Welcome to the AGE of MAGNESIUM

welcome to the age of magnesium you probably haven't noticed it but it has already begun we have new sources of Supply New sources of demand and we have intermediary Technologies to match them without question we are looking at a convergence of Technologies and for now I'm not exactly certain how broad this convergence is but at the very least it includes electric vehicles highpressure die castings new Alloys and modern variations on the Dow process which all come together to make the impossible become inevitable hello YouTube I'm Michael SC and I think we should start at the consumer product which is the electric vehicle because the implications here are not obvious for electric vehicles lighter is always better but for all vehicles lighter is always better so what's the news this is the part that's not obvious and the answer is that with the Advent of electric vehicles finally somebody cares and here's what I mean by that when purchasing a normal car some nerds might care about fuel efficiency but the truth is that most buyers don't they care about the price the size the looks the handling the power and that's about it and if they can't afford the gasoline Bill afterwards they're simply going to drive their car less and blame the government so in turn manufacturers don't care either because their customers don't and while Regulators might might pretend to care in reality Regulators offer enough leeway such that real life fuel economy becomes relevant but with electric vehicles the story is entirely different in an electric vehicle the lower the weight the smaller the battery and the battery costs money this means that in electric cars for a certain targeted range the weight actually affects the cost of the car before it even leaves the factory and with the auto business being the ultimate business of penny pinching this is a big deal this is exactly why electric vehicles make such extensive use of aluminum already but while the switch from steel to aluminum was fairly straightforward the switch from aluminum to magnesium is going to be a bit more difficult this is where the intermediary Technologies is come in first of all magnesium is flammable if you get it hot enough it will start on fire now in the past automakers have attempted to circumvent this issue for instance in the casing of a gearbox this product is big and thick and has a lot of thermal mess so while it does burn if you manage to ignite it because it's so big taking a blowtorch to it will just not be enough to start the fire because the metal will dissipate the heat faster than it's being added so the ignition temperature is never reached the nature of the product largely circumvents the flammability issue although not entirely and this products do still burn in car fires but it was a good start obviously this means that you probably shouldn't be making body panels out of magnesium because their thin nature makes them starting on fire much more likely but Additionally you might not want to have hundreds and hundreds of kilograms of magnesium in the structural components especially in an electric car because although electric cars are 10 times less likely to catch fire if they do ignite they already have the problem of being very difficult to put out and 200 kg of magnesium would only supercharge this issue so the problem needs an actual solution and the actual solution is to make magnesium that simply doesn't burn and low and behold this has already been done modern magnesium Alloys can reach way higher temperatures without burning and in fact they can even melt without burning so this issue has basically been solved thus opening up magnesium for all components of the vehicle a secondary concern would be corrosion but this issue has been solved too with the researchers even calling it stainless magnesium and with the knowledge that neither of these issues have to be issues anymore it means that automakers and their suppliers can close the gap to actual vehicle components in their own material science labs so the first intermediary technology was new Alloys but Alloys aren't everything and here's the thing for the longest time the structural components of a vehicle were made from stem steel and for most of these components volume isn't an issue weight and strength are the only issues so replacing them with aluminum seems like the next logical step and yet the industry never did go in the stamped aluminum Direction I'm not sure exactly why stamped aluminum wasn't viable but in the end it doesn't matter because very recently like 3 years ago the industry did move to full aluminum structure by making use of high pressure die castings this move was pioneered by Tesla which is why these castings have come to be known Giga castings but Tesla did not invent the technology its suppliers did and the same suppliers are already working to upgrade these machines to get them ready for magnesium so high press die castings are the second intermediary technology so at this point we know that we want to use the Magnesium we know that we can use the Magnesium but where do we get the Magnesium from obviously there is a magnesium industry already in place but if magnesium is going to gain Traction in automotive the existing industry is a whole order of magnitude too small at least so production might need to grow exponentially and there are multiple startups in this space with the most famous one being agratha who have already made their first sale although symbolic and to get an idea of the process the platonic ideal of a magnesium extraction process goes like this you pump in water from the sea you take the Magnesium out of the sea water and you pump the water back into the sea no other inputs except energy and no other waste products except depleted sea water and the old school Dow process is almost exactly like this but not quite the D process goes like this you pump in seawat as the first step obviously you filter it and then you dredge up freaking oyster beds which are mostly calcium carbonate calcinate those at around 1,000° Celsius producing calcium oxide and CO2 which