I cut out a bit that I had on how much it could scale to make it shorter, but there’s still a bit about that in the practical section. In general, phytomining could potentially produce the vast majority of some of the less common elements (thallium), and Krol-Sinclair and Hale say that the same is true for cobalt. It could also produce a pretty large chunk of nickel- I don’t have an exact number but I’m pretty confident that it could be a double-digit percentage of the world’s consumption. So yes, it scales, but figuring out how much it scales would be a good target for future research.
I was not expecting this to be the answer. That’s really fascinating. Phytomining is officially on my radar now, and I’ll be linking back to this article. I hope attention to it starts taking off.
I cut out a bit that I had on how much it could scale to make it shorter, but there’s still a bit about that in the practical section. In general, phytomining could potentially produce the vast majority of some of the less common elements (thallium), and Krol-Sinclair and Hale say that the same is true for cobalt. It could also produce a pretty large chunk of nickel- I don’t have an exact number but I’m pretty confident that it could be a double-digit percentage of the world’s consumption. So yes, it scales, but figuring out how much it scales would be a good target for future research.
I was not expecting this to be the answer. That’s really fascinating. Phytomining is officially on my radar now, and I’ll be linking back to this article. I hope attention to it starts taking off.