Realize Energy-rich Compound Opportunities Valorizing Extraction from Refuse waters
Program Description:
The Realize Energy-rich Compound Opportunities Valorizing Extraction from Refuse waters (RECOVER) program will strengthen American access to ammonia and critical metals by creating new ways to extract materials from domestic wastewater. The program will target ammonia, a crucial ingredient for fertilizer, and critical metals that are important for key energy technologies. Most ammonia applied to agricultural fields ends up in wastewater, and the majority of critical metals used in U.S. technologies are imported from overseas. Yet domestic wastewater from agriculture, mining, and oil and gas production contains enough ammonia and critical metals to displace all or much of U.S. imports.
Technologies supported by the RECOVER program will focus on developing new materials and processes to make extraction of ammonia and critical metals from wastewater energy-efficient, selective, and durable. Project teams will reduce the number of recovery steps compared to conventional approaches, and tailor their technologies to work within existing or new wastewater facilities. The goal of the program is to replace 50% of domestic ammonia supplies, and 100% of key critical metal supplies, by recovery from wastewater sources. Crucially, the new wastewater processes must recover these materials at a competitive market price.
Innovation Need:
Today’s methods for treating wastewater relies on either destroying ammonia or discharging it to the environment, where much of it ends up as a greenhouse gas. Attempts to recover ammonia using conventional methods, such as gas-phase column stripping, result in significantly higher costs. Existing extraction methods for critical metals entail complex, multi-step processes and are not economical for metal concentrations found in wastewaters. These processes also produce environmentally harmful solvents that require further treatment.
RECOVER project teams will develop new materials to selectively bind or react target ions and molecules in solutions with high ionic strength, natural organic matter, and/or competing cations. Project teams will create new processes to continuously recover ammonia and critical minerals without a drop in performance over time. The new approaches will be scalable to large operations and complement existing wastewater treatment needs.
Potential Impact:
By promoting new technologies in ammonia and critical metal extraction from wastewater, RECOVER will:
Security:
Strengthen U.S. independence by lessening reliance on imports of ammonia and key critical metals.
Environment:
Improve the energy efficiency of procuring market-valuable forms of ammonia and critical metals by eliminating the energy needs for mining while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Economy:
Create new revenue sources for wastewater treatment plants, which will reduce net costs and contribute to improved water treatment outcomes.