Chemical process produces critical battery metals with no waste

Lot's of ores are just byproducts of the processing of other ores. Like He production is mostly a consequence of natural gas extraction. If you don't extract the high volume profitable (and often environmentally messy) common ore, you don't get any significant amount of the "rare earths".

   Selenium and Cobalt come from Copper mining
   Indium Germanium and Gallium come from Zinc mining
   Nb Nd Pr Sd come from Iron mining
   Yt Nd etc come from Bauxite and Phosphate mining

There are other places you can get these metals, but they aren't economically viable. Building an infrastructure for cleanly and reliably processing them in volume is clearly important though.

I love seeing the progress in mechanical (real world) tech.

I'm becoming somewhat (although not completely) cynical in a "devil is in the details" kinda way.

It seems we see a lot of hype which either fizzles out, or never seems to make it all the way.

This one us at the pilot plant stage, so at least made it out the lab. I hope it makes it all the way to full size production.

So far it sounds reasonably environmental friendly and good that they have a pilot plant running.

A few questions remain unanswered though: What can the current plant already do? It sounds like a multi-day sequential process per batch. How many batteries could that give?

The mixed metal product also contains nickel-manganese-cobalt. But certainly with a lot of other stuff and not in the exact ratio you would put in a battery. Even if we were to continoue with NMC batteries (LFPs are more common today). It looks like a first concentration step to get the interesting 10% of the rock. What separation process still remains? I expect a concentrate still to be much more useful than bare rock.

What are the overall economics? I understand that you won't need the separate mining as Olivine is considered waste and has already been piled up. But is that an economic benefit? (cheaper?) Environmental? Or time to market? (you don't need another mining permission for more capacity).

Is it just a more green but more expensive extraction from unused Olivine? Or will this replace all other dirty extractions mining soon? (too good to be true)

Australia has an unenviable track record of promising sounding companies that get funding from government sources and soon go belly up.

Poor implemenation, poor quality control, complacency and the lack of educated personnel all contribute to this.

Meanwhile, the technology is studied, improved and transferred by enterprising Chinese and soon becomes a billion dollar company in Guangdong.

It appears that power input from intermittent sources could be fairly easy to accommodate with this process. A battery could be added to run things that can't be turned off, like circulation pumps, etc., otherwise it could all be solar or wind powered.

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