In this episode of the Rare Earth Exchanges podcast, host Dustin Olsen and co-host Daniel O’Connor engage with Buz Barstow from Cornell University, who discusses his extensive background in biology and physics, and his innovative work in extracting rare earth elements using microbial methods. The conversation covers the challenges of rare earth extraction, the role of synthetic biology, and the support from ARPA-E in advancing these technologies. Barstow highlights the importance of collaboration and the potential of genetically modified organisms like Gluconobacter in improving extraction efficiency while addressing environmental concerns. In this conversation, Daniel O’Connor and Buz Barstow discuss innovative methods for extracting rare earth elements, focusing on the potential of bio-lixiviants and genetic engineering. They explore the challenges of scaling up production, the importance of alternative feedstocks like cellulosic sugars, and the need for sustainable practices in mining. Buz shares insights on the complexities of genetic editing in bacteria and the future of rare earth extraction technologies, emphasizing the importance of diverse approaches to overcome existing hurdles.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Rare Earth Extraction
02:13 Buzz Barstow’s Journey and Background
05:40 The Rare Earth Problem and Technological Innovations
09:51 Support from ARPA-E and Collaborative Efforts
12:36 Microbial Approaches to Rare Earth Extraction
18:02 Comparing Traditional and Innovative Extraction Methods
26:28 The Role of Gluconobacter in Rare Earth Extraction
28:01 Patenting and Future Potential
29:27 Innovative Approaches to Rare Earth Element Extraction
30:23 Scaling Up: Short, Medium, and Long-Term Goals
32:28 Genetic Engineering and Bacterial Growth Challenges
34:52 The Role of Glucose and Alternative Feedstocks
36:43 Cellulosic Hydrolysate: A Game Changer for Bio-lixiviants
39:54 Advice for Aspiring Innovators in Rare Earth Mining
42:46 Competing Technologies in Rare Earth Extraction
Listen to the REEx Podcast
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Dustin Olsen (00:01.31)
Hi everyone, welcome to the Rare Earth Exchanges podcast. You’re joining me, Dustin, and my co-host Daniel. Today we’ve got Buzz Barstow from Cornell University, and he’s doing some really exciting things with extracting rares. And so let’s dive into it. So Buzz, can you start us off and just tell us how long have you been working at Cornell and just some of your background? How did you get into all of this?
Buz Barstow (00:26.697)
Gosh, so where to start? So I think probably Cornell is probably the longest professional relationship I’ve had in my life. was, so I’ve been a faculty member there for like seven and a half years, I think, since the start of 2018. But before that, I was a graduate student there as well for seven years.
So I was originally, my undergrad degree is in physics and my PhD is in biological physics. somewhere along the way, I think it was Hurricane Katrina. I remember becoming very worried about climate change and thinking, you know, somebody’s got to do something about this.
And I felt that biology had sort of unique capabilities for solving that problem. And at the time, nobody seemed to be really doing anything like that. I later found out they were. sort of glad in retrospect, actually, that I didn’t know that they were. Because I wonder if I would have been scared off or something. there was very little evidence that anybody was doing.
much in the area. And this sounds like a great thing to do. And then I was a postdoc at Harvard Medical School. there I learned a lot more about synthetic biology, sort of how biology really works.
And I also learned that…
Buz Barstow (02:18.225)
synthetic biology as it was at the time, was operating under the principle that we thought knew everything that we need to know about biology to engineer it. And I think that view is completely wrong. It turns out that we really understand, maybe this was obvious to other people, it wasn’t obvious to me at the time, but
We understand a handful of biomedically relevant model organisms. And you can literally count them on, I say you could count them on two hands, but then I run out of names after five fingers. So it’s not very many. And even then we don’t understand them that well.
A lot of the energy in biology over the past 50 years or so has really been focused on biomedical applications of engineering biology, of understanding it. All the other really interesting aspects of biology done by weird organisms in weird places
have really been neglected. The money just hasn’t been there to do anything.
like sort of that extensive. I don’t want to say not that exciting because there’s loads of really exciting biology out there. But we don’t understand it nearly well enough to sort of harness it through engineering. A really good example of this is sort of the attempts to make aviation work at the sort of end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century, where we had this sort of
Buz Barstow (04:11.02)
Large is the wrong word, people knew about birds. They had an idea how birds’ wings worked, how birds could manipulate airflow to stay aloft, how you could build a wing to stay aloft, how a bird could control its flight. But when the Wright brothers seriously tried to build an aircraft using the existing body of knowledge,
They discovered that there were some serious holes in it.