fills away you dump the calcium oxide into the seawat where it reacts with the water to form calcium hydroxide then the calcium hydroxide reacts with the magnesium chloride forming insoluble magnesium hydroxide which precipitates out of solution in a fairly selective reaction and in turn it produces highly soluble calcium chloride which remains in solution so at this point you collect the magnesium hydroxide precipitate from the bottom you dump the water into the ocean and you're almost finished but not quite magnesium hydroxide is insoluble and has an extremely high melting point so Direct electr assis isn't viable while any sort of thermal cracking likely only happens at some ridiculous temperature like 10,000 de or whatever so that isn't an option either so this molecule is quite useless which means that you have to neutralize it with hydrochloric acid and make magnesium chloride again and this compound melts at a much more manageable temperature which makes direct electrolysis possible and this is what completes the D process it's almost perfect it's Continuous Flow using pumps and conveyor belts it's well suited for electrification although it does use high heat if only it could find a way to eliminate the calcium carbonate input either by recycling it or by doing something entirely different for the purification step if it could do that it would be ideal and perfectly sustainable but arguably the biggest problem of the Dow process is that it actually went bankrupt sort of went bankrupt it was superseded by the rise of the pigeon process in China and from the perspective of all the points that we covered the pigeon process is way worse it uses Dolomite and feros silicon as the input so this you have to get from a mine it produces solid slag as a waste product so this you have to dump somewhere it's a batch process so it's inherently more labor intensive and inherently less scalable and because it's done in China it's all powered by coal but back in the '90s nobody cared about any of this so nobody bothered to help keep the Dow process alive in the face of subsidized Chinese competition but today the story is entirely different different politically different economically and different environmentally today we want localized magnesium and we want environmentally friendly magnesium and there are a number of startups working on it including the most famous one mraa from an interview that co-founder makes it pretty obvious that calcinating oyster shells is not part of their process and although he doesn't disclose what they're actually doing it does say that they have made magnesium from seawater already and that magnesium is fundamentally easier to decarbonize than other metals because there aren't any direct carbon emissions and the final technology the supplier to the supplier is actually solar photovoltaics as as we know solar is the cheapest source of energy in human history but only if you use it instantaneously you can store it overnight using batteries and this is still competitive but in order to get the crazy almost too cheap to measure prices those are only possible with instantaneous consumption this is a limitation but if you can adapt to it it's also an incredible advantage and actually I'm surprised that we're not seeing more Industrial operations molded their processes to it already but for mraa the hints are that they're very well aware of this advantage and at the very least their electrolysis process was designed to operate in a 100 Kelvin wide temperature range which means that for instance they can heat the salt up using solar power in instantaneous consumption during the daytime and thus use less energy during the night time and mraa is looking at as much as 50% dispatchability in their power consumption now in the list of Technologies an honorable mention might actually go to reverse osmosis although this is just me speculating but hear me out reverse osmosis might deserve an honorable mention because Americans love to build their houses in the desert and then complain about water availability despite living in one of the most water rich countries on the planet this salination is the obvious solution to this but the issue is that thisel Nation produces brine which actually pretty much isn't an issue but Americans have convinced themselves that it is an issue so if you build the Magnesium plant in Southern California and have it accept the brine from a desalination plant this might make approval easier for both of them since the total amount of brine that gets discharged would be vastly reduced and at the same time this might reduce the capex for the Magnesium plant in fact as I've come to learn while editing mraa has signed a contract to take in magnesium brinds from the San Francisco cisal ponds as a raw material and they consider capex efficiency to be very important so my speculation was definitely barking up the right tree so to recap we have automakers finally actually caring about the weight in their vehicles we have academics finally producing magnesium Alloys that can be used broadly inside the vehicle we have Automotive suppliers finally coming up with ways to make large magnesium structural components we have startups coming online probably solving for the platonic ideal of a magnesium from seawater process we have solar panels making the cheapest electricity in human history and maybe we have relevant developments in reverse osmosis and Americans wanting lawns in the desert so I would say that the convergence of knowledges is obvious now in a future video I would like to estimate how big the actual impact is how quickly can magnesium scale how quickly can it be deployed and how much energy it can save and if you want to catch that video when I publish it you should make sure to like And subscribe until then thank you for watching and make sure to let me know what you think about magnesium in the comments I read all your comments

Channel: Michael Size

Views: 144,637

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Id: PTV_UUIe268

Length: 13min 36sec (816 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 08 2024