Finland’s Elmery Oy has secured a €2.46 million contribution from the European Innovation Council (EIC) for a two-year project to scale its pulsating-electrolysis metal-recovery technology. The work is intended to move the process from customer-specific testing to live industrial service, with demonstrations at full-refinery scale across several recovery processes.
The project began on 1 October 2026 and is scheduled to run until September 2028. Elmery will use the EIC-backed project to demonstrate its selective recovery technology at refinery scale, according to the company. A key step is to establish how the process performs in operating refinery conditions, rather than only in customer-specific tests.
The technology targets the final fractions of critical and precious metals that conventional refinery circuits can leave dissolved in process solutions. Refiners may recover most of a valuable metal but leave economically significant quantities behind, particularly when concentrations are low or several metals coexist. For high-value metals, even a few percentage points of unrecovered material can represent substantial lost value.
Elmery says its system can achieve more than 99% recovery efficiency by tuning electrical pulse parameters to the chemistry of a specific solution. The company has tested the approach on platinum-group metals, gold, copper and rare earths. It is also using machine-learning techniques to refine process recipes for different customer streams.
In real refinery solutions, impurities, variable concentrations and changing process conditions can affect the technology’s ability to maintain electrochemical selectivity. The project’s demonstrations will address that challenge as Elmery moves toward industrial service.
The work is part of a broader shift toward electrified hydrometallurgy, as European industry seeks to reduce reagent use and emissions. Electricity-based separation can replace chemical additions, improve selectivity or capture metals that would otherwise remain in waste or low-value streams. Its value proposition improves further when the electricity supply is low-carbon.
Recovering more metal from existing refineries can improve resource efficiency without requiring a new orebody, mine footprint or primary extraction. If such technologies can economically recover the last few percentage points of strategic metals, they could expand secondary supply within existing European industrial infrastructure.