Buz Barstow (04:47.504)
It turns out that the equations that describe sort of how a wing works, how it generates lift, how it causes drag, they’re sort of approximately right, but they’re not exactly right. And so the Wright brothers had to do foundational studies in aerodynamics to get their aircraft off the ground. And if today you can go to the Smithsonian and you’ll see the flyer, but right next to it, there’s a wind tunnel that they built in their bicycle store to study
how wing shape affects lift and drag. And in just a few months, they were able to figure out the right wing shape and get that aircraft off the ground. And so we’re in a similar situation with applying biology to problems in sort of energy and climate.
A good friend of mine, Michael Bame, who’s now an associate professor at Harvard and I, we came up with a technology we call Knockout Sudoku. It lets us knock out genes in an organism. It could be gluconobacter, could be vibrio-natrogens, it could be shewanella, another bug that we’ve worked on to harness its potential in rare earth elements.
Dustin Olsen (05:48.669)
Thanks.
Buz Barstow (06:04.836)
We can knock out the jeans very cheaply and easily. instead of spending millions of dollars, you spend a few thousand dollars instead.
then once you’ve done that, you can start to understand the biology. It doesn’t tell you everything. And again, I’d be misrepresenting it if I said it could. But it tells you quite a lot that you didn’t know before.
Buz Barstow (06:31.694)
The rare earth problem, think I first became aware of it. I remember sort of in the late 2000s, we started seeing all these like very cheap, but very strong magnets sort of being available. I think you could buy them on Amazon, right? And you could do kind of cool things with them. you could sort of, I think we liked them because you could sort of…
throw razor blades at them and the razor blades would stick to them. But you could use them to move around beads for DNA separation. I like, this is kind of interesting. I wonder how this is made. And I think this is how I became aware of the neodymium iron boron magnets. This is cool. And then very soon after that.
I remember that there was this, Chinese government instituted an export ban on rare earths that affected the US and China. And all of a sudden, the sort of the value of these things, the real value of these things in sustainability, sort of national security became very, very apparent. I thought, gosh, I wonder if biology can do something with this.
Then I just let the idea sort of lie fallow for a few years. And I was, you know, I didn’t have like the most successful postdoc. This is the sort of part of your career after your PhD. And nothing worked, but I was lucky enough to get a position at Princeton as a fellow. And that let me develop this sort of Sudoku technology. And after that, you know, I sort of well, now it’s time to come back to all the areas where we can apply this.
And rare earths were one of them. And I remember I did my interview at Cornell and in it you sort of get asked, you know, what are you going to do? You you’ve told us what you’ve done. What are you going to do? And so I gave a list of all these problems in sustainability that I wanted to solve with biology. And the first one I brought up was rare earths.
Buz Barstow (08:55.984)
Normally, when I bring up biology, sustainability, people’s eyes glaze over. I think it’s a little too science fiction. But with this, people just got it instantly. From then on, I was very, very lucky to be at the right place at the right time multiple times.
Buz Barstow (09:21.584)
I think maybe one of the biggest breaks we got actually was the Trump administration, the first Trump administration. Again, you would think just on the surface, for somebody like me interested in solving climate change, this would be the worst thing ever. It actually turned out they have this interest, they had, and they still have this interest in minerals because to his credit and to the administration’s credit, they understand their strategic importance.
Dustin Olsen (09:37.212)
Thanks.
Buz Barstow (09:51.65)
Maybe not for solving climate change, but for a huge number of other things.
Buz Barstow (10:00.333)
And so we were very lucky. ARPA-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, they created this program called Biomining, a program officer called Doug Wicks, who if you haven’t had on, you should. He’s amazing to talk to. He was an incredibly farsighted guy. And he sort of, again, recognized that in the future,
we need new mining technologies. And he often quips, right? If you were to take Pliny the Elder, know, sort of the Roman statement, happened to write a treatise on mining, I think in the first century AD, he says, if you were to take him forward in time, 2,000 years, and you were to take him to a modern mine, the thing that would shock him the most would be the trucks.
everything else you’d recognize. What that means is there’s an enormous amount of sort of improvement we could potentially do in mining technology.
Dustin Olsen (11:00.188)
.
