Mining Critical Metals and Elements from Seawater: Opportunities and Challenges
Related Experiment Video
Updated: Apr 14, 2026

Clean Sampling and Analysis of River and Estuarine Waters for Trace Metal Studies
Published on: July 1, 2016
Mamadou S Diallo1,2, Madhusudhana Rao Kotte1, Manki Cho1
1†Graduate School of EEWS (Energy, Environment, Water and Sustainability), Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, South Korea.
Abstract:
The availability and sustainable supply of technology metals and valuable elements is critical to the global economy. There is a growing realization that the development and deployment of the clean energy technologies and sustainable products and manufacturing industries of the 21st century will require large amounts of critical metals and valuable elements including rare-earth elements (REEs), platinum group metals (PGMs), lithium, copper, cobalt, silver, and gold. Advances in industrial ecology, water purification, and resource recovery have established that seawater is an important and largely untapped source of technology metals and valuable elements. This feature article discusses the opportunities and challenges of mining critical metals and elements from seawater. We highlight recent advances and provide an outlook of the future of metal mining and resource recovery from seawater.
More Related Videos
10:31Detection and Recovery of Palladium, Gold and Cobalt Metals from the Urban Mine Using Novel Sensors/Adsorbents Designated with Nanoscale Wagon-wheel-shaped Pores
Published on: December 6, 2015
10:20Quantification of Heavy Metals and Other Inorganic Contaminants on the Productivity of Microalgae
Published on: July 10, 2015
Related Concept Videos
Microbial Leaching
Microbes and Other Elemental Cycles
Acid Mine Drainage
Marine Microbial Ecology
Precipitation and Co-precipitation
Microbial Corrosion