They were our first stab at cleaning up emissions and they became rich pickings for thieves…catalytic convertors. You probably have one if you have a petrol or diesel motor.
They sit ahead of your exhaust and are made of a mix of precious metals like platinum and palladium. Now one company in Canada is doing it’s best to recycle all the good stuff so we don’t have to mine it again.
I spoke to Don Weatherbee CEO of Regenx Tech about how this could be a way to help us protect resources.
Don started with a history lesson:
“So late 70s, early 80s one of the biggest issues around, especially in cities, was smog. And, you know, people of a certain age can remember, you’d go outside and it was just thick, ugly, hung over the city. And that smog was your noxious gases coming out of automobiles. And the first way to combat this was a catalytic converter.
‘And so how a catalytic converter works, is that it looks like a muffler under your car but inside that steel container is a honeycomb with all kinds of pores and holes in that. And that honeycomb is coated with platinum and palladium, PGM (platinum group metals) materials. And as the dirty air flows across it, it creates a chemical reaction and then it takes the noxious gas and converts them into less harmful stuff, effectively into CO2.
“And that’s what’s emitted. And at the time, that was thought to be a great advance because we were just putting into the air more of what we had in the air and we were taking away these harmful gases and they did a great job.”
Of course today the CO2 is a problem, so Don and his team have teamed up with a scrap dealer to make sure the old catalytic convertors aren’t wasted and the precious elements within them are literally turned back to pure metals now used for clean power.
“The scrap dealer collects them and he takes the honeycomb out of the steel case and grinds it down into a fine powder. In that honeycomb is a silicon carbide material. So a fancy ceramic coated with the precious metals. And so when he breaks it down into the powder, we can then put it into what’s called the hydro metallurgical process. Fancy word for a chemical leach. Okay, so we use chemistry to extract the precious metals off of the ceramic material. So once we do that, it’s put into a solution.
“Then we take that leach solution and we use another chemical reaction that drops the precious metals back into a solid form, which is what we call a dirty concentrate. And we provide that dirty concentrate to a refiner who creates it into a 99.9% pure metal.”
So what will this do? Nice to recycle some rare earths but with EVs you don’t need them so where’s the demand. Don says it’s all about fuel cells to be use in transport and clean energy.
“There is a whole host of technologies that are dependent on PGMs, this is the hydrogen economy. Fundamentally, your EVs are built around two baselines. One is your battery electric and your other is your fuel cells. And your fuel cells are hydrogen based. And so a hydrogen economy, the two sides of the hydrogen economy need platinum.
“The one is the electronic electrolysis side, which is the creation of green hydrogen, and the second is a hydrogen fuel cell. So in the reaction where you put hydrogen in, you have to have a place where that reaction occurs and that anode is platinum based.
“So there there’s actually projected to be more demand for platinum in the future than there is currently based on catalytic converters!”
Do listen to the whole podcast, where we talk about how Don’s work could save us from future emissions and change the way we power our future – based on recycling the past. Please subscribe too on your podcast platform.
