Mining minerals from seawater Damian Palin
i collaborate with bacteria and i’m
about to show you some stop-motion
footage that i made recently where
you’ll see bacteria accumulating
minerals from their environment
over a period of an hour
so what you’re seeing here is the
bacteria metabolizing and as they do so
they create electrical charge
and this attracts metals from their
local environment and these metals
accumulate as minerals on the surface of
the bacteria
one of the most pervasive problems in
the world today for people is inadequate
access to clean drinking water
and the desalination process is one
where we take out salts we can use it
for drinking and agriculture
but removing the salts from water in
particularly sea water through reverse
osmosis is a critical technique for
countries who do not have access to
clean drinking water around the globe
so seawater reverse osmosis is a
membrane filtration technology
we take the water from the sea and we
apply a pressure
and this pressure forces the sea water
through a membrane this takes energy
producing clean water but we’re also
left with a concentrated salt solution
or brine but the process is very
expensive and it’s cost prohibitive for
many countries around the globe and also
the brine that’s produced
is oftentimes just pumped back out into
the sea and this is detrimental to the
local ecology of the sea area that it’s
pumped back out into so i work in
singapore at the moment and this is a
place that’s really a leading place for
desalination technology and singapore
proposes by 2060 to produce 9 million
liters per day of desalinated water
but this will produce an equally
massive amount of desalination brine and
this is where my collaboration with
bacteria comes into play so what we’re
doing at the moment is we’re
accumulating metals like calcium
potassium and magnesium from out of
desalination brine
and this in terms of magnesium and the
amount of water that i just mentioned
equates to a 4.5 us billion dollar
mining industry for singapore a place
that doesn’t have any natural resources
so i’d like you to imagine a mining
industry in a way that one hasn’t
existed before
imagine a mining industry that doesn’t
mean defiling the earth
and imagine bacteria helping us do this
by
accumulating
and precipitating
and sedimenting minerals out of
desalination brine
and what you can see here is the
beginning of our industry in a test tube
a mining industry that is in harmony
with nature thank you