Insider Brief:
- Endolith’s technology improves copper recovery rates from already-existing mines, and increases access to the metal on which many decarbonization technologies depend.
- The technology involves the targeted use of microbiomes to improve recoveries, coupled with cloud technology to strategically target the microbiomes.
- The company has raised around US$5 million in seed funding.
Copper is a building block of most net-zero and decarbonization technologies. Technologies from power lines to solar panels and wind turbines to electric vehicles and energy-efficient equipment all require this metal.
However, the International Energy Agency warned last month that copper supplies will fall 30% short of the amount of copper needed to meet 2035 demand if nothing is done.
Endolith is aiming to expand the amount of copper available by applying its microbiome technology to increase yields in copper production at existing mines.
Most copper is refined through heap leaching – a process which involves spraying sulphuric acid on mined material to separate the copper ore from the waste rock. There are at least 140 existing heap leach operations throughout the world.
Heap leach processing can recover anywhere between 20% and 60% of copper ore from deposits, Endolith CEO Liz Dennett told Climate Insider.
Endolith’s technology can help these mines squeeze out another 10% to 20% of metal, she said.
“Copper is the backbone of everything,” she said. Projected copper shortages are a “civilization-level bottleneck,” she said, pointing out that each new data centre requires between 10 to 15 tons of copper.
“The best place to find copper is where there’s already copper,” she said. “We need new copper today – not 15 years from now,” she added, referencing the long wait times associated with permitting new mines.
“If we can maximize recovery rates, we’re not making more mines and creating more waste,” she said. “To create a new mine, it’s very capital intensive and there’s a lot of equipment to be deployed. We are saving so much new infrastructure, which has a massive carbon footprint.”
Microbes and cloud data combination
The technology has two parts: the microbial communities which help remove waste rock from ore, and the cloud platform to monitor reactions put in motion by the microbial communities.
“Microbes are nature’s oldest miner,” she said. “They facilitate a lot of these chemical reactions that otherwise the sulphuric acid [in the heap leach] would catalyze. We just have faster, Olympic-caliber microbes that we’re putting in there.”
The microbes are plugged into the existing heap leaches to maximize ore output, Dennett said.
Endolith uses naturally occurring microorganisms, which then accelerate redox reactions to tackle ore separation in complex orebodies. Heap leaches tend to struggle with these kinds of orebodies, Dennett said.
“This is where we thrive,” Dennett said. “We want the marginal stuff that people are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to get to.”
The process, known as bioleaching, involves integrating biohatcheries of microbial communities into the existing heap leach infrastructure. These biohatcheries produce a product called biolixiviants, which work with the heap leaching process to maximize returns.
The microbial communities are introduced to a heap leach sample to understand how microbes are currently operating within the heap leach and how these can be optimized. The process takes between two and four months.
The second part of Endolith’s technology is the cloud platform, which Dennett calls biological intelligence.
The cloud platform collects thousands of data. “Every new rock we touch gives us thousands of data points,” Dennett said. The cloud allows Endolith to track how microbes interact with the rock, and determine which types of microbes respond best to different environments as well as different Eh and pH levels.
Endolith is also expanding into lithium mining, a metal used primarily in electric vehicles. The technology enables microbiomes to dissolve the clays around lithium and expedite processing.
Early commercial success
The start-up of less than 20 people now has finalized commercial agreements with mining giants Rio Tinto and BHP, and has negotiated not-yet-announced agreements with five other companies.
The company recently worked with BHP’s innovation arm, Think & Act Differently (TAD), and mining startup ecosystem Unearthed to trial its technology. Endolith worked with low-grade sulfide ores and demonstrated a significant increase in copper recovery.
Endolith has thus far raised around US$5 million, and defied investors’ expectations early on, Dennett, a self-described “blue-purple haired enthusiastic CEO,” said.
While other mining-focused startups in microbes have floundered, Endolith seems to be on an upward trajectory. Dennett attributes this to her team, who have come from other major mining companies and understand the needs of their customers.
She is also very proud that some 65% of staff at Endolith is female.
“Our secret sauce is our team,” she said, to explain Endolith’s success. “We have a team that know the issue inside in and out.”
