More Value per Tonne: Rethinking How We Use Rock

Rocks may seem ordinary and ubiquitous, but they are the foundation of the geomaterials that underpin modern society - from cement in our built environment to the critical minerals in our smartphones and energy technologies. As the energy transition accelerates and demand for physical infrastructure grows, demand for materials is increasing rapidly. Simply extracting more resources to meet this demand is costly and environmentally consequential. Decades of innovation have made cars more fuel-efficient and batteries more effective; can we apply the same principle to Earth materials? Just as fuel efficiency asks how far we can go on a gallon of fuel, resource efficiency asks how much value we can obtain from a tonne of rock. Rocks themselves may be inexpensive, but extracting, processing, transporting, and developing or expanding the resource are not. Improving material retention and quarry utilization efficiency can therefore create more value from the resources we already extract.

This seminar explores three ways to make each tonne of rock more productive: retaining more usable material through feedstock redesign, extracting multiple values through water - rock interactions, and selecting better through smart sensing. Specifically, we will examine how feedstock redesign for cement can enable lower-temperature processing and decarbonization while conserving mass, increasing material yield and retention; how water interacting with rock under thermal and chemical gradients can mobilize valuable elements and create additional value streams; and how smart sensing could support more targeted extraction by revealing where valuable properties occur within heterogeneous rock resources. Ultimately, resource efficiency asks us to shift the question from how much we can extract to how much useful value we can obtain from what we extract.

Speaker: Tiziana Vanorio, Stanford University

Attend in person or online (see weblink)