Energy and Mineral Wastes
Energy Waste Science
Energy production doesn’t just produce energy. We study the waste streams of energy production to understand their resource potential and inform future energy resource development.
Mine Wastes and Legacy Mine Lands
Mine wastes can be a hazard – and a potential source of minerals. We study mine wastes to mitigate mine waste hazards and identify potential resources.
Wastes produced during mineral and energy resource development can be hazardous but can also be a resource.
We study both modern and legacy wastes to evaluate the potential for recovering valuable materials from them, and to inform environmental remediation and guide future resource development.
Energy and mineral production is a little like cooking.
It creates something we need but requires infrastructure and results in some waste. After you cook a meal, you likely turn off your stove and clean it. You might throw scrap food in the trash – or, if you are creative, you might incorporate some high-quality scraps into a future meal.
In energy and mineral production, the clean-up process is just as important – and the scraps can be even more valuable. Our research on legacy and active mineral and energy production helps identify the potential in mine and energy wastes, inform environmental remediation, and guide future energy and mineral development.
Read about our research below.
The Impact and Potential of Wastes from the Past
Our country has a legacy of energy and mineral production that is over 200 years old. In the past, regulations on energy and mineral production were not as strong, and many legacy sites were never properly shut down. Today, the American landscape is dotted with legacy sites such as defunct mines and abandoned oil and gas wells.
These legacy sites can be a safety hazard, and detrimental to the environment. Our national inventories of mine features and unplugged oil and gas wells provide a nation-scale perspective that is crucial to prioritizing and tracking the progress of remediation projects. We also conduct research at legacy sites to understand how they impact water quality, greenhouse gas emissions, and ecosystem health.
Legacy mine wastes may also be an underutilized resource. Mine waste is the material left behind after the desired minerals have been separated from it, including features like tailings and slag piles. These wastes often contain minerals that are now in high demand but weren’t economically or technologically feasible to process at the time. We characterize and study mine wastes across the Nation to understand their mineral composition and evaluate their potential as a source of
important minerals. Our Earth Mapping Resources Initiative (Earth MRI) is currently developing the first ever National Inventory of Mine Wastes.
Looking to the Future
We study and quantify energy and mineral waste streams in order to inform future energy and mineral development.
Some examples of our research include quantifying how much waste rock is produced during mining of different minerals, or the quantity of produced water (groundwater pulled up during oil and gas production that is extremely saline) that would need to be stored or treated to fully develop different oil and gas resources.
We also study the mechanics and implications of storing wastes and other materials in rocks below the Earth’s surface. For instance, we assess the potential for sequestering carbon dioxide - a waste product produced when hydrocarbons like coal, oil and gas are burned.
Our research highlights opportunities to use wastes as resources. We are quantifying the mineral concentration in produced waters to understand whether minerals such as lithium could be feasibly recovered from the waste stream of oil and gas production. We have also assessed the national potential for carbon dioxide enhanced oil recovery – a method that could sequester carbon and produce oil at the same time. One other example is our research of mineral by-products: minerals that are often mined as a by-product of other minerals and could be recovered from the waste stream of some mines.
All of this research helps decision-makers better manage and co-manage natural resources.
To learn more, go to these pages on our Energy Resources Program and Mineral Resources Program sites.