About the Webinar
This National Lab Discovery Series webinar featured a portfolio of technologies from Oak Ridge National Laboratory focused on critical mineral recovery and separation. These innovations are designed to recover valuable materials from waste streams and underutilized resources, creating new opportunities to improve efficiency, reduce waste, and strengthen domestic supply chains for materials essential to electronics, defense, and advanced manufacturing.
The session highlighted a range of scalable approaches spanning different stages of mineral recovery and separation, along with examples of how ORNL technologies are moving from the lab to real-world commercial applications.
Key Topics Covered
- Recovery of rare earth elements, uranium, gypsum, and phosphoric acid from phosphate mining process waste streams
- A scalable method for producing high-purity rare earth elements from mining tailings using selective dissolution and membrane-based separation
- Selective leaching of rare earth elements using polyaminocarboxylate chelators to improve early-stage separation efficiency
- Real-world commercialization examples, including ORNL’s licensed lithium recovery technologies
- Opportunities to evaluate, license, and partner around critical mineral recovery technologies
- Live Q&A with ORNL researchers and technology transfer experts
Featured Speaker
Dr. Parans Paranthaman – Corporate Fellow, Chemical Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory