The ocean has about 20 million loads of gold in it– thats around 700 TRILLION DOLLARS worth of gold! In this episode of Reactions, we explore how, for over a century, individuals have struggled to collect it. Hes totally delirious, clinging to life and he has an unusual dream where he sees seawater being turned into gold.
It would also be quite pricey to carry that much seawater because theres so little gold in that water that you would require to bring millions of gallons.
Well for now, Im not gon na get gold out of this, however I did get to go to the beach to movie this video.
Video Transcript:
The ocean has around 20 million lots of gold in it. Thats something like $700 trillion worth of gold.
And the cubic mile of seawater behind me has someplace around a million dollars worth.
How do I get some of that?
( indistinct) Hello, I am Sam Jones, Im here for reactions.
All right, Im ready.
Im obviously, not the first person to have actually thought of this. In 1872, a British chemist called Edward Sonstadt found that there was gold in seawater, however he didnt really try to get abundant off of it.
The first individual to attempt was New England pastor, Prescott Ford Jernegan in 1890s. The story goes that he comes down with typhoid fever. Hes totally delirious, clinging to life and he has a strange dream where he sees seawater being turned into gold.
He survives the typhoid and hes like, all right, Im gon na do that. And he produces what he calls the gold accumulator.
It was basically a wood box with holes in it that inside had a sheet of strong mercury that was combined with a secret active ingredient. And after that it had actually a wire connected to a battery that went through the mercury and energized it.
Jernegan was offering this odd energized wood box to people so that they might get rich fast by sucking gold out of the water.
This is a chemical process that researchers typically describe as a scam, the science simply wasnt there,
Not all attempts to get gold out of seawater had been rip-offs.
In 1900 developer Henry Clay Bull submitted a patent for an approach of extracting gold from seawater, where he lowered the acidity of seawater to apparently take out liquified ions, including gold ions, however theres no record of Bull even attempting his own device.
In the 1920s, Nobel Laureate, Fritz Haber invested years working on this and really created what was apparently a legit procedure that includes an enormous centrifuge.
Then he realized he made a really easy mathematical error early on, and his process turned out to cost more cash than you d in fact get back in gold but where they all failed, I believe I can be successful?
I imply, it cant be that difficult.
Got it.
Well boil off the water in seawater, which will just leave the salt behind and then Im gon na try and extract gold from that.
Hmm, now that I have salt, I simply need to separate the gold from the other things in it.
Normally when people draw out gold from rock or sediment in nature, they utilize a technique called a gold cyanidation where gold is basically liquified.
Gold cyanidation relies on an oxidation decrease or redox response, which is a type of response where electrons are transferred from one species or atom to another.
In this case, oxygen removes electrons from gold atoms leaving them with a positive charge so that they can form a complex with adversely charged cyanide.
Hey George, can I get a thumbs up for using cyanide in this video?
While I was trying to figure out how to purchase something thats been utilized as a chemical weapon to extract gold, I got to believing, how much gold could I actually receive from this?
In 1990, researchers determined that theres about one gram of gold for every hundred million lots of seawater.
I boiled down one liter of seawater and seawater includes about 50 femtomole per liter of gold, that corresponds to about 10 picograms.
$ 1 gold is about 0.01769 grams of gold. So if I just desire a dollars worth of gold, I would require to go through 2 billion liters.
Hmm, okay.
Well, a fast call to a chemist ought to help me sort this out.
If I brought a hundred liters of seawater to your lab and I was trying to draw out gold from it, what would you inform me to do?
— If you brought it to the lab we could try to remove it doing something like electrochemistry, where do we try to reduce it by offering electrons to it.
So whats the disadvantage of just doing that. I indicate, just bring you containers and buckets of seawater.
— Well, my laboratory isnt that huge. So this would be truly challenging. Because theres so little gold in that water that you would need to bring millions of gallons, it would also be quite pricey to carry that much seawater.
— There has actually been some work done where people have in fact eliminated gold from seawater utilizing metal, natural frameworks.
A metal organic framework, or MOF is clusters of metal ions linked together by natural particles. MOFs can be customized to trap different molecules of interest and their large surface area means they can take in a great deal of whatever theyre gathering.
— A small piece of metal, organic frameworks say the size of your hand, may have the area of state a football field.
So then whats the holdup?
— Well, these things bind ions, however a great deal of ions look similar and given the percentage of gold youre gon na get out of the water, it really ends up not being expense effective.
— I believe if you were discussing doing it profitably. People would sort of discover that to be a little silly.
Ah, fine. Well in the meantime, Im not gon na get gold out of this, however I did get to go to the beach to movie this video. It wasnt a total loss.
Prior to you go, we wished to invite you to take part in PBS digital studios, annual audience survey. Your feedback actually assists us understand what our audience has an interest in so that we can provide you more of it. So if you have a couple of minutes, we d enjoy your input.
You even get to vote on possible brand-new shows. Theres a link in the description below, thanks.
https://to.pbs.org/2021survey
The ocean has about 20 million lots of gold in it– thats around 700 TRILLION DOLLARS worth of gold! In this episode of Reactions, we explore how, for over a century, individuals have struggled to collect it. And we see if, where they stopped working, we can be successful.
