How this company mines metals with less carbon #shorts #carbonfootprint #metal

19 Mar 2025 · 1 min

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This content was created by Ian Peterman. This content was uploaded by Ian Peterman. This is a YouTube video titled "How this company mines metals with less carbon #shorts #carbonfootprint #metal" (created 2025-03-19). It contains a single-speaker explanation (in English) of metallurgical leaching: a chemical process that dissolves solid metals into a liquid solution and then precipitates them back to solid, presented as an energy- and carbon-efficient alternative to traditional smelting. The speaker notes that smelters produce about 1,500 kg CO2 per ton processed and contrasts that with the chemical process’ much lower CO2 output.

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It's called metallurgic leaching. What it effectively is, is just using a chemical that turns the solid element into a liquid version. It's taking a liquid chemical that grabs the elemental, the ions, and attaches it to its liquid version, which then becomes a solution. So you've turned it from a solid to a liquid. And then we use another chemical process to drop it out of the liquid back into a solid form. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to use a smelter to get your conversion versus a chemical process. What we know is a smelter will create 1,500 kilograms of CO2 for every ton it processes, and we're minimal amount of CO2.