Hydrogen and critical metals from seaweed

Every summer since 2011, the brown seaweed Sargassum has blanketed beaches along the Atlantic and Caribbean coasts, hurting local ecosystems and economies. Warmer temperatures have led to explosive growth of this marine algae and sparked efforts to convert the problem biomass to valuable products . At the American Chemical Society’s Spring 2025 meeting, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, reported methods to make hydrogen fuel and extract rare earth elements (REEs), which are critical for batteries and electronics, from Sargassum . Seaweed is known to absorb metal ions from seawater, with some species accumulating up to 40% of their dry weight as minerals. The research is part of a project whose goal is to make commercial products from the millions of metric tons of Sargassum economically, said UCLA material scientist and engineer Aaron Moment . Moment, Ah-Hyung Alissa Park, and colleagues have developed an alkaline thermal treatment to