Buz Barstow (11:09.391)
So what we were able to do, we were sort of given support from ARPA-E and also from Cornell. The universities, they’re very good. American universities are sort of unique, I think, in their ability to sort of bootstrap unconventional research that isn’t sort of ready for federal funding yet. And in the couple of years, sort of leading up to…
leading up to sort of support from RPE. Cornell had backed us, you know, again, they’d understood the importance of Rare Earths and they’d allowed me to sort of assemble a team. also, and Cornell is sort of, I think, unusual, at least in my experience amongst the Ivies and the sort of, you know, Ivy plus universities, in that it’s really good at sort of cultivating relationships between faculty.
And I was very, very lucky. I randomly got seated next to a guy called Esteban Goetzel, who was a geologist at a workshop on climate change solutions. And it was just a few months after I joined the faculty. And he’d just been there for about a year. And we sort of hit it off instantly. again, Cornell’s support allows you to kind of build that relationship and
Without him, I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere, honestly. Combining biology and appreciation of the importance of minerals, I think that comes from physics. And then an ability to actually do geology, I think was crucial to making this work.
Buz Barstow (13:03.427)
Now, so I mentioned there are two microbes here, or maybe three.
When I pitched these ideas to Cornell, I said I wanted to work on a microbe called Aspergillus terius. When I’d written my research plan, I’d seen that there had been some sort nascent work in getting Aspergillus to dissolve monazite. This is a mineral that’s common in Chinese deposits. It’s also common in coal fly ash, and it hosts rare earths. But its efficiency was really low. I said, okay,
I think we can improve this with genetic engineering.
And when you start a lab, have to fill out all these safety forms.
Turns out sort of aspergillus terrius is persona non grata at Cornell. think they’ve had more than one incident where it’s sort of infected somebody who has a compromised immune system. So they said, nobody’s ever working on this again. And I thought, my God, what am going to do? So I called up this guy called Paul Canfield, who is an expert on rare earths at
Buz Barstow (14:26.399)
Ames lab at Iowa State. And I’d met him a few years earlier and I asked him, you know, is there anybody in the country working on rare earths biology? And he said, well, I don’t know, I’ll scratch my head. A few days later, scratching his head. He puts me in touch with a pair of researchers at Idaho National Lab, which is part of the Critical Materials Institute called Yoshko, Fujita and David Reed.
And they had started working on a microbe on gluconobacter. And they’d even shown that it’s almost good enough to build an industrial process that can extract rare earths profitably. But it’s not quite good enough. And I called them up and they were very nice to share their time. They even shared this microbe with us.
And we said, okay, if we could understand how gluconovector at the genetic level is dissolving rocks, we can genetically engineer it to do it better.
Buz Barstow (15:38.573)
Alexa Schmitz, she was my first postdoc in my lab. I’d looked for somebody just right for the job from even before I arrived at Cornell. I never quite found anybody. And then I was quite right. I felt was quite right. And then I met Alexa at this talk I gave in plant science next door to my department.
And Alexa, I think she asked all the right questions at my seminar. after she said she was looking for a postdoc for this, said, great, I’ll… And so she was one of my first hires. And so the great thing about working with somebody like a plant scientist, compared to working with somebody like myself is…
that she’s used to doing things that take an extremely long time. A physicist is used to things happening instantly. A traditional synthetic biologist who works with E. coli, the lab workhorse, they’re used to things happening overnight. And the blood vessel doesn’t do anything overnight. It takes forever.
Daniel O’Connor (16:37.477)
you
Buz Barstow (17:02.764)
Alexa had the right amount of patience to make this work. She was able to knock out all the genes in its genome and then she could study it. She could do a test on every gene knockout and she could say, which one of these is important?
for dissolving or for making acids, which we think is sort of the, very important part of dissolving a rock. It’s not the only part. Yes, of course.
Daniel O’Connor (17:31.749)
And Buzz, if I could just chime in just for a second. And the context here is you’re finding a more efficient, almost circular economy centric way of not only dissolving host rock, but then separating the rare earth element metal from other metals or elements.
Correct? This is the context.
Buz Barstow (18:02.764)
That’s exactly right. Yes, exactly. Both of the traditional ways, you know, the traditional way of dissolving rock is environmentally horrible. And then the traditional way of separating is environmentally horrible as well. And so we’re looking for better ways to do both. Yes. Yeah. Yes.
Daniel O’Connor (18:12.238)
Yes.
Daniel O’Connor (18:16.665)
Yes.
Daniel O’Connor (18:21.464)
Yes, yes. So with that in mind, so what I hear you saying so far, just so we can keep tying all this together, is the discovery of gluconobacter was these folks that you ran into, were they the first ones to be looking into this investigation?
Buz Barstow (18:31.533)
Yes.
