Tesla just offered a giant contract to whoever can efficiently mine nickel- why is this process so difficult and inefficient?
In: Engineering
Basically most of the large undeveloped nickel deposits are of a type of ore that is challenging to work with. It’s not so much that it’s hard to mine the ore itself, but difficult to separate the nickel. There several ways to do it, but none are great – a common one requires significant amounts of heat, pressure, and acid, which isn’t hard to do, but can get really expensive from an energy and maintenance perspective. There are other methods which don’t require the high heat and pressure, but only work on specific kinds of geology.
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