| Abstract Scope |
New technologies for climate change mitigation will require rapid and significant production scale-up for materials such as solar silicon, light metals for transportation, and rare earths for electric vehicle motors and wind turbine generators, as well as new processes for emissions-free ironmaking. In this context, electrometallurgy can potentially provide new process technologies which can scale quickly to meet global clean energy and efficiency needs. This talk will discuss several such candidate electrometallurgy technologies and their common features. For example, molten salt electrolysis with SOM anodes can directly reduce natural quartzite to solar silicon with no direct greenhouse emissions. Flow Electrolysis is a new method for direct oxide-to-metal powder reduction in aqueous solution with no direct greenhouse emissions. And there are other electrometallurgy technologies with potential for significant net-negative greenhouse emissions. |