Buz Barstow (18:44.898)
I think they were. I couldn’t say they were the first first, but I think they were definitely some of the early ones. And if you get a chance, you should definitely talk to them as well. I think they were definitely very early. People knew that gluconobacter could dissolve minerals for quite a long time because it dissolves phosphates, which are the host of lot of rare earths.
But it does it, like it does it sort of mainly to get phosphate, I think. I don’t think it necessarily does it to get rarer earths.
Daniel O’Connor (19:21.334)
Right, right. So as you all, now when you went about doing this and it was written up in a journal and Earth Exchanges did an article and we’ll send it to you and your colleagues, but we did an article about this. Can you describe like the study that you set up to do this? Was it with partners? Was it just in the academic setting? Were there…
Buz Barstow (19:35.843)
Yes.
Daniel O’Connor (19:49.449)
any government or DOE elements to this study.
Buz Barstow (19:54.862)
So it was purely, the first paper we published was completely Cornell people. was funded by ARPA-E, which is part of the Department of Energy, but other than that, they didn’t really have anything to do with it. Yeah, again, we had several labs. We had my lab, Esteban Gotsel’s lab, and also
Daniel O’Connor (19:59.384)
Yeah.
Daniel O’Connor (20:09.623)
Right.
Buz Barstow (20:23.657)
Mingming Wu, who’s a colleague of mine, and Megan Holycross, who’s a colleague of Esteban’s in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Later, after we’d done that, and we patented the genetic edits that we needed to improve gluconobacter, Alexa got an award from the Activate Foundation, which is this lab bench to start up.
foundation, I guess. And that was what allowed her to start Regen.
Daniel O’Connor (21:02.766)
Got it. And that’s a question, sorry, but I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, but Regen, one of the things that we weren’t sure about, because in your Cornell article, the intellectual property that you all have patented, on the one hand, it says, if you’re interested in, for any kind of entrepreneurs, it basically says it’s available.
Buz Barstow (21:27.255)
Yeah.
Daniel O’Connor (21:29.933)
But then there’s Regen. Is Regen a spin-off of Cornell to commercialize what you all have tested?
Buz Barstow (21:38.316)
Yes, exactly. That’s right. It’s a completely separate entity from Cornell. For several years, think, 2020, I think for three years, it was hosted inside Cornell in an incubator. But then they recently moved out to a building which is near the airport, which is actually
Daniel O’Connor (21:40.717)
Okay.
Daniel O’Connor (21:59.168)
Right. Yeah.
Buz Barstow (22:06.881)
just down the road from my house.
Daniel O’Connor (22:08.834)
Awesome. getting back to it, so when you all did these studies, if you had to compare this approach, and there’s two elements, there’s the gluconobacter, but then there’s another microbe, I think. And can you tell us, like, how does this compare to the more traditional ways today that maybe over in China or something, they’re separating these materials?
Buz Barstow (22:14.593)
Yes.
Buz Barstow (22:39.503)
my gosh, yeah, can definitely try. can definitely try. if you think about rare earth elements, they’re, if you go, I’m sure all your listeners know, right, they’re sort of at the bottom of the periodic table. they’re like, if you look on column three, there’s like scandium and then yttrium. And then there’s this sort of missing whole, right? And it’s not one element.
it’s actually a whole series of elements, the lanthanides. And what it means is they’re all very chemically extremely similar. They have very similar ionic radii. At least in stochem neutral conditions, they have the same valence state. So separating them chemically is extremely difficult because you can’t say, well, a compound which binds one
Daniel O’Connor (23:11.189)
Right.
Buz Barstow (23:37.377)
binds all the other ones as well, because they sort of look the same. And the way that, as I understand it, they’re separated today in a commercial process is you set up two organic solvents.
Daniel O’Connor (23:56.245)
Mm-hmm.
Buz Barstow (24:00.264)
One is heavier than the other. you know, they float on, you one floats on top of the other one. And then each one of these has an extractant molecule dissolved in it. And that extract, so the organic solvent is already horrible for your health. The extractant is even more horrible.
And that what sort of say the extractant in the top stream, in the top liquid, has got a slight, a very slight preference for say one or a handful of lanthanides, let’s say light lanthanides. And then the extractant molecule in the lower solution, in the lower liquid, has got a slightly elevated preference for another group of lanthanides.
let’s say the heavy lanthanides, we take these two pieces of liquid and we flow them opposite to one another in a device called the mixer settler. And these two streams are miles long. And over those miles and miles, the light lanthanides sort of go, say, in the top and the heavy ones go in the bottom. And then you sort of have these two streams and you have sort of…
like this. And eventually you get some separation. And then you do that again. And you keep separating, you sort of keep separating and you enrich for say an individual lanthanide eventually. And that process was sort of perfected in the US, I think for Apollo in the 60s. And it was operated for several decades until
Daniel O’Connor (25:30.656)
Right.
