[ChuckMcM]

Not to be too snarky here, did you read the link to the research? It too uses electro-chemistry with the defining feature: "This new process produces pure magnesium hydroxide, allowing researchers to skip energy-intensive and expensive purification steps."

My reasoning was to note that the Magrathea collateral is pushing "low energy" to make the connection. I am NOT saying I KNOW that this how they are doing it. It is because this is a "mature market" in terms of well established players who are doing this with lime and salt ponds that I was wondering "Has anything changed that would convince a VC (or Angel) to fund a new magnesium producer?" What would have to be true in order to have a value proposition that would convince someone they could succeed against the established players?

And so I go off and search various "research news" web sites to see if there is any news on Magnesium extraction. If they are not using this research then I would be skeptical of their success given the existing market is well established and making a new venture using existing techniques is pretty capital intensive.

[avernon]

Yes, I read the underlying paper a while back. It only looks at the very first step of a Dow-like process, before any electrochemistry happens. Instead of dumping hydroxide in a tank, they expose it to hydroxide in a serpentine flow path. When I was reading into this before calcium didn't seem to be too big of a problem for the Dow process because the calcium compounds are more soluble than magnesium hydroxide. They were actually adding more calcium with the lime. So their comparison may be to a different method than the Dow Process. It didn't seem particularly useful.

Then you neutralize the magnesium hydroxide with hydrochloric acid to make Magnesium chloride and do molten salt electrolysis on it to make pure magnesium and chlorine.