If you live near Freeport Texas or in China here is a way to make money.

 

The last Pidgeon process magnesium plant is in Freeport Texas. Most magnesium in the world now comes from China. The Pidgeon process uses a lot of ferrosilicon. Ferrosilicon is an alloy of iron and silicon that can cost $1270 per ton. In the scrap metal industry often people throw out transformers. Transformers are ferrosilicon cores wrapped with copper. Someone in the scrap industry needs to collect the cores separate the copper. Then sell the remaining cores on back into the steel industry as ferrosilicon or on to the magnesium producers. Most of it now just goes into plain steel scrap. Or at least that's what my scrap dealer tells me. I bring him a box of stripped cores and he says to me with a very straight face. “Oh that's steel. It's magnetic.”

Start a Medical Tourism Company

Medical costs in the US are crazy. It is easy and convenient to have common procedures done outside of the United States. Medical fees to have a procedure done outside the States are usually 50% what they are in the united states. This will include the cost of airfare and Hotels. The only problem is the fear of the unknown factor. South Korea has a world class medical system and the doctors are well trained. Many of the doctors in Seoul are or are in the process of getting accredited for medical practice in the United States. The nurses as well. Doctors in Korea are usually fluent in English to boot. A good business to start would be one that chooses a common procedure and sets up a medical holiday for patients from the US. A good business would pick up patients at the airport, and give them some hand holding while they are overseas for their procedure.

Extract Potassium from Seawater

Everyone knows there is salt in seawater. Well ... salt is a dissolved metal. If one gets test equipment that is good enough one can find every metal in seawater. Some elements are just spread very thin.

One example is gold. There is between 3 and 6 ppb (parts per billion) of gold in seawater. I mean in one billion parts perhaps 4 are gold. That is very little. If one had a machine or process that would perfectly extract the gold then they would be left with pumping the water into the processor. The energy used pumping the water would cost more than the value of the gold recovered. On the other hand if the processor was placed in an open ocean current one could use the power of the ocean to do the extraction. Then again it would be easier to just put out electrical generators to generate power and then sell the power for money.

There is a lot of potassium in seawater though. For every liter of seawater there is 3.8 grams of potassium in it. Potassium is useful as potash. It sells for about $400 per ton and is used as fertilizer.
If an extraction process can be figured out where it is economical to extract the potassium then a profit can be made.

A possible method would be to have a long tube of semi permeable membrane. permeable to Na+ and K+ ions but not permeable to anything larger ( like soap). Then with the tube in the ocean a water soluble Na+(cation)- is pumped through the tube and K+(cation)- drops out as a solid which can then be filtered and collected. The trick, of course, is to find the right cation. An example of one is nitrate. (NO3)- At room temperature a solution of Na+, K+, and (NO3)- holds but when the temperature drops the KNO3 precipitates out as a solid. Some does stay in solution though.

China now imports a lot of potassium from Canada as it is cheaper to import it than extract it from the sea but in the future when the population is greater and the need for fertilizer and food is greater the price of potassium will rise and someone will commercialize a process for this. Perhaps it will be done in tandem with the extraction of magnesium, lithium, and uranium from seawater.

Unfortunately I currently live inland.