Buz Barstow (25:45.185)
Marty Weems, was the CEO of Western Rare Earths, one of the companies that’s operating in the Western US to tap new deposits of rare earths. He said to me that starting in the 80s and the early 90s, the Environmental Protection Agency got teeth, he said. It started to crack down on things like this.
Justifiably right. think anybody would say this is not good for the environment in any way, shape or form. And the solution was not to say, let’s make a better process. The solution was to outsource it to China and just do it there instead.
Daniel O’Connor (26:16.414)
Right. Right.
Daniel O’Connor (26:28.766)
Yeah, yes, yeah, I understood. And obviously, you know, just to get some of the context that we report on, obviously, a lot, we often report on what’s going on in China, the state-backed companies, and just so that, you know, Western audiences have a better idea. It can seem mysterious over there sometimes. Now, let’s look at, so what we reported, and please let us know if this is correct, that
Buz Barstow (26:37.568)
Yes.
Buz Barstow (26:49.536)
Yes.
Daniel O’Connor (26:58.016)
At the center of this innovation was the gluconobacter oxidans. And this genetically modified bacterium not only survives extreme acidity, but also generates acid byproducts, enhancing rare earth element, bleaching by up to 73%. And then separately,
Buz Barstow (27:05.248)
Yes.
Daniel O’Connor (27:23.488)
The other modification to geoxydens increases the rare earth element extraction by up to 111 % based improvement based on the novel gene editing. And again, I think that was Alexa that was doing that. Was that Alexa doing? Is that a… Sabrina, sorry, sorry. Okay, okay.
Dustin Olsen (27:45.625)
you
Buz Barstow (27:47.5)
I it was Sabrina. I think that one was Sabrina. I think that was Sabrina, yeah.
Daniel O’Connor (27:52.447)
But just to finish, so 111 % of the novel gene editing strategies that identify 89 relevant biomining genes, and that’s what you were mapping out. Those different gene sets also enhance a natural rock weathering for carbon capture, accelerating mineral carbonation by a factor of 58.
Buz Barstow (28:01.184)
Yeah.
Daniel O’Connor (28:19.816)
You this is kind of amazing. mean, you’re on to, before we get into commercialization, I mean, this has serious potential. You’ve patented, how many patents do you have for this?
Buz Barstow (28:25.217)
plus.
Buz Barstow (28:30.22)
Gosh, that’s a great question. So not as many as I would like is the answer. So gosh, so I actually, that’s a great question. I don’t want to say and then be wrong. Cornell actually has actually been a little bit, I would say cautious about patenting.
lately, because, you know, you know, coming through COVID, and then because of the sort of the funding freeze on universities, Cornell has, you know, filing a patent costs a lot of money, especially internationally. And so they’ve been, they’ve been very reluctant to spend on things that don’t have a sort of immediate take up, unfortunately.
Daniel O’Connor (29:15.263)
Yeah, I understood. Yes. So, yes.
Daniel O’Connor (29:27.037)
We understand, but I will tell you separate and apart, Buzz. This is fascinating, the fact that you have this patent. We’d like to learn more on that. look, let’s be creative and open-minded. Let’s say some company licenses this patent, structures a deal with, or Regen, let’s say Regen raises some money. To have an alternative separation,
Buz Barstow (29:31.348)
Yes.
Buz Barstow (29:36.672)
Yes.
Buz Barstow (29:45.409)
Yes.
Buz Barstow (29:50.838)
Yes.
Daniel O’Connor (29:55.23)
Program that could start to scale up, know looking at all the things that have to happen all the you know Serious, I would imagine milestones that are in place for something like this to really be Prime time. I mean what would we broke it down to short term medium term long term. So short term would be one to three years Medium term three to five years long term five to ten years. What’s possible in the short run? What do you?
Assuming there was interest in this approach, this method, what would that look like? What needs to happen in one to two years?
Buz Barstow (30:33.228)
I think, and actually, Alexa is definitely the best person to talk to about this. So I think, so the first thing that you would want to know is how big does this scale? Like how much biolexiviant, this is the sort of mineral dissolving cocktail that gluconobacter makes.
