Extracting Gold from Seawater

The ocean has around 700 trillion dollars worth of gold in it and Sam’s going to try to get (some of) it.
#gold #mining #OceanChemistry

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Credits:
Executive Producers:
George Zaidan
Hilary Hudson

Producers:
Elaine Seward
Andrew Sobey
Darren Weaver

Writer/Host:
Sam Jones, PhD

Scientific consultants:
Michelle Boucher, PhD
Leila Duman, PhD
Wesley Farrell, PhD
Kelly K. Falkner, PhD
Wendy L. Queen, PhD

Sources:
Gold in seawater

Is there gold in the ocean?

There’s gold in seawater but we can’t get to it

New England Gold Hoax of 1898: Greed Meets Moxie

Extraction of gold from seawater

Patent design for extracting gold from seawater

'Sunbeams from cucumbers': an early twentieth-century gold-from-seawater extraction scheme in northern New South Wales

Prescott Jernegan and the Gold from Seawater Swindle

Chemistry: Mining the Sea

Scientists invent method to extract gold from liquid waste

$771 Trillion Worth Of Gold Lies Hidden In The Ocean: Good Luck Getting It

Germany’s Post-World War I Scheme to Extract Gold from Water

Science: Gold in sea water – not enough to get rich

Diving into the History of Seabed Mining

Rapid, Selective Extraction of Trace Amounts of Gold from Complex Water Mixtures with a Metal–Organic Framework (MOF)/Polymer Composite

Metal-organic framework

Uranium removal from seawater by means of polymeric fabrics grafted with diallyl oxalate through a single-step, solvent-free process

Optimizing and evaluating the operational factors affecting the cyanide leaching circuit of the Aghdareh gold processing plant using a CCD model

[ACSReactions]

Issuing correction on a graphic of ours, regarding Fritz Haber. He was not, under any circumstances, "bae".
BONUS QUESTION: In one part of the video we say we'd need to oxidize gold, in another part Dr. Farrell says he'd try reducing it. Any guesses why?

[mervinmarias]

"The secret ingredient is lies" lmao

[chrisng]

There are proposals for extracting it from brine leftover from desalination, it's a lot more concentrated and it's basically free (they'd probably pay you to take it off their hands)

[marsfps]

These videos are such well-produced and made, underrated!!

[himanbam]

You know at this point you'd probably make more money selling the salt you evaporated from. By my calculations, you can get $1 by selling the salt from 700mL of seawater, instead of the gold from 2 GL of seawater.

[Zavstar]

Gold would become worthless then if supply increases that much

[beachboardfan]

So if we sort out fusion energy production and subsequently have limitless energy this will totally be viable...

[matthannigan]

I love the vids - but despise the graphics and audio choices made for fritz haber, the father of chemical warfare.

[victorbellew]

I think the trick is doing something like desalinization, which has some inherent value on its own. A byproduct of most desalinization methods does produce gold and can offset some of the cost but still isn’t cost effective. A question I have is, one of the largest gold mines on earth is in South America and mines microscopic gold from the coral reef. Does the coral get that gold from the ocean and if so what process does it use to concentrate the gold? If not, where is the gold coming from and why is the coral storing gold?

[urantia]

Why not clean the sea water for use on land and get all the minerals as a by product?

[SyamilahStore]

Make a device like a big box that traps micro particles of gold, at the bottom of the sea (assume gold will be more at the bottom) from seawater that pass through the device. A special filter with active carbon might do to adsorp small gold particles onto it. A gauage to measure how many gals of seawater had pass through the device. Hehe

[MichaelRicksAherne]

Learned about this channel through the survey. Good stuff! Looking forward to the next video.

[SciTechVault]

Inspired by this video, I ran an actual calculation for a novel project: A large ship with a 5 meter by 5 meter composite containing a known metal-organic framework (Fe-BTC/PpPDA) with a high selectivity for gold (but not for copper or nickel) passively collecting gold while sailing between Sweden and the United States. Results: Still not encouraging! The basic premise: A 100 kg MOF composite would cost somewhere between $5, 000 and $20, 000, but would trap gold weighing nearly 100 kg (worth $5.6 million)! The unsolved problem: How to expose this MOF composite to 10 to the power 17 liters of sea water in order to obtain 100 kg of gold from it? For simplicity and for the sake of calculation, assume that your ship is sailing through a cuboid of sea water (Sweden to US = 7, 700 km; width = 5 m; and height = 5 m) and that the MOF composite is exposed to the entire volume of sea water contained in the cuboid.

[thomasredis]

Incorrect, 20 mil tons are on the ocean floor, NOT in the water. Only a tiny fraction of this gold is in sea water. Sea water is 0.01-0.03 ppt gold, but going with your number from 1990 of 1 gram in 100 mil tons of water (aka 0.01 ppt), the cubic mile (4 bill tons) of sea water behind you would only contain 40 grams which at the time of your video was only $2, 300 ... NOT $1 million, lol. That's because 99.94% (according to these numbers) has sunk to the ocean floor already.

[anthonymazar]

I have a question for you, can you tell me at what precise level in the salt sea water that the Au. atom floats at? I know the answer, and this knowledge is extremely valuable.

[jugzster]

Fascinating video, almost as fascinating as the number of times your hair color changed!

[bobadalnoboj]

Hi there, Im doing experiments extracting preciious from river flow, put 100g of coconut carcoal into cloth bag, negative titanium electrode placed inside charcoal, made a solar panel generating 1, 5-3v depending on sun activity, (to attract mostly precious, silver-gold-rodium-platinum-iridium-palladium, such voltage range ) and positive electrode made from a piece of iron, placed both electrodes into river, first plus to beginning of waterflow than minus, distance about 2 meters, tried also to solt water placing in that area a bottle with salt, for better electric conductivity, but better results got without salt. After 40 days of work took charcoal off, heated to wet condition and got a weight of approximately 120g!!! Looked at microscope and saw in it some small places of YELLOW on a charcoal surface! But mostly covered with some white metall. Now have a couple of charcoal portions from different experiments and thinking about extraction from charcoal, will try to make a charcoal powder than grab it with heated lead and use melting furnace and cupelation to extract from lead.

[archerpro]

WOW!! At first I thought she was delusional then turns out she's a genius. I'm glad I kept watching the video.

[davidolson]

With the rise in oceans and the need for fresh water bigger and better desalinization plants will be needed. The big problem now is what to do with the brine. I would guess some of our new scientists will figure out how to extract all the minerals and various elements from this brine including lithium for their batteries.

[rogerc]

Water desalination plants remove brine from sea water, try reactions with that.