WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) today announced $9.9 million for 7 projects to support the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts to strengthen domestic supply chains and ensure America leads the world in the emerging clean energy economy. These projects will seek to establish a new low-carbon, cost-competitive domestic supply chain for nickel. Nickel is a key component in manufacturing steels, alloys, and lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles, consumer electronics, stationary storage, and other technologies. The project will pursue methods using plants to extract nickel from the soil – a process known as phytomining.

“Our vision for a clean energy future requires a sustainable, domestic supply chain for critical materials,” said ARPA-E Director Evelyn N. Wang. “Phytomining could open an entirely new way to sustainably extract minerals from soil and support a net-zero economy.”  

ARPA-E’s Plant HYperaccumulators TO MIne Nickel-Enriched Soils (PHYTOMINES) Exploratory Topic seeks to spur the technological development of domestic phytomining. Nickel is an ideal mineral to validate phytomining’s viability since a large portion of currently known hyperaccumulators accumulate nickel. The DOE Critical Materials Assessment lists nickel as crucial to global clean energy technology supply chains but assesses its supply risk as moderate in the short term and high in the long term. Phytomining could provide a sustainable means to alleviate supply risks. If successful, it could provide access to untapped resources in serpentine barren lands and function as a bio-refinery, yielding nickel in a purer form and eliminating the need for costly, high-carbon footprint downstream processing.

The following projects are selected under the PHYTOMINES Exploratory Topic: 

• Michigan Technological University (Houghton, MI) is developing a chemical and microbiological phytomining system to make nickel more available for uptake by plants in nickel-enriched marginal soils. (Award amount: $1,900,000)
• University of Wisconsin–Madison (Madison, WI) is developing a biomolecular tool kit to domesticate two strains of wild nickel hyperaccumulating plants. (Award amount: $1,471,665)
• University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ) will conduct a large-scale herbarium x-ray fluorescence (XRF) scanning project to discover new metal-harvesting hyperaccumulating plants in the U.S. and optimize metal uptake under native geographic conditions. (Award amount: $999,679) 

Access complete project descriptions for each of the projects selected for PHYTOMINES here.  

ARPA-E advances high-potential, high-impact clean energy technologies across a wide range of technical areas that are strategic to America's energy security. Learn more about these efforts and ARPA-E's commitment to ensuring the United States continues to lead the world in developing and deploying advanced clean energy technologies.  

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