Given these two market challenges, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is taking a closer look at the idea of recovering minerals from the hot brines that geothermal power plants pump out of the ground. These mineral-rich fluids contain a variety of rare earth elements and other valuable metals, but at conventional geothermal plants the only thing that gets extracted today is the heat.
A wasted opportunity? That’s what the DOE thinks. Last summer, the department committed more than $4 million to nine geothermal projects aimed at recovering both heat and minerals from brines. Work on those projects started in October, with results expected by fall 2016 or earlier.
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