(The Center Square) — The hunt for critical minerals in Pennsylvania is on.
A multi-billion-dollar industry is at hand — if innovators can make the technology work and scale up from the lab to the field.
With lithium — used in solar energy, batteries, and other electronics — the commonwealth may have an opportunity to salvage the metal from oil and gas wastewater. If it works, Pennsylvania could see an economic boom that cleans up the environment.
“From my point of view, lithium is the highest value and the least-addressed market,” said Patrick Ho, CEO of Forager Station, a startup working on extraction technology. “There’s a lot of other rare earth minerals and metals that are super important, but in terms of just sheer bang for your buck, lithium is a pretty good one.”
Ho is working on an electrochemical process to capture lithium in wastewater and separate it from calcium and magnesium, which can gum…
