Summary

The sultanate of Oman has huge potential for valuable minerals production considering its strategic local as a coastal country with seawater salt which contains high-grade of various minerals. Seawater contains large quantities of valuable minerals and some of these are very scarce and expensive. It was reported that oceans and seas cover nearly three-quarters of the earth’s surface and the concentration of salts in this water is approximately 5 × 1016 tons of salts. This amount of salt constitutes much more than the minerals that are available as land-based reserves. However, only a few of these minerals are currently mined from the sea. Therefore, there is need to explore the attractive option of seawater mining. This research will evaluate membrane separation technology as tools for more economical and environmentally friendly seawater mineral mining methods. In this work, membrane-based mining of minerals from seawater is proposed. The work will involve the exploration of seawater minerals by collecting seawater samples from various locations in Oman. The mineral content of the seawater sample will then be determined. Design, fabrication and testing of an integrated set up of membrane systems for mineral recovery will also be performed. Data obtained from this work will be used to carry out process simulation to understand the feasibility of large-scale production of minerals.

Objectives

1- To evaluate the performance of an integrated seawater treatment set up that can extract valuable minerals from seawater.

2- To focus on: • detailed study and analysis of the mineral contents of Omani seawater •

3- Evaluation of integrated membrane distillation and membrane electrodialysis technologies for mining valuable minerals from seawater

Funding Agency:

MOHERI