A federal contract will help Texas-based Supra Elemental Recovery fine-tune and scale its mineral-recovery technology to retrieve scandium, one of countless critical minerals company leadership said could eventually be recovered.
Supra, a startup spun out of the University of Texas at Austin, launched earlier this year to develop its sponge-based mineral recovery technology. Dissolved industrial waste is pumped through sponge-like cartridges, which selectively capture minerals that can then be recovered through rinsing.
Katie Durham, co-founder and CEO, said the technology can potentially be tweaked to retrieve any mineral, but the initial focus is on gallium and scandium. The aerospace and energy industries are among those needing scandium, but the nation’s supply of that and several other critical minerals is completely import-dependent.
“We looked at the state of the country and critical minerals,” she said. Gallium and scandium “are high-priced elements, so we focused on those as our go-to-market elements. We can help solve the import problem and prove our technology’s value.”
The contract through the US Department of Defense will help the company do just that, Durham said. The Phase I Small Business Innovation Research contract, which runs for a year, will fund the company’s efforts to evaluate the technology for relevant feedstocks that would support its scalability.
Scandium supplies exist on shore, she said, but the infrastructure is lacking to capture it and put it back into use.
“We will develop the sponge at a larger scale, and we will use real-world industrial byproducts in a continual flow,” she said. The plan is to “go from lab-scale testing to a demonstration-scale environment.”
This effort should help shore up the domestic mineral supply amid a federal push to bolster the supply chain, including a presidential determination in July authorizing the Secretary of Commerce to restrict the export of critical minerals.
The sponges also help ensure higher purity and work across a wide pH range, which she said allows companies to use a variety of solvents to pull minerals from the cartridges — including water.
Durham sees the contract as another step toward the company’s overall expansion. The technology can be tuned to retrieve potentially any element by swapping the cartridge’s receptors, she said, so proving its capabilities with scandium will build confidence and generate revenue to fund those efforts. Company researchers have a pipeline of cartridges they’re working on.
She said long-term goals include to both supply companies with Supra sponges and to look at the company installing its own systems to serve as the processor.
“Our vision is to deploy these sponges far and wide,” she said. “Our goal is to see thousands of these sponges in the world.”
Other domestic companies working on scandium recovery technology include Coherent, Winner Water Services and USA Rare Earth. The US government is also backing the buildout of a scandium mine by Sunrise Energy Metals in Australia.