How much of this can you actually make? And how does that compare with how efficiently you can make it at lab scale? And if you were to interview her, strongly recommend you do. I think she would tell you that they have made in the past three years, I think, a lot of progress in doing this.
Daniel O’Connor (31:02.45)
Yeah, right.
Daniel O’Connor (31:09.747)
Right.
Daniel O’Connor (31:14.653)
Yes.
Daniel O’Connor (31:23.282)
Wow. Wow.
Buz Barstow (31:24.926)
And sort of scaling it up. And then the next challenge, let’s say, four to five years is scaling up even more. It’s sort of make it even bigger. So if I remember again from my discussions with Alexa, she wants a pilot plant in sort of under 10 years. Something that could supply, could give a sort of
Daniel O’Connor (31:32.488)
Yeah.
Daniel O’Connor (31:37.266)
Yes.
Daniel O’Connor (31:49.694)
Yeah.
Buz Barstow (31:54.88)
finished product to like an end user.
Daniel O’Connor (31:58.845)
Yes, and I think what’s very important is alternative approaches that have a better environmental footprint. Now, if we look at the actual bacteria, the genes that you configure to have to make this bacteria, now, like how difficult is it to make it? Like is it, you know, the
the bacteria itself. Is it simple, moderately complex or complex? And is it difficult? The next question is scale it up. Because you have to produce this in a controlled environment to be able to continuously separate than to scale out. And then hopefully over time, we’re not as dependent on China. We can be a little more independent.
Buz Barstow (32:49.099)
Yeah.
Buz Barstow (32:56.321)
gosh, that’s okay. So how I’m going to break this down. so doing genetic edits in gluconobacteria sort of genetically editing it is, sort of doable, but it’s not like, it’s not easy. It’s sort of, it’s a bit of a pain in the ass, but it’s doable. It’s tractable. And we’re getting, we get better at it every day and Regen gets better at it every day, but it’s still not totally easy.
Daniel O’Connor (33:11.928)
Mm. Okay.
Buz Barstow (33:23.413)
But once you’ve done that, once you’ve made the edit, and it really is just, you know, sort of blood, sweat and tears to make it work. Once you’ve done that, growing gluconobacteria is surprisingly easy, as long as you give it food. And my colleague, Gillian Goldfarb, who’s a professor in chemical and biological engineering.
Daniel O’Connor (33:49.808)
Hmm.
Buz Barstow (33:51.084)
She’s been able to show that you can grow gluconobacter on food waste. So instead of giving it expensive growth media, you can give it very cheap growth media instead. Now you’ve grown it. The next challenge is making the biolexivient with it.
Dustin Olsen (33:51.416)
you
Daniel O’Connor (34:08.509)
Wow.
Daniel O’Connor (34:21.467)
Right, right.
Buz Barstow (34:22.987)
And this is probably the biggest sort vexation that I have right now. So to make that lexiviant, we give it glucose. if think about it, glucose sounds cheap, there’s actually not a huge amount of glucose available in the United States. There’s surprisingly not like actually like, well, so there’s enough glucose in the United States.
Daniel O’Connor (34:42.555)
Really?
Yeah, that’s…
Dustin Olsen (34:48.151)
So
Buz Barstow (34:52.565)
for rare earth mining. Because we don’t really need that much rare. As important as rare earth theme, our need for them is actually very low. So if I remember, and I might be on Mount Stupid here, I think our total import is only a few hundred thousand tons, if that. And I think the Defense Department only needs something like 5,000 tons a year.
Daniel O’Connor (35:19.164)
Yeah, it’s not a huge amount, but it’s certainly important.
Buz Barstow (35:24.971)
It’s incredibly important. Yeah, you’re right. It’s like very small amount of it goes a very long way in terms of effect. so, for its wedge, it’s very expensive. So you can justify the cost of that glucose for extracting rare earth elements.
Daniel O’Connor (35:30.204)
It goes a long way. Yeah.
Daniel O’Connor (35:38.32)
Yeah.
Daniel O’Connor (35:45.754)
Interesting.
Buz Barstow (35:45.801)
But for something else, let’s say at the complete opposite end of the spectrum, where you want to dissolve rock to get magnesium and iron for CO2 sequestration, there you need to dissolve an enormous amount of rock because you need an enormous amount of magnesium and iron. So instead of needing hundreds of thousands of tons, you’ll need billions of tons to sequester CO2.
Daniel O’Connor (35:53.766)
Mm-hmm.
Dustin Olsen (35:59.96)
you
Daniel O’Connor (36:12.174)
Right. Right.
