Primary Convener:
Jayde Aufrecht, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Convener:
Yoshiko Fujita, Idaho National Laboratory
Alex Beliaev, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Chair:
Jayde Aufrecht, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Critical materials are essential to energy production, transmission, and storage technologies, but their forecasted demand in the next decade far surpasses their primary supply. Some critical materials also exist in trace amounts in the environment, offering an opportunity to address supply challenges. Biological organisms (i.e. plants, bacteria, fungi) may be able to enhance trace critical material recovery through natural or engineered functions. This session aims to explore new tools, methods, and models to characterize biogeochemical processes that can impact the mobility or speciation of critical materials in the environment, and which could be harnessed for critical material recovery. We broadly invite contributions on the biogeochemical transformations of critical metals including studies on how critical minerals impact microbial or plant systems. Presentation topics may encompass computational transport simulations, laboratory and field scale case studies, model system experiments, geomicrobiology, genetic engineering, and molecular imaging techniques to characterize the distribution of critical minerals.

Index Terms
0414 Biogeochemical cycles, processes, and modeling
0461 Metals
0463 Microbe|mineral interactions
0489 Trace element cycling

GeoBurst Sessions:
Yes

Suggested Itineraries:
Critical Minerals and Renewable Energy

Neighborhoods:
3. Earth Covering

Cross-Listed:
MR - Mineral and Rock Physics