DESC0025154

One of the difficulties in achieving a clean energy transition is the growing need for critical minerals from the mining sector. A way to extract minerals more intelligently and efficiently is necessary to enable a lower-carbon and secure energy future for our country. NaturaFrac is developing a novel platform of pulsed unsteady combustion for combining static and dynamic pressurization for more comprehensive injection of leachate for optimized sweep efficiency of in situ recovery mining of critical mineral containing deep orebodies. NaturaFrac will develop a tool and formation response model to enable more surface area in a deep orebody to be connected to the productive flow paths to enable economic recovery of deep stranded minerals. In Phase I NaturaFrac will determine technical and economic feasibility of applying our proprietary dynamic pulsed combustion for fluids movement through otherwise non-mineable critical minerals containing orebodies. Key to our proposed efforts will be reducing the overall surface footprint of stimulation while optimizing the tool-generated pressure pulse profile (rise time and peak value) for comprehensively injection leachate into a deep orebody. We will develop an executable conceptual tool design, build a flexible dynamic injection model, and perform a techno-economic analysis to validate the benefits the proposed efforts will achieve. We will estimate increased sweep efficiency and ore recovery, overall operating costs, quantify the reduction in emissions from our process, and detail the overall economic benefits. The NaturaFrac process proposed will be the key to unlocking economic minerals recovery from stranded, deep, and hard rock orebodies. This clean energy source will be of tremendous environmental benefit as it is a carbon free source of energy. The successes in the proposed research will also be directly applicable to deep enhanced geothermal (EGS) well stimulation, while reducing the dependence and environmental footprint of inaccurate water based hydraulic fracturing. This provides a cheaper and cleaner alternative to surface and underground mining with more advantageous economics.