Buz Barstow (36:14.414)
There, I don’t think there is enough glucose in the world to do it. Now, is something we discovered recently. Two of my grad students, Luke Plant and Joseph Lee, they discovered that instead of giving gluconobacter glucose, you can give it cellulosic hydrolysate. If you remember from
say the Norths and the early 2010s, there was a lot of debate around corn ethanol. And here, if you remember right, you take the corn and you get rid of the easy to digest stuff off of it. And from that, you can make high fructose corn syrup, which you can then ferment to ethanol.
Daniel O’Connor (36:50.246)
Mm-hmm.
Daniel O’Connor (36:55.162)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I remember.
Daniel O’Connor (37:02.8)
Mm-hmm.
Buz Barstow (37:10.504)
But you leave behind when you do that, you leave behind an enormous amount of stover. Like most of the plant is in this indigestible thing, know, the sort of the, the carb, right? And
What do you do with that? It’s really hard to break down. If you can break it down, it produces an enormous supply of cellulosic sugars that you can feed to microbes. Luke and Joseph were able to show that if you take cellulosic sugars and feed them to gluconobacter, it does almost as well as when you feed it glucose, something I totally didn’t expect.
Now, in principle, cellulosic hydrolysate can be much cheaper and it’s much more abundant than glucose. The only problem is don’t know where in the world is there really an industry making it yet.
Daniel O’Connor (38:10.145)
Interesting. But if you did have that production, it could be used as a food source for the other bacteria we’re talking about.
Buz Barstow (38:24.792)
my gosh, it could be used as a, and I want to distinguish between food and sort bio-lixiviant feedstock. so you could definitely, you can use it to make a lixiviant. You can sort of take gluconobacteria that’s already been grown up and you can feed it glucose or cellulosic sugars and it will make the lixiviant for you.
Daniel O’Connor (38:33.209)
Right, right, okay, okay.
Buz Barstow (38:54.163)
Buz Barstow (38:57.502)
And so you’re potentially in business there. I think a challenge will be, and this is actually a challenge that the entire bioeconomy faces, is getting enough cellulosic sugars. I think if somebody can crack that, we’re in business. Or if they can find an alternative, even cheaper source of sugars. That’s something my lab is working on as well. Again, you could be in business as well.
Daniel O’Connor (39:00.302)
Yeah.
Dustin Olsen (39:22.646)
Thank
Daniel O’Connor (39:26.924)
Interesting very very very interesting. So I mean, I think you know, this has been fascinating I mean, it’s already we’re almost at the end of the hour, but I First of all, this is it’s kind of brilliant. I really believe buzz that that are Challenges with rare earth elements. I mean we have a short-term challenge We’re in a trade war crunch right now However, I think longer term
It’s exactly what folks like you are doing. And you bring in the business folks and the finance and government support, and I think you’ll start to see innovation. And it’s already happening. you know, if we look forward, if you were going to advise listeners out here that are interested in pursuing this and learning more in the context of Rare Earth, where do they search? What topic should they start with?
Dustin Olsen (39:59.351)
you
Buz Barstow (40:07.572)
Yes.
Dustin Olsen (40:19.446)
Okay.
Buz Barstow (40:23.512)
my gosh, that is a great question. That’s a great question. would, okay, I’m going to plug myself while I think on the other topics. Okay. So if you, if you go to my website, we have a section called media and there’s in there, there’s a section of popular articles that have been written on this, that might serve as an entry point that would be like a really good, a really good entry point to this. I’d also strongly recommend.
Daniel O’Connor (40:34.145)
Okay. Okay.
Daniel O’Connor (40:39.989)
Okay? Okay?
Buz Barstow (40:52.938)
Go read David McKay’s book. McKay was a science advisor to the British government and he wrote this book called Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air. And it’s an extremely hard-nosed look at the problem of sustainability in sort of all of its aspects. It was written, gosh, more than 15 years ago and
Daniel O’Connor (41:02.509)
Okay.
Daniel O’Connor (41:20.782)
Wow.
Buz Barstow (41:21.316)
every time I read it, I get something new out of it. You should definitely read that. I would also really recommend reading a report. This report is almost 20 years old, actually, by a guy called Michael Brenner, is a professor of applied math at Harvard.
Dustin Olsen (41:21.778)
.
Daniel O’Connor (41:27.929)
for sure.
Buz Barstow (41:49.706)
And he wrote this report to the Jason Defense Advisory Group called Engineering Microorganisms for Energy. And in it, he lays out from a very basic physical perspective, all of the challenges that you’ll face in applying biology to the challenges of energy. I think that when I read that, again, every time I read this, I get something new about it out of it.
