this video is sponsored by blinkist the demand for mined Metals used for things like construction
materials and battery packs for EVS are set to keep increasing exponentially in the coming
years but metals are in limited Supply and we're quickly running out of good ores to mine them from
leading to larger amounts of tailings and other waste from the mining industry as well as higher
costs for things that we use every day but what if the solution to all this was to turn Farmers
into aggro miners yes mining for metals and other materials by growing crops
I'm Ricky and this is Two Bit da Vinci
Metals are an essential part of our modern world they're part of all infrastructure and they're in most of the products and things that we use every day we mine over three billion
metric tons of iron every year making it the most widely mined metal in the world by far but iron
wouldn't be nearly as popular if it weren't for other alloying elements like nickel or carbon
making these elements equally important throw some carbon into iron and you get steel which
is vastly more interesting but iron is still at the core of it all so let's focus a bit on nickel
nickel is an often hidden but essential part of many of the sustainability technologies that we
cover right here on this channel you probably remember from previous episodes that nickel is
an important part of lithium ion batteries that power our laptops mobile devices and EVS where it
can make up to 80 percent of the cathode material every year we mine 2.7 million tons of fresh
knuckle to cover the increasing demand of which almost 70 percent ends up in stainless steel 11 in
batteries six percent electroplating and the rest in other uses this means that we use almost 300
1000 tons of nickel every year for Batteries alone and the demand is set to increase approximately
20 fold in the next 30 Years so unless other Technologies manage to replace lithium ion in
EVs and other mobile applications we'll definitely need additional sources of metals like nickel if
we were to meet this new demand now no matter how sustainable their applications are materials like
nickel are only as sustainable as the processes used to make them with hydrogen being a great
example as we've explored in recent videos about red hydrogen that I suggest checking out here in
the case of metals these have to be mined from the ground and the ores have to be transported crushed
and submitted to different metallurgical processes to extract the pure metal or its compounds even
though we could power some of these things with green energy the mining part yeah it's going to
be dirty mining destroys the soil and pollutes air and water and so it produces massive amounts
of waste called tailings All of which need to be managed but what if there was a way to turn
mining's negative effects into something good effectively cleaning up one of the dirtiest
parts of metal production well there is and it's called Agra mining agriminating sometimes called
metal farming is just what the name implies I mean isn't it so obvious using Agriculture and plants
to extract minerals like metals from the ground and then harvesting the plant to extract those
metals from the biomass this is a relatively new yet simple idea that uses very special
plants technically called hyperaccumulators AKA metal hoarders which have the unique ability
to accumulate certain metals like nickel or manganese in their sap and leaves to a much
higher concentration than normal the concentration can be hundreds of thousands of times higher than
what normal plants can tolerate reaching a staggering 25 percent dry weight compared to
normal leaves and average plants that usually get around point zero zero zero five percent in dry
weight and speaking of taking something valuable and concentrating it is a perfect segue to tell
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the link in the description more importantly metal concentrations in hyper accumulators can
be several times higher than the original soil making the plan itself a better source of metal
than the soil where it grows and better in fact than most commercially viable auras for example
high-grade nickel ores usually have only a little over two percent nickel but bio orus from nickel
hyper accumulators can reach over 10 times that concentration these plants store heavy metals
in isolated compartments inside their cells as a defense mechanism heavy metals are toxic so
eat them and you'll be sick so how does agromining really work well both the theory and the practice
behind agromining are pretty straightforward first we start by carefully selecting the right
hyperaccumulative species there are literally thousands of known hyper accumulators for
different metals and minerals which grow in different climates and soil conditions second
we plant these hyper accumulators in metal Rich degraded lands like those found in abandoned
mine lines ultramafic laterite soil or in mine tailings once the plants breach maturity comes
the Harvest this gives us a metal-rich biomass but it's not quite ready for metal extraction
yet we first need to dry and incinerate them so we can get a high grade metal bio ore in the form
of an ash the bio ore is finally processed into pure metal salts and other compounds or the pure
metal of different industrial applications through different Thermo or Hydro metallurgical processes
and the waste well in most cases that can be put back into the soil as fertilizer it seems to me
that agromining is such a no-brainer anyone with experience in farming and with the right guidance
could easily start producing metal Oreos from any of these plants even in soils you would normally
consider worthless this opens the opportunity for a new source of income for farmers who live
in or near places with ultramafic or Serpentine soils but there's so much more that agromining
brings to the table compared to traditional Mining and traditional agriculture first with
agrimining we don't need to mine the soil and transport thousands of pounds of rock miles away
where we need to use vast amounts of energy to crush the stones into thin powder before
processing drier fresh biomass is much easier to chop into smaller bits for making processing
much less energy intensive second the dry biomass itself is a source of energy that we can harness
when we incinerate it further offset in the cost of energy to produce the metal third and this is
particularly important agromatic produces a pure metal or pure metal compound than traditional
mining allowing its direct use in metal Catalyst production for the chemical industry and even
as metal oxides for battery manufacturing adding more value to the crop fourth as mentioned before
these crops can grow in low quality soils which aren't fit for farming or commercially viable for
traditional mining for example some nickel hyper accumulators can grow in ultramafic lateral soils
found in places like the Philippines Indonesia and New Caledonia where nickel content is below one
percent making it uneconomical for mining but with concentration is too high for most other
crops to grow making it useless for traditional farming this is probably the biggest benefit to
everyday people like farmers who can use their know-how to add value to land that would otherwise
be idle while providing income for themselves and their families at the same time another benefit is
