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