Opportunity Title:
Mining Innovations for Negative Emissions Resource Recovery (MINER)
Opportunity Number:
DE-FOA-0002707
Description:
The Mining Innovations for Negative Emissions Resource Recovery (MINER) program’s aim is to support the development of commercial-ready technologies that give the United States a net-zero or net negative emissions pathway toward increased domestic supplies of copper, nickel, lithium, cobalt, rare earth elements, and other critical elements required for the transition to clean energy. The lack of a secure domestic supply of these minerals poses a significant supply chain risk for the United States, especially with regard to batteries, renewable energy generation, and transmission. Meanwhile, the domestic mining industry faces the rapid depletion of high-profit deposits, increased cost of mining and processing, expensive, management, and accumulation of tailings, resulting in an overall reduced return of investment by conventional mining methods. Consequently, the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA–E) is issuing this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) with objectives to support the development of technology and approaches to: (1) decrease comminution energy by 50% compared to state-of-the-art; (2) increase yield of energy-relevant minerals by reducing unrecovered energy-relevant minerals in the tailings by 50% compared to state-of-the-art; and (3) enabling the negative emissions production of key minerals by sequestering >10 wt.% CO2e per metric ton of ore processed.
Four categories have been identified as necessary to achieve these goals and are discussed in detail later:
I. Mineral comminution
II. Improvements to beneficiation and processing to increase mineral yield
III. Carbon negative reactions
IV. Sensing, analyzing and enabling carbonation potential and mineralization
This FOA supports the development of viable technologies to achieve these goals cost-effectively with the potential to reach commercial scalability. Identified within this FOA are technical categories of interest in Section I.F. Also provided within this FOA are performance targets for the technical categories of interest in Section I.G. Lastly, Sections I.H and I.I of the FOA provide information on technoeconomic analysis (TEA) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) requirements, respectively.
Eligibility:
Unrestricted.
Total Amount Available:
$44,000,000 available.
Maximum Award:
$5,000,000
Minimum Award:
$500,000
Submission Details:
Due April 15, 2022 - Submissions to this FOA are due no later than 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time on 04/15/2022. Applicants are strongly encouraged to submit at least 48 hours in advance of the due date.
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