A USA startup wants to recover all the copper that’s tied up in mine waste using a specialised catalyst so rock-eating microbes can release the trapped metal.
What’s more they say they can work with existing mines in a way that uses less water and energy than traditional production processes.
The extraction technology by Jetti Resources is focused on a common type of ore that traps copper behind a thin film, but by using a specialised catalyst to disrupt the layer they can free up the metal.
It’s an idea that could not only be worth $2T in the current market, but also help plug the looming global supply shortage of copper I and many others have talked about already.
Apparently over just the past decade an estimated 43M tons of copper has been mined but never processed, left to sit in mine-waste piles on the surface because its too costly & difficult to extract.
It not only works on waste, but on low grade primary sulfides like chalcopyrite that hasn’t been viable to mine. Jetti says that as much as 8M tons of additional copper could be produced each year by the 2040s – more than one third of last year’s total global mine production.
I don’t like to brag of course, but our Road to Zero project already flagged Jetti’s breakthrough in both our Water & Materials Handling reports.
Jetti just raised $100M to help ‘rapidly’ install their plants at large copper mines, while some of the world’s biggest miners like BHP, Freeport-McMoRan & Teck Resources are already investors.
So far Jetti’s process has been running at just one mine, Capstone Mining’s Pinto Valley in Arizona, who reported that cathode production per area irrigated has doubled.
In an electrified world desperate for sustainable copper supplies, Jetta’s technology could be—as the company itself says—the sector’s “holy grail”.
Cheers, John Fennell