About Olokun Minerals
Named after the Yoruba deity Olokun (or Olókun), the revered ruler of all bodies of water, Olokun Minerals extracts valuable metals and minerals from salty, mineral-rich wastewater streams and creates products that can be used in concrete to build infrastructure, fertilizers for agriculture, and batteries for electronics and vehicles.
The Problem
The Future of Water
Less than 2% of the earth’s water is fresh water and accessible for us to use. Current clean water demand is already high and continues to increase, while fresh water sources are dwindling. Desalination increases our water supply by converting seawater to fresh water, but it produces a saline solution, called brine, three-times saltier than the ocean that threatens sea life and can contribute to more carbon emissions. In addition, key minerals used to expand agriculture and industry exist in those brine waste streams but are currently being under-utilized and thrown back into the ocean.
The Solution
Sustainable Mining
Olokun Minerals seeks to capture that brine waste before it goes into the ocean and mine minerals for critical supply chains. There are eleven ions that make up 99.9% of salts in seawater including sodium, magnesium, calcium, and potassium (to name a few). These minerals are the building blocks of our existence and are sold to a variety of industries, from food, textiles, and paper to construction, automobiles, and pharmaceutical products. The technology we are utilizing also allows us to extract ions like lithium from other brine waste streams including formation waters from oil and gas fracking operations, geothermal brines, salt flats, and e-waste recycling. We can therefore capture valuable metals and minerals from a larger array of different sources that in the past have not always been economically feasible to extract.
Technology
Traditionally, mineral extraction from brine streams has been done using ion exchange membranes where metal ions like lithium travel through a barrier with small holes just big enough for that ion to get through and nothing else. The problem with this method is you can only filter out one mineral at a time. We are exploring ways to mine multiple metals and minerals simultaneously using water instead of hydrochloric acid as an input which would allow brine mineral mining to be more time and resource efficient.