Daniel O’Connor (42:11.427)
Right.
Daniel O’Connor (42:17.325)
Yeah, yeah.
Buz Barstow (42:18.217)
Strongly recommend that. Coming back to rare earths, there’s a great article that appeared in Nature. I think it was at the end of 2023 by Amber Dance. It’s linked on my website. And in it, she sort of lays out all of the, you know, the fields of sort of rare earth bio mining. And so
Daniel O’Connor (42:31.331)
Mm-hmm.
Daniel O’Connor (42:35.735)
Okay.
Buz Barstow (42:46.885)
She talks about our work, she talks about Regen, but she also talks about work by my colleagues, Joey Catruvo at Penn State, who has a very interesting separation technology, and Cecilia Martinez-Gomez at Berkeley, who has another very interesting sort of separation and extraction technology. Both of these are based on sort of completely different physical principles.
Daniel O’Connor (42:57.23)
Mm-hmm.
Buz Barstow (43:15.059)
to the ones we’ve been using for separations.
Daniel O’Connor (43:17.761)
Right, right, right, right.
Buz Barstow (43:19.881)
And this is a sort of a really good way, you if you think about every time the US government has faced a sort of a serious challenge in engineering, what it’s done is it’s it’s identified, typically it’s successfully identified several competing approaches that work on totally different principles. If you think about say the Manhattan project and the problem of say, isotope enrichment, you know, we did
Daniel O’Connor (43:40.951)
Interesting.
Buz Barstow (43:48.842)
gas diffusion, did the cyclotron method, and we did chemical separation methods for that. And eventually, actually, I think out of those three, two of them worked. Again, here with rare earths, what the government is doing is it’s hedging its bet by using three approaches. We approached it through what’s called selective biosorption, which is the least selective of the methods actually, but it has other advantages.
Dustin Olsen (43:55.254)
you
Daniel O’Connor (43:57.729)
Great.
Dustin Olsen (44:05.141)
So
Daniel O’Connor (44:12.599)
Mm-hmm.
Buz Barstow (44:18.541)
Then Joey approaches it by something by chelation, by selective chelation. And this again has got lots of, you know, lots of drawbacks, but it’s got loads of benefits to it. then Cecilia’s approach, hyperaccumulation, again, it has different challenges, it’s got different advantages. Every time I see these two, know, something I stress is
Dustin Olsen (44:22.101)
you
Daniel O’Connor (44:23.639)
escalation.
Buz Barstow (44:45.481)
My guess is that the winning technology, the winning company, probably use aspects of all three of these approaches, I think.
Daniel O’Connor (44:58.582)
That’s very interesting. these are, so what I’d like to do just as we wrap up here, first of all, please let everybody know your website. Can you share your website address?
Buz Barstow (45:11.101)
course I can it’s barstow.be that’s like B.cornell.edu
Daniel O’Connor (45:18.335)
Okay, and we will do a follow-up or we’ll send you this article. We would like to be in touch with Alexa and discuss Regen and maybe have you back on. I think that’s a very important topic. We’d like to try to help you all. I mean, part of our mission too is sort of patriotic. We want to accelerate efforts, even if it’s early stage buzz, that’s great. It has to be at every level, including R &D.
So we’re here for you guys to help in any way we can. yeah, I think this has been incredible. I want to thank you so much for taking the time. Dustin, any last minute thoughts?
Dustin Olsen (45:58.806)
you
Dustin Olsen (46:02.533)
No, like just listening to Buzz talk, it’s very exciting. The discoveries and the things that they’re improving upon and the little holes of knowledge and gaps that they’re filling in to keep this going is exciting. But at the same time, it sounds like there’s still some pretty significant hurdles to overcome before we even start to see this mainstream. So very educational. This is a great.
Great conversation, great podcast. So Buzz, thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to join us, educate us, and ultimately just help the rest of our listeners hopefully be just as excited as we are about the potential of something a bit more environmentally safe for rare earth mining. So thank you for joining.
Buz Barstow (46:51.613)
And thank you to you as well. And thank you to you for hosting as well. I always appreciate a chance to talk about our work and Regen’s work as well.
Dustin Olsen (46:58.42)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, hopefully we’ll have you on the show again in the future. We’ll get an update on any advancements and things like that that you’ve discovered. So we’ll definitely be in touch. So with that, I think we’ll sign off. And everyone, thanks for listening.
Daniel O’Connor (47:16.649)
Thank you.
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