Sustainable and scalable processes in mining and metal transformation are key to responding to the climate change challenges of the 21stcentury. Join MIT researchers and MIT spun-out startups to hear the latest research on Resources Extraction Technologies, and what future trends we can expect in the metal processing industry.
Join us on December 2nd to learn more about MIT’s impactful work!
Prof. Antoine Allanore has more than a decade of experience in the field of chemical metallurgy. Since 2004, as R&D engineer at ArcelorMittal in France, then at MIT since 2010, he has developed several alternative processes for metal extraction that adopt green chemistry principles. He co-founded Boston Electrometallurgical Corporation (BEMC) to engineer the large-scale development of such approaches. In 2012, he was appointed the T.B. King Assistant Professor of Metallurgy in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering at MIT, where his research group aims at developing sustainable materials extraction and manufacturing processes. His group has proposed a novel approach to investigate and control water/mineral interactions in soils using microfluidics (Word Congress on Soils Science, Korea, 2014, PLOSOne, 2015). Focusing on mining and processing of unconventional resources (Journal of the Total Environment, 2015, Green Chemistry 2015), he invented a waste-free process to produce a potassium fertilizer from earth-abundant raw materials. The product has been designed to suit tropical soils and has succeeded crop-tests. It is now under field evaluation in Brazil (16th World Fertilizer Congress, Rio, 2014). He teaches thermodynamics and sustainable chemical metallurgy at both the undergraduate and graduate level. He was awarded the DeNora Prize in 2012 and the Early Career Faculty Fellow award in 2015, both from TMS (The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society).
Our research supports the necessary transformation of the materials extraction and recycling processes in order to mitigate their environmental impact and accommodate a global market dominated by China. We develop processes that target higher productivity, lower GHG emissions and limited water and chemical consumptions. The developments reported herein are applicable to primary extraction, anchored in the reality of mining challenges such as liberation size or low ore grades (for example nickel or copper). Our findings extend to recycling and downstream recovery, in particular for products containing rare-earths, precious metals or even cobalt. Our processes enable to upgrade, with minimal cost and environmental impact, mixed solid compounds such as crushed ores, slags, tailings or recycled streams. We efficiently transform such feeds into new solid phases that are amenable to cost effective and well established recovery with physical separations technologies. Furthermore, we have demonstrated the unique ability to use those stream to recover metallic products with more cost efficient technologies that are integrated with the deployment of green electrical power.
PhD in Electrical Engineering at Brown University focused on semiconductor devices for sensing and energy generation. Currently at Columbia University working to commercialize gas sensing technology at Lelantos.
Adam spent the last decade leading global business development for new technologies in the energy industry. At Vionx Energy, a vanadium flow battery company, Adam led sales and developed multi-MW projects in partnership with Siemens and Starwood Energy. Prior to Vionx, Adam was VP of Business Development at SustainX where he led first market partnerships in Korea and Japan and raised over $20M in equity from GE, Rockport, Polaris, and others.