Many metals are essential in modern technologies, e.g., sustainable energy technologies. Growing demand and insufficient self-supply increase the necessity of developing own value chains for critical raw materials. In unexploited mineral resources, industry minerals and waste from the process industry, Norway has potential resources for production of critical raw materials in metallic form.
In this project, the unique competence of SINTEF Industry within process technology and metal production is utilized to develop technologies that enable the production of high added-value products from Norwegian resources.
The overall aim of SIP4Raw is to develop technologies that enable the extraction of critical metals from Norwegian mineral resources.
In the first step, selected raw-materials streams are characterized and evaluated as potential sources. Then, a combination of thermodynamic modelling and innovative methods within hydro-, pyro- and electrometallurgy is used to optimize the production of metals (high added-value products) from each raw material stream, at bench-scale.
The increasing demand for critical metals must be met by sustainable technologies from sourcing to products. Therefore, a complete sustainability assessment (social, environmental and economic) of the developed processes will also be carried out, as an important decision gate in the evaluation of the potential markets of the technological solutions under investigation.