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- Copper. One of the most precious non-precious metals. It's part of your everyday life. It powers your home, your car, and your phone. It's how you're watching this very video. And its value has more than doubled over the last 10 years. - Across the board, there's demand for copper for electrification. - Everything from electric cars to wind turbines relies on having access to copper. - But there's not enough to keep up.
- Unfortunately, we can't just go out and discover new copper mines. - Opening a new mine costs a pretty penny, and it takes years to build. - If you can find ways to squeeze more copper out of existing mines, you don't have to open up new mines. - One way to answer this big problem is actually small. Nope, smaller than that. Think microscopic. There we go. Microbes. These little bugs eat their way through ore and leave behind copper.
Not much is understood about them. Mining companies are finding ways to change that. But are these teeny, tiny miners biting off more than they can chew? - This is cool. We get to go to the pit. That's where the action happens. This where the really big truck with the really, really big rock-carrying ability is. That's why I didn't say that. - Oh, I'm sorry. It's actually - - I'm Dr. Liz Dennett. I'm the founder and CEO of Endolith. The main issue with the high-grade copper ores is that most of them are gone, and the things that are left are very difficult to get to.
They're very remote or they're not able to be safely mined. And so the best place to find copper is where we already have copper, places like this. - This is Carlota Mine. It's producing about 60% less copper than it did during peak output. Unless something is done, it's set to shut down by the end of the decade. - Most of the copper that's left on the surface of the planet is trapped in low-grade ores. I am talking rocks that are like 0.25 to 0.3% copper. That's not very much copper. And traditional methods get maybe around half of that.
- In high-grade ore, you'll find much denser concentrations of copper. Today, we find that it's harder and harder to find high-grade copper mines. The mining industry is a famously conservative industry. These are companies that are often quite reluctant to invest billions of dollars into a new mine because sometimes it can scare their investors. Because of that, we've seen a lot of companies come in and try to offer alternatives. - Biomining, the process of using microbes to extract metals from ore, is one of these alternatives to get more copper.
It's also very inexpensive compared to other methods. - Microbes are actually the oldest miners in the world. For billions of years, they have been reshaping the planet by breaking down rocks and reaching out elements. - Microbes are living organisms too small to be seen with the naked eye, like bacteria, archaea, and some fungi. They can be found in the most extreme environments, from volcanoes to glaciers, and the most ordinary: our bodies. Microbes have always been a part of mine sites. The challenge modern biomining companies face is that they still don't fully understand how these bugs work.
- It's a black box. Microbes are in the environment. They are playing some kind of role, but it's unconstrained, it's running wild. - So let's take a step back here. Heap leaching is a biomining process for low-grade ore. It starts with ore getting blasted into particles, which then gets piled into ginormous heaps, hence the name. An irrigation system runs sulfuric acid through the heap. This is where communities of microbes are added. This buggy solution flushes through the ore and liberates the copper, which is collected in giant ