Ok, hear me out. If stripping these minerals from the land had a negative impact wouldn’t stripping them from ocean water (which is the medium containing life, unlike ore) may also have negative consequences?? Seems to me like a pretty drastic alteration of ocean water chemistry in the long term. What if animal biology expects the magnesium to be available?
Metal Without Mining
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Re: Metal Without Mining
#12Isn't Magnesium highly flammable/explosive? How do you protect parts made from this metal?
Magnesium parts are already in widespread use. The covers you see on the sides of motorcycle engines/transmissions are often magnesium. In solid form the risk is mitigated because there isn't enough surface area for the reaction with oxygen, it's the powder/shavings that are a concern. You can actually weld magnesium parts without it igniting. Reading up on it a little more - it seems with enough heat solid magnesium…
I used to have a flowerpot furnace and cast small objects. I once stumbled upon a car that had been burnt out. The engine block had dripped down the road and I was able to collect some of the melted pieces. It would pop and spit when poked once cast, very different to the aluminium I often used, and I wondered at the time whether it was the magnesium in the block that was doing it.
Re: Metal Without Mining
#13Isn't Magnesium highly flammable/explosive? How do you protect parts made from this metal?
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Re: Metal Without Mining
#14Ok, hear me out. If stripping these minerals from the land had a negative impact wouldn’t stripping them from ocean water (which is the medium containing life, unlike ore) may also have negative consequences?? Seems to me like a pretty drastic alteration of ocean water chemistry in the long term. What if animal biology expects the magnesium to be available?
That's true if the minerals extracted are consumed completely.
Metals however, are often the most recyclable materials we use, because unlike carbon-based materials like plastics, metals often have useful properties in their elemental state, or as alloys that can be melted down and reused without the loss of those properties or of much material.
Most aluminum, for example is recycled, because the cost of recycling it is lower than the cost of mining new material.
Re: Metal Without Mining
#15Ok, hear me out. If stripping these minerals from the land had a negative impact wouldn’t stripping them from ocean water (which is the medium containing life, unlike ore) may also have negative consequences?? Seems to me like a pretty drastic alteration of ocean water chemistry in the long term. What if animal biology expects the magnesium to be available?
Eh no. Oceans are big. Really big. Unbelievably big even. We're talking about filtering tiny fractions of ocean water, and nowhere close to all of it. Literally a drop in the ocean in comparison.
So, no. This is not a serious concern.
Re: Metal Without Mining
#16If you are wondering "how" they are doing this, I believe this company is the externalization of this research: https://www.innovationnewsnetwork.com/new-method-extract-mag...
(Kind of hard to pin down exactly since they don't say a lot about how they are doing it, but a quick check suggests this is the only "new" thing in extracting magnesium recently and Magrathea is a young company[1])
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/magrathea-metals
Re: Metal Without Mining
#17Ok, hear me out. If stripping these minerals from the land had a negative impact wouldn’t stripping them from ocean water (which is the medium containing life, unlike ore) may also have negative consequences?? Seems to me like a pretty drastic alteration of ocean water chemistry in the long term. What if animal biology expects the magnesium to be available?
Correct, the question that should be asked here is what happens to all of the water after we've removed the minerals we need from it? Do we just pump it back into the ocean? The outlet would need to be far enough away from the inlet to avoid dilution. What impact does that have on marine life? We know that concentrating those minerals into brine when we extract water through desalinization is harmful so how harmful is doing the opposite and depleting the water of the minerals?
Also, those intakes for water are going to be massive. How are we going to make them fish safe? Dolphin safe? Plankton safe? This is a major problem in hydroelectric dams.
Third, what's providing power for this process and where is it located?
Fourth, what are the second order effects of replacing a lot of steel production? Will this make all of the remaining products where steel can't be replaced a lot more expensive? I doubt you can use magnesium as a replacement for the girders used in buildings. Magnesium is only as strong as mild steel so pretty much everything that requires any tensile strength will still need to use steel.
Re: Metal Without Mining
#18Ok, hear me out. If stripping these minerals from the land had a negative impact wouldn’t stripping them from ocean water (which is the medium containing life, unlike ore) may also have negative consequences?? Seems to me like a pretty drastic alteration of ocean water chemistry in the long term. What if animal biology expects the magnesium to be available?
Eh no. Oceans are big. Really big. Unbelievably big even. We're talking about filtering tiny fractions of ocean water, and nowhere close to all of it. Literally a drop in the ocean in comparison. So, no. This is not a serious concern.
Speaking strictly of mineral removal this rings true. However, processing large volumes of seawater can still have a detrimental effect on the local ecosystem, because pumping large volumes of seawater is extremely stressful to all of the seawater-loving organisms that get pulled along for the ride.
Re: Metal Without Mining
#19Isn't Magnesium highly flammable/explosive? How do you protect parts made from this metal?
Old timers recall the infamous case of the NeXT Cube...
https://web.archive.org/web/20000817013818/http://simson.net...
Re: Metal Without Mining
#20Ok, hear me out. If stripping these minerals from the land had a negative impact wouldn’t stripping them from ocean water (which is the medium containing life, unlike ore) may also have negative consequences?? Seems to me like a pretty drastic alteration of ocean water chemistry in the long term. What if animal biology expects the magnesium to be available?
That's true if the minerals extracted are consumed completely. Metals however, are often the most recyclable materials we use, because unlike carbon-based materials like plastics, metals often have useful properties in their elemental state, or as alloys that can be melted down and reused without the loss of those properties or of much material. Most aluminum, for example is recycled, because the cost of recycling it…
The concern isn't that we'll completely deplete the ocean, that would be a monumental task. The worry is about what happens at the "mining" sites. Those are going to be in continuous operation for a long time.