Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory seeking to boost the recovery of materials critical to supply chains that will help enable America’s decarbonization transition are turning to various sources of water.

To obtain the materials needed to manufacture products such as batteries, magnets in electric motors, catalysts, nuclear reactors and other carbon-free energy technologies, the team is calling water an overlooked potential source of said materials.

As such, the scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have detailed a means by which critical materials might be recovered from various water streams such as wastewater, ocean water, ground water, aquifers and geothermal brines, among others.

For instance, the researchers note that groundwater aquifers and geothermal brines are potential sources for materials like lithium, which is used in the manufacture of electric vehicle batteries and consequently could be used to help decarbonize the economy. ​

“Lithium is in the ocean and in geothermal brines; you’d extract it differently from these two sources but it’s important to understand which is cheapest, has the smallest environmental impact, and enables secure supply chains,” the researchers explained. ​“For many other materials, water is underexplored as a source, and that’s something we’re paying increasingly more attention to.”

To extract such critical materials from water sources, the researchers are eyeing a range of approaches from the traditional methods like membranes to interfacial solar steam generators.

A paper detailing the proposal, ​“Material design strategies for recovery of critical resources from water,” appears in the journal Advanced Materials