Why Scalability Is Lithium’s Biggest Challenge and How Direct Lithium to Product® (DLP™) Addresses It
Despite being both in extremely high demand and not particularly rare, lithium production faces a severe bottleneck because of the difficulties of moving new production technologies and projects from demonstration to large-scale commercial operation, while managing environmental, social, permitting, safety, and economic risks that can delay or constrain project development. Conventional lithium supply rests on...Read More→
Taming Florida’s Gypstack Crisis: Recovering Radium-226 for Cancer Therapies and Clean Infrastructure
In early April 2021, crews at Florida’s Piney Point phosphate plant fought to stop a leak in the liner of a reservoir that had held 480 million gallons of wastewater. On Saturday night, an attempt to plug the leak with rock and sand failed. “They reached a point where they were about to celebrate and...Read More→
The AI Revolution and Molecular Recognition Technology®: Ensuring a Reliable Supply Chain for High Purity Critical Minerals
The birth of AI Long before artificial intelligence (AI) was realized in any way, intense computing was done by ENIAC. Announced by the University of Pennsylvania on February 14, 1946, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer was built under an Army contract to tackle wartime ballistics calculations. It filled a room 30 by 50 feet,...Read More→
Custom Macrocycles: The Hidden Magic Bullets Driving Precision Radioligand Therapy
MacroLig® 404 (Cryptand 2.2.2) is a macrocycle widely used in the synthesis of diagnostic radiopharmaceuticals, such as those utilizing Fluorine-18 (18F). Building on decades of Molecular Recognition Technology® (MRT™) and large-scale macrocycle manufacturing expertise, IBC Advanced Technologies develops advanced, custom macrocycles designed specifically for therapeutic radioligand applications. IBC is leveraging its proprietary macrocyclic chemistry and...Read More→
Separating and Refining Iridium and Ruthenium: How Molecular Recognition Technology® (MRT™) Solves the Hardest Problem in PGM Refining
Two Scarce Metals the Energy Transition Depends On Iridium (Ir) and ruthenium (Ru) are the two least abundant members of the platinum group metals (PGMs), a classification defined by scarcity. Roughly 7.5 tonnes of Ir are mined each year, compared with about 200 tonnes of platinum, and South Africa accounts for 88% of that Ir...Read More→
Power in Chemistry, Simplicity in Engineering: Molecular Recognition Technology® (MRT™) Offers Maximum Recovery, Maximum Purity and Minimal Waste
The World’s Critical Minerals Are Getting Harder to Reach and Process Every year, the critical minerals that power modern life become harder to extract and purify. Primary ore grades decline. Mines dig deeper. More rock must be processed for less metal. Chemically complex brines and tailings must be treated to pull out small amounts of...Read More→
From Cu-64 to Pb-203: Solving the Purification Challenge in Medical Radioisotopes
From Cu-64 to Pb-203: Solving the Purification Challenge in Medical Radioisotopes Nuclear medicine uses radioactive isotopes to diagnose and treat disease, and it is routine at hospitals and health care facilities worldwide, spanning everything from positron emission tomography (PET) scans that diagnose Alzheimer’s disease to radiopharmaceuticals that treat cancer [1]. On the diagnostic side, the...Read More→
Product, Not Intermediate: How Direct Lithium to Product® (DLP™) Outperforms Evaporation Ponds and DLE
The Race for Lithium Is Really a Race for Purity Global deployment of lithium-ion batteries in 2025 was six times what it was in 2020, and electric vehicles now account for roughly one in four new cars sold worldwide [1]. Battery chemistries are diverging. Lithium iron phosphate is gaining share, sodium-ion is emerging, and solid-state...Read More→
Rhenium: The Critical Metal at the White-Hot Heart of the Jet Engine
Deep inside the turbine of a modern jet engine, in the first stage just behind the combustor, gas temperatures can exceed 1,650 °C which is hotter than the melting point of the very nickel the engine is built from [5]. Spinning in that inferno are turbine blades, each one cast as a single, unbroken metallic...Read More→
Responsible by Design: How IBC follows Green Engineering & Green Chemistry Principles
How Irresponsible Mining Can Lead to Disaster On a late-November day in 2016, a flock of snow geese migrating south set down to rest on a lake in Butte, Montana. From a distance the water looked inviting; a still, emerald-green expanse ringed by terraced rock. Within days, several thousand of the birds were dead. By...Read More→