Team from U of I and Stanford selected to receive $3M in federal funding for technology to extract critical minerals from wastewater

Funding Part of Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) Program to eliminate waste of essential minerals and increase domestic resiliency

Champaign, Ill. – Researchers from the University of Illinois and Stanford University have been selected to receive $3M in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). Their project is part of the Realize Energy-rich Compound Opportunities Valorizing Extraction from Refuse waters (RECOVER) program, which aims to reduce American dependence on ammonia and critical mineral imports by establishing new, secure domestic supply chains.

Led by Stanford professor Will Tarpeh and U of I civil and environmental engineering professor Jeremy Guest, this collaborative project will develop a novel Electrochemical Stripping, Adsorption, and Precipitation (ESAP) process that recovers commercial-grade ammonia, phosphorus, and magnesium from wastewater streams at water resource recovery facilities.

At U of I, Guest and his research group will develop computational models for the ESAP process and use techno-economic analysis (TEA) and life cycle assessment (LCA) to guide research, development, and deployment strategies pursued by Tarpeh’s team and by their commercial partner, Recovered Potential (Menlo Park, California).

The RECOVER program targets ammonia and critical minerals for their respective importance to fertilizer and energy technology production. Domestic wastewater from agriculture, mining, and oil and gas production contains enough ammonia and critical metals to displace all or much of U.S. imports, making it a viable foundation on which to fortify supply of both materials.

With this potential in mind, RECOVER supported projects will focus on developing new materials and processes to make extraction of ammonia and critical metals from wastewater productive, selective, and durable. Project teams will reduce the number of recovery steps compared to conventional approaches, and tailor their technologies to work within existing or new wastewater facilities. Crucially, the new wastewater processes must also recover these materials at a competitive market price.

Overall, Guest and Tarpeh’s work will transform waste into valuable products that meet regional nutrient demands, advance toward commercialization, and support a more sustainable circular economy, helping RECOVER work towards its goal to replace 50% of domestic ammonia supplies, and 100% of key critical metal supplies, through wastewater recovery.

Jeremy Guest is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering and the Levenick Professor and Director of the Levenick Center for a Climate-Smart Circular Bioeconomy at the University of Illinois. In addition to his role as the Director of the Levenick Center, Guest also serves as the Associate Director for Research for the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) and a Deputy Theme Lead for Sustainability for the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI, a Bioenergy Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy).