ASU prof turns trash into treasure
Nick Rolston (right), an assistant professor of electrical engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University, works in the lab with undergraduate student Daniel Abreu (left). Rolston was recently awarded a pair of grants from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement’s Scialog: Sustainable Minerals, Metals, and Materials conference to improve the extraction of critical elements from copper mining byproducts and explore algae’s potential to extract precious materials from the oceans. Photo by Erika Gronek/ASU
The Research Corporation for Science Advancement, or RCSA, regularly hosts a series of discussions known as Scialog, a portmanteau of science and dialogue. Created in 2010, the Scialog format aims to accelerate breakthroughs by initiating dialogues about scientific themes of global importance among a creative network of researchers.
The latest event in the series, Scialog: Sustainable Minerals, Metals, and Materials, is a three-year initiative that aims to spark advances in the mining, design, manufacturing and disposal of materials needed to achieve a more sustainable and low-carbon energy system.
One of the researchers selected to participate was Nick Rolston, an assistant professor of electrical engineering in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. Kailong Jin, an assistant professor of chemical engineering in the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy, also part of the Fulton Schools, was also among the 50 fellows chosen to participate in Scialog.
Rolston was selected to be part of two interdisciplinary, multiuniversity teams of researchers who have been awarded grants to fund the start of a pair of research projects.
“This is a bit of a pivot for our group as our focus has been on renewable energy materials,” Rolston says.
However, Rolston finds a connection to his research when considering the lack of resources available to achieve sustainable goals, such as creating enough solar panel cells to power the planet.
“Both of the projects are trying to understand how we can be better stewards,” Rolston says. “How can we take what might be considered as waste and convert it into something more useful?”
Mining for more
The Arizona copper mining industry produced 74% of the copper in the United States in 2023. With all that mining, there are also byproducts beyond copper that often include other traces of valuable critical materials like nickel or silver that can also be extracted.
Rolston’s first project is called “Electrocatalyst Formation From Extracted Critical Trace Elements in Copper Ores,” or EFFECT ECO. He is teaming with Isabel Barton, an associate professor of mining and geological engineering at the University of Arizona, and Agnes Thorarinsdottir, an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Rochester, to simultaneously enhance the extraction of trace critical elements from copper sulfide ores, develop more sustainable processing methods to copper sulfides and create electrocatalysts.
“Our idea was to develop a technique to improve the harvesting of those secondary products, which are not often desired when you’re doing copper mining, though they’re actually more valuable,” Rolston says. “We use the existing infrastructure of copper mining to create and harvest useful precious materials.”
These critical materials are all needed to address technology industry shortages, such as the silver required in microelectronics and solar panels, which limit the quantity that can be produced.
“Our economy is rapidly changing; therefore, the demand for materials is going to likely outpace the supply,” Rolston says. “Either there’s not going to be enough, or there are going to be significant environmental effects to try to extract as much as we’re consuming.”
Digging in the deep
Rolston’s second project takes to the sea and is focused on using algae and seaweed in mining due to their ability to concentrate precious materials at very high levels in the oceans. Having heavy metals and waste in oceans is not desirable, and algae can serve as a filter that can be used to collect and extract some of these same types of precious materials.
For the project, “Seaweed for Critical Element Extraction and Transformation,” or Sea-CrEEt, Rolston is teaming with Loretta Roberson, an associate scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory, and Julian West, an assistant professor of chemistry at Rice University.
“It turns out, a lot of times critical materials are heavier elements,” Rolston says. “Things like carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen are abundant, but those are all very light elements. If you go down the periodic table, you find silver and gold and platinum but also others like tellurium, technetium and lanthanum that are less common.”
If a small amount of a material or mineral is in the ocean, passing it through the algae can help concentrate it. Rolston’s team is exploring whether certain types of algae can better absorb different materials. They also want to learn where it is concentrated within the algae, so they could ultimately try to extract that material from the algae itself for use in other applications.
Turning dialogue into future research direction
Rolston’s two projects were among the six awarded to interdisciplinary teams as part of Scialog and were funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
One of the distinctive features of Scialog is its algorithmic matching of participants into breakout groups to maximize interaction among researchers who might never meet in their usual scientific silos.
Participants are challenged to get to know each other and their research to envision collaboration, leverage different approaches and methods, and determine which novel problems they could tackle together.
“It’s a really beautiful process,” Rolston says. “They create discussion groups, and it could be uncomfortable because I didn’t know anything about these people, and the reason I say uncomfortable is because you sit down and then you’re having to communicate. You have to distill down and describe what you’re doing in a way that’s understandable.”
Through a series of four discussion groups, Rolston had two where the group just clicked and they realized there was a topic that was of interest to all of them.
Rolston also credits ASU’s investments in facilities as a major reason for receiving these grants.
“ASU has so much unique expertise and equipment,” Rolston says. “In both projects, we are using a specific tool that ASU has brought in that profiles through the material and gives the amount of elements at each location. It’s like having a magical microscope that can peel away layers of material. When I shared that our group had worked on this, folks were immediately very interested.”
The opportunity to get out of his comfort zone and explore projects that he wouldn’t otherwise be a part of made Scialog a great experience for Rolston.
“A lot of the projects we’re working on are based on our expertise, so it’s such a joy to have a chance to work on something quite a bit different,” Rolston says. “These projects can help provide perspective and give us a better understanding of the science behind these other areas, which in five or 10 years from now could be pillars of our research group going forward.”
Are you an undergraduate or master’s degree student interested in participating in this research and joining ASU Assistant Professor Nick Rolston’s lab team? Contact him at nicholas.rolston@asu.edu to learn more.
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