that agromining can help with soil Rehabilitation after strip mining this makes it doubly attractive
for mining companies who get more value from the mine for longer while at the same time
cleaning their operation and integrating it into their circular economy finally we can also use
agromining to suck out heavy metals and recycle metal Rich waste from different industries by
simply growing the right hyperaccumulators in these areas by now you're probably wondering if
this is so great then why haven't I heard about it before why aren't there agromining companies all
over the place cleaning after mining companies and turning out a decent profit while they're at it
well it turns out even though agriminating sounds great in theory it's still a very recent idea and
it hasn't reached commercial scale yet the whole movement was set in motion because of the current
Rising Trend in nickel demand a couple decades ago this wasn't the case we could easily increase
production and meet demand without a hiccup today with the renewable energy and the EV Revolution
things look quite different but that's not to say all this is just a theory or coming from a
lab in fact one research group has taken one step out of the lab and into the field with a European
spin-off company called life aggramine the company has been working on several pilot Farms trying
to determine the economic feasibility of nickel agromining in different European countries like
Spain Germany and Albania the results from these longest running projects were recently reported
after 15 years of gathering data in posca Albania they use a local variety of nickel
hyperaccumulator called adontharhena calcitica and under optimal conditions were able to get
a maximum of 425 pounds of nickel per hectare in the form of a very valuable salt called ammonium
nickel sulfate hexahydrate or ansh let's go with ansh this cell can be used directly for nickel
electroplating or as a stock material for Pure nickel Metal Manufacturing so let's see how much
value life agramine can get out of these seemingly unfertile lands ansh contains 14.9 percent nickel
so 425 pounds of nickel would be equivalent to about 2 850 pounds of of ansh cheap ammonium
nickel sulfate sourced in India cost between 5.50 and 11 per pound for a technical grade
salt by technograde I mean 85 to 90 pure so nickel produced in each hectare of Life agamine's metal
Farm is worth anywhere from fifteen thousand six hundred to Thirty one thousand two hundred dollars
most likely more given that the end product is much purer than the standard nickel mining
products for comparison the worldwide production of rice in 2016 which was the highest grossing
food crop was worth 332 billion dollars and the total acreage dedicated to Rice that year was 162
million hectares so the average value obtained per hectare of rice fields was roughly two thousand
dollars of course this comparison doesn't take into account the cost of processing the
buyer but it still shows the economic potential behind being able to use agromining as a source
of nickel as I said aggramind isn't a commercial scale operation just yet and they'll still need
to do more studies and field experiments to optimize everything and maximize yield before
committing to full-scale production however we can still use our results to estimate how
much nickel we could get out of the ground using agromining assuming a yield of 193 kilograms per
hectare and considering that Europe has over 1 million hectares of available ultramafic
soil where we could plant hyperaccumulators we're looking at 193 million kilograms or 193
000 metric tons of nickel in Europe alone this isn't a meager sum knowing that Europe's total
nickel production 2021 was 243 500 tons so the important takeaway here is that agromining has
potential to complement current metal mining in cases like nickel the contribution to the global
supply chain could be significant if this is deployed on a large scale it could really help EVS
overcome the hurdles that they're going to face in the future but beyond that the agriminating
secondary benefit life soil remediation and Industrial Waste Recycling has the potential
to take mining to the next level and close the loop in the circular economy but of course as you
know nothing is ever perfect not even agrimining first there's the issue of invasive species we
have thousands of metal hoarding plans to choose from but we need to choose one that won't compete
with and replace indigenous plants in the region else they would invade and take over the entire
ecosystem and cause collapses down the line Second even though we've identified thousands
of them we don't know enough about most of the hyperaccumulative species to be able to
reproduce and successfully grow these plants in any Farm we still need more agronomic research to
optimize things like metal uptake growth biomass yield past resistance and more finally there is
a problem of depth through traditional mining we can access minerals buried thousands of feet in
the ground however agriminating is limited to How deep the roots of the hyperaccumulated plants can
go and these will rarely go deeper than a couple of feet leaving plenty of untapped Metals beneath
the ground but regardless of these cons what I find most exciting and interesting about the
concept behind agromining is the possibility of an additional primary source of key metals
like nickel manganese and others increasing our economically available reserves without pushing
the prices up since the total available resources are limited we still need to improve recycling
in a much more reliable secondary source for most metals but aggraminding buys us more time between
what we have now and what we'll need in 10 or 20 years helping us avoid unnecessary Supply
chains bottlenecks that'll make transitioning to a cleaner carbon neutral World harder it's
kind of like one of those ideas behind e-fuels in the sense that they're a promising technology
that can serve as a bridge to a more sustainable future so when you eat a tomato and people say
it's good for you or a banana has potassium well that is the plant sucking those nutrients out of
the ground up into the roots and into the stem to the fruit into the leaves and that's kind of how
all plants work but what's really interesting is how much of an impact agromining specific
crops can make and yes it is kind of a big deal and honestly I'm not so sure if it's a bridge
technology or maybe the future because there's so many areas where the concentration is just
too low for any kind of mining practicality but grow these plants especially if water is
not a concern and this might make sense of course water is a concern increasingly in more parts of
the world so that really is the one question I still would have and I would love to reach out
to one of these companies in the future to figure out how when you do these calculations how do you
know how much water these crops will take and how does that factor into the feasibility study
so this is still new but I will keep looking into it and if there's any progress that comes up we'll
make future videos covering this stuff all right guys thank you so much for watching don't forget
to subscribe if you're new hit that like button and the bell icon to get notifications and stuff
and check out this video next I think you're gonna like I'm Ricky this is stupid DaVinci