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Metal From Seawater

A startup aims to restore American magnesium production.

An Oakland, California-based startup has a business plan that sounds
like modern alchemy: turning seawater into metal, and using it to build
cars, airplanes, satellites, and drones.

Magrathea Metals, named after a planet
in the Douglas Adams
sci-fi epic

**The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy**, is developing a more
cost-effective way to reduce saltwater to cooked-down brines, and
electrolyze the leftover salts to produce magnesium metal.

CEO Alex Grant hopes the product can be scaled to create lightweight,
carbon-neutral alternatives to the dominant structural metals, aluminum
and steel. The company has already signed multiple government contracts,
Grant said, and has launched a project with an undisclosed major
automaker.

Metal from seawater may sound fantastical, but the U.S. was already
making it a century ago. Dow Chemical began producing magnesium for
aircraft, car parts, and bombs in the 1920s. In the 1940s, Dow refined
the process Magrathea is now hoping to resurrect, gleaning magnesium
from the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Yet today, there is only one primary producer of magnesium in all of
North America, Europe, and Australia: Utah's U.S. Magnesium
,
which has the unusual honor of having been declared a Superfund site
while still in operation. U.S. Magnesium declared

**force majeure** (an act of God) during the pandemic and has reportedly
struggled to restore its facilities to full operating capacity.

As with so many other natural resources and critical components, China
has gained a dominant position in the global supply of magnesium.
Magrathea is proposing to restore America's status as a major primary
producer-this time, using renewable energy.

The company stands to benefit from the Inflation Reduction Act and its
production tax credit for rare minerals. The question, as with direct
lithium extraction using geothermal energy
, is
whether it can scale cost-effectively. The team has worked with retired
engineers of Dow Magnesium and aluminum firm Norsk Hydro, who have
shared best practices on materials handling. "Ten or 20 years from now,
their knowledge is going to be lost. But we've been able to capture a
lot, while they can still give it," Grant said.

Part of a larger surge in manufacturing investment
, Magrathea's bid
will test whether a materials science startup can compete with global
metal-producing juggernauts, which have billions of dollars of steel in
the ground.

AMERICAN MAGNESIUM PRODUCTION WAS BORN out of wartime disruptions to
supply chains.

When Herbert Dow arrived in Midland, Michigan, in the 1890s, the area
was environmentally blighted. Intensive lumbering had razed ancient
forests, and with little left to chop, the logging industry was
receding.

Dow saw an opportunity to draw on a far older resource: the briny
remains of the region's prehistoric seas, which run in deep aquifers
across central Michigan. He launched a chemical business extracting
bromine, magnesium, and other elements from that bitter water.

In 1914, a blockade by the Allied powers in World War I cut off imports
from Germany, then the world's primary magnesium producer. The
restrictions highlighted American reliance on Germany for other vital
goods like aspirin, dyes, and chemicals, and gave Dow an opening to
expand magnesium production.

After an interwar lull, World War II intensified domestic demand for
magnesium. Both aircraft bombers and the bombs they carried used
magnesium, which flares brightly when it burns. Dow developed a process
for extracting magnesium from the ocean, and in 1941 opened a new plant
in Freeport, Texas, selecting the site for the cheap availability of
natural gas, salt, sulphur, and oysters in Galveston Bay. Oyster shells
were used to produce calcium oxide.

"There is an epic quality involved in the peopling of a flat, narrow
tongue of waste land with strange shapes of structures and having them
combine to take a ladle of gleaming metal out of a curling, white-capped
ocean wave," Dow wrote in a later report
to
Congress.

[link removed]

Magnesium demand fell off after WWII, with the Korean War briefly
reigniting the market. Dow plowed magnesium instead into consumer goods,
like sewing machines
and baby strollers .

In the 1970s, UCLA industrial policy professor Marvin Lieberman wrote
,
Dow "shifted from its 'limit-pricing' strategy, designed to maintain
Dow's position as the dominant magnesium producer, to a 'skim
pricing' type of strategy intended to maximize more immediate
returns." It raised the price of magnesium, sold off its magnesium
research library, and moved magnesium research staff to other units.

U.S. Magnesium, which draws on the Great Salt Lake, began operating in
1972, and it was not until the 1990s that U.S. dominance as a global
primary producer of magnesium began to slip. Tariff reductions led to
increases in magnesium imports from China and Eastern Europe, and the
U.S. became an importer. In 1998, when Hurricane Frances flooded the
Freeport plant, Dow seized the opportunity to declare

**force majeure** and exit the business.

New fuel economy standards, meanwhile, pushed carmakers to trim the
weight of vehicles. Many swapped steel for lighter materials, like
aluminum alloys that included some magnesium.

