A team of researchers have been given almost $2 million to see if seaweed in Southeast Alaska is absorbing rare earth elements.
The team, led by the University of Alaska Fairbanks, is specifically looking at seaweed growing in the water near Bokan Mountain on Prince of Wales Island. Bokan Mountain is known as a rich deposit of the coveted elements.
Rare earth elements, or REE’s, are a class of metals that are critical in satellites, magnets, cell phones, and the kinds of batteries used in green energies like solar. Currently, the market is dominated by China. This project is a response to the Department of Energy’s call for alternative domestic sources of the metals.
Seaweeds are like sponges, which means they can absorb rare earth elements just like nutrients. The question for researchers is how much?
“Being able to quantify how much they are able to accumulate, and specifically, what types of elements they’re uptaking – and where in the tissue are they housing it?” Schery Umanzor, the lead researcher on the project and a professor at UAF in Juneau specializing in seaweed farming, explained.
According to Umanzor, for every ton of REE’s mined in the traditional way, hundreds of tons of toxic chemicals are released into the environment. This project hopes to help change that.
“But this is what we are aligning with in humanity – green energies. And green energies are highly dependent on rare earth elements to a great extent. So, to make them green, we actually have to make mining green. And that’s really what excites me,” said Umanzor.
This spring, the team will be testing the seaweed samples to see if they are absorbing metals washed into the water. The thought is that they are washing off the rocks around Bokan Mountain into the stream systems, into the ocean, into the seaweed.
But even then, would there be enough to make a cellphone or a battery?
Umanzor said no.
The problem is scale. She said if the concentration of the metals in kelp is what they think it is, a metric ton of seaweed would produce about a gram of REE’s. That’s about the weight of a paperclip. And that’s only in the places in the ocean where there are REE’s in the first place.
This project isn’t focused on the extraction though. The goal is to understand the geochemistry of REE’s in a place like Bokan Mountain and the role seaweed could play.
“The project itself is very exploratory and is a moonshot on its own. But if it works, it can really be a game changer, not only for Alaska, but for the United States as a whole.”
For Umanzor, seaweed holds many secrets. And we are only beginning to tap into its potential.
“They are old creatures, and they are so versatile, you find them in freshwater, saltwater, in the tropics, in the Arctic,” she said. “So, I just wonder how is it that they can adapt to such extreme conditions? Imagine, for example, see within the intertidal, how come we go at low tide, and we step on them, and then when the tide comes up, they go back to life kind of thing?”
Southeast Alaska is quickly becoming a hub for seaweed farming and Umanzor believes now it is just a matter of scaling up.
