Ceibo wants to unlock vast new copper deposits for the energy transition—while making the mining industry more sustainable.
Copper wires form the backbone of the clean-energy economy, connecting cars, buildings, and factories to the grid. Copper is also essential to solar panels, wind turbines, and EVs. Demand for the metal in these and other cleantech applications is expected to nearly triple by 2040. But much of the copper that remains in the ground is locked up in low-grade ores that aren’t economical to mine. The mining technology company Ceibo hopes to change that.
Today, about 20% of the world’s copper is produced from copper oxide ores. Copper is extracted by crushing the rock, placing it in a giant pile, and spraying it with dilute acid. As acid percolates through the rock, the copper dissolves and leaches out.
The remaining 80% of the world’s copper comes from copper sulfide ores, which don’t dissolve well in acid. To extract that copper, the industry uses a more energy- and water-intensive process that involves concentrating the metal in vats of chemicals before smelting it at high temperatures.
Ceibo is tweaking the lower-impact leaching process so that it works on copper sulfides. The company’s chemistry-based approach mimics the way naturally occurring microbial communities liberate copper from sulfide ores, but at an accelerated pace. By altering conditions within the rock pile, including pH and oxidation state, Ceibo’s tech makes it possible to recover more than 70% of the copper. Companies that are already mining copper oxides can plug the firm’s tech into their existing infrastructure without costly retrofits.