UNLIMITED, DECARBONIZED, SUSTAINABLE MAGNESIUM FROM SEAWATER
Top Innovator Tidal Metals ‘mines’ critical strategic metal in first-of-a-kind clean and green process
“The world currently discards 100 megatons of magnesium annually in desalination brine without capturing any of it. This is 100 times the total global annual Mg production, exceeding even aluminum production at 70 megatons per year. We have an unprecedented opportunity to unlock this vast resource of the lightest structural metal to accelerate the energy transition without digging a single mine or emitting a single ton of CO2.” --Howard Yuh, Co-Founder Tidal Metals
Interview with Howard Yuh, PhD, Co-Founder Tidal Metals
By Suzanne Forcese
WT: Congratulations on being named a Top Innovator in the Uplink Sustainable Mining Challenge!
Yuh: We are honored to be recognized alongside other innovative startups shaping the future of mining to be more sustainable, efficient, circular, and less carbon-intense. The resources needed to complete the global Energy Transition are vast and can only be accomplished with new innovations.
WT: Please give us an overview of Tidal Metals.
Yuh: Tidal Metals was founded in 2017 by three PhD scientists educated at MIT, Princeton, and Wisconsin. It is a VC funded deep-tech company based in New Jersey that has developed a breakthrough suite of innovations for producing critical minerals and metals from seawater and brines – with no waste, no carbon emissions, and no harm to the environment. Tidal Metals’ first application is producing magnesium metal from seawater or desalination waste brine using only electricity. Unlocking an economically competitive and unlimited supply of this structural metal is essential for lightweighting transportation, national security, hydrogen storage, and the manufacture of other metals.
WT: Howard, you are described as the original inventor of Tidal Metals’ foundational set of technologies leading the highly skilled team toward rapid commercialization. Can you tell us a bit about the journey?
Yuh: While working on a solar desalination grant proposal, I invented a new way to pump water vapor using a solid adsorbent driven by temperature changes. This was the genesis of Tidal Metals’ patented TSVP or temperature-swing vapor pump, which can efficiently evaporate heavy brines. Originally envisioned for zero liquid discharge desalination with valorized salt recovery, the team pivoted to focus on making magnesium because the market for this critical metal is established with strong demand signals and uncertain supply sources.
WT: Please comment on Team Talent and what each brings to the success of your start-up.
Yuh: Co-founder and COO, Dr. Kevin Tritz, Ph.D. in Engineering Physics from U. Wisconsin at Madison has two decades of experience in implementing control systems, operations, and engineering design.
Co-founder and CTO Dr. Ethan Schartman, Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Princeton, has two decades of experience in engineering design and rapid prototyping. Ethan is a genius designer, fabricator, and debugger. The mechanical designs of the TSVP and electrolysis systems are Ethan’s brainchild.
WT: Your process has been described as the most energy-efficient fractional crystallization technology in the world --the essential technology to the economical harvesting of magnesium from ocean waters and brines.
Yuh: Developing a revolutionary technology is only half the battle; bringing it to market requires the addition of an entirely different set of skills. Enter Duncan O’Brien, Tidal Metals’ Chief Strategy Officer and CFO. Duncan has had a storied career in business leadership bringing experience and strategic vision needed to grow and commercialize Tidal Metals’ technology.
WT: Tidal Metals was previously concentrating on desalination -- but you stumbled upon something significant, an aha! moment that changed the course of your start-up. What was that realization?
Yuh: While the Tidal Metals team has always targeted magnesium as a valuable metal to be recovered from seawater, the aha! moment really came around in late 2021 when we noticed the price of magnesium nearly quadrupled due to a self-imposed limit on carbon emissions by the Chinese government that essentially shut down magnesium production there.
At nearly the same time, in September 2021, the only remaining US producer, US Magnesium, declared force majeure and has not made any magnesium since then. Prices rose to all-time highs of $22,000/Tonne.
After realizing there were no producers in the West and the market potential of our technology when used for magnesium production, we decided to focus on capturing magnesium chloride and to expand our technology to include the other processes needed to create magnesium metal from seawater.
WT: Why magnesium?
Yuh: Magnesium (Mg) is identified as a critical, strategic metal by the US, EU, JP, UK, and KR. Increased use of this lightest of structural metals, weighing less than a quarter of steel, half of titanium and two-thirds of aluminum, will accelerate the decarbonization of mobility, enable electric aviation, and lightweight computers, communications, and other consumer products (the "3Cs"). Magnesium is also used extensively in military applications and is important for national defense.
Tidal Metals has developed a technology to economically access an estimated two billion megatons of magnesium in seawater, enough to last humanity for millennia. Our scalable, economic process for “mining” magnesium from seawater generates no waste and is fully electrified. When combined with renewable energy, magnesium becomes the sustainable, carbon-neutral and essentially unlimited structural metal of the future.
WT: And presently, where is magnesium used? What is the outlook for future magnesium use?
Yuh: Dominant uses are for structural components in automotive, defense, industrial tools and other 3C applications. In the US use tends to be concentrated in high performance vehicles where lightweighting carries a premium.
For the immediate future, magnesium is crucial for decarbonization of transportation. Regardless of the energy used, moving less mass requires less energy. Gasoline, diesel, batteries, or hydrogen vehicles all benefit. All the International Energy Agency energy transition plans rely on greatly increased automative Mg use, ranging from most conservative STEPS scenario where global demand for Mg doubles in the next ten years to the most aggressive NZE scenario where demand for Mg triples. The world has never added a megatonne of Mg production in a decade in the past. To scale this quickly, we must find new sources that do not require digging up rocks or building evaporation ponds.
WT: You mentioned aluminum, steel, and titanium, how might magnesium production affect these metals?
Yuh: All aluminum is used as alloys with other metals and nearly all aluminum alloys contain magnesium. Because aluminum is a much larger (70 megatons a year) market, a significant amount of Mg is needed to make aluminum. Steel desulfurization also uses magnesium. Titanium production completely depends on magnesium. Because the United States no longer produces magnesium, it also produces titanium at negligible levels (400Tonnes/year). The aerospace, defense, and marine industries are reliant on titanium.
Since magnesium is needed to make titanium, China controls global titanium supply as well.
In addition to these existing uses, we believe at Tidal Metals that new uses will drive the impact of decarbonized magnesium far beyond current uses in:
- advanced manufacturing techniques like thixomolding where Mg granules are injection cast as a hot pressurized slurry similar to plastic injection molding
- electric aviation such as eVTOL and orbital payloads
- hydrogen storage. Magnesium hydride (MgH2) is a promising candidate to store hydrogen at ambient conditions (no pressure, no cryogenics)
WT: 90% of global magnesium production comes from China using environmentally destructive terrestrial mining and the 80-year-old Pidgeon refining process that releases the most carbon of any structural metal – at least 37 tons CO2 e/ton Mg.
It takes between 10-14 Tons of coal to make each Ton of magnesium in China. Because the Pidgeon process is labor and energy intensive (high opex), but has low equipment cost (low capex), the Chinese magnesium industry is highly fractured with hundreds of small producers.
How can Tidal Metals provide a superior global answer to these problems?
Yuh: The need is to develop sustainable low-carbon footprint magnesium production that does not rely on imported feedstocks; that scales faster than any metal production technology has in the past; and that can compete economically with Chinese magnesium. We have created the technology suite needed to make this happen. By using seawater and renewable electricity we have the only process that can scale production from zero today to greater than one megatonne per year in 10 years.
Only seawater and electricity are required in the 4-step Tidal Metals process:
- Concentration Membrane Technologies: concentrate magnesium salts in seawater or desalination waste brine
- Crystallization: patented temperature-swing vapor pumps (TSVP) crystalize magnesium chloride hexahydrate from brine
- Dehydration: the same vapor pumps are used as part of the process to dehydrate magnesium chloride hexahydrate (MbCl2 6H2O) into anhydrous MgCl2
- Electrolysis: anhydrous MgCl2 is electrolyzed into metal.
WT: How close is Tidal Metals to commercialization?
Yuh: Tidal Metals has demonstrated its entire magnesium extraction process in its research and lab facilities located near Princeton, New Jersey. We are currently developing a 200 tpa (Tons per annum) pilot-scale plant to prove the scalability, energy efficiency and economics of the technology.
The step beyond the pilot will be a large industrial plant with minimum capacity of 10,000 tpa. We hope to attract both private and public sector funds to construct this first-of–a-kind plant to reshore the production of a critical metal.
There are applications beyond metal, for example the calcium and magnesium in seawater can be used to make cement for concrete without the carbon footprint. Tidal Metals is focusing on magnesium metal first but there are more riches to be had from the sea and other brines. We will share more details in 2025.
WT: Any last comments on the significance of your mission?
Yuh: We can simultaneously tackle the difficult challenge of water scarcity and create the decarbonized metal of our century.
As humans exhaust Earth’s freshwater cycle and the need to augment it with desalination grows, we must find ways to keep what was a nearly free commodity affordable for all. A clear path making this happen is by extracting valuable mineral dissolved in seawater at large scale.