Global production of magnesium more than tripled between 1995 and 2023,
but the U.S. share sank. Since there has been just one U.S. producer
since 2001, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has withheld national
aggregate magnesium production statistics, arguing that it would be
disclosing proprietary company data.

In 1994, China produced less than 5 percent of global magnesium; by
2014, it accounted for 87 percent of the global market, according to
USGS figures. In 2021, shortages in Chinese magnesium

prompted European carmakers and business associations to warn of
"imminent risk of Europe-wide production shutdowns" because of dwindling
magnesium supplies.

Also in 2021, U.S. Magnesium shut down due to equipment problems. Since
then, the company appears to have restarted production. Multiple
representatives could not be reached for comment.

Chemists have pointed out an annoying trade-off
of "lightweighting": While
lighter vehicles produce fewer emissions on the road, making

****those lighter materials typically requires more energy up front,
compared to the material being replaced.

China uses the Pidgeon process, a labor-intensive way of extracting
magnesium through smelting, which emits carbon dioxide, and has
typically relied heavily on coal. Although electrolysis is also
energy-intensive, it relies on electricity, and could potentially be
fired by renewables.

TWO ANGLOSPHERE MINING COLONY EXPATS have now teamed up on Magrathea.
Before launching the company, Grant, originally from Canada, founded
Lilac Solutions, a company developing similar technology for lithium
extraction. He is working with Jacob Brown, an Australian who built a
battery cathode pilot as an engineer at Tesla.

Their idea is to use wind, solar, and geothermal energy to power
electrochemical magnesium production. The basic process for producing
electrochemical magnesium requires seawater or other sources of salt,
such as the brines left over in table salt or potash fertilizer
production.

The brines are purified and evaporated down to magnesium salt, which is
further processed to remove all water. (This dehydration technology is a
key process Magrathea will be trying to refine.) The salt is then
electrolyzed-separated with an electrical current-to produce
magnesium metal, which can be cast into ingots or directly into machine
components.

"The focus right now is displacing super carbon-intense Chinese mag from
Western markets," Grant said. Magrathea is focusing first on winning the
existing magnesium market, as U.S. automakers and aluminum firms look to
onshore and decarbonize their supply chains. Further out, the company
aims to scale magnesium die casting to replace heavier "structural
metals" like steel and aluminum, used in vehicles.

The global steel industry is about a thousand orders of magnitude larger
than magnesium. Given the staggering quantity of fixed capital in steel,
Magrathea's pitch to lift market share from steel remains far-fetched.

Grant points to Ford's switch in the early 2000s to using more
aluminum in their trucks, including the iconic F-150, which was seen at
the time as unlikely to succeed.

Electric batteries have blown up the weight of vehicles, and automakers
now acknowledge the urgent need to slim down. Ned Curic, chief
technology officer at Stellantis, which makes cars including the Jeep,
Dodge, and Chrysler brands, said in a recent interview with

**Automotive News Europe** that the single biggest engineering challenge
he faces is vehicle weight.

Several sustainable investment funds, including VoLo Earth, have taken
an interest in Magrathea's approach to securing metals without mining.
Magrathea is also backed by Exor Ventures, the investment arm of
Italy's Agnelli family, which owns 14 percent of Stellantis and 24
percent of Ferrari. Grant touts this as a sign of the automotive
industry's "strategic interest" in magnesium.

Another investor is Kunal Sinha, global head of recycling at commodity
trader Glencore.

So far, Magrathea has made just "a couple kilos" of magnesium, Grant
said. The firm is building a pilot in Oakland with the capacity to make
two tons of metal per year. The goal, he said, is to demonstrate a
process to make anhydrous magnesium chloride at low cost.

Asked whether the company will aim to license its technology or continue
operating it directly, Grant said the plan is "roughly"
build-own-operate, "but there is a lot of nuance." For example, he said,
Magrathea wants to sell equity in assets, and partners might operate
"chunks" of the operation.

But Grant underscored the importance of owning the technology at least
until it reaches commercial scale.

"We will build smelters, and we will sell metal," he said. "At every
stage of scale-up, you run into technical challenges that you solve, and
we want to be the people solving those technical challenges."

~ LEE HARRIS, STAFF WRITER

Follow Lee Harris on Twitter
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