, while investors have added to holdings in exchange-traded funds. Citigroup Inc. analysts boosted their three-month price forecast by 3.7% to $2,800 an ounce amid expectations that further labor-market deterioration will drive demand.

Spot gold rose 1% to $2,746.41 an ounce at 2:01 p.m. in New York. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index was little changed. Palladium, platinum and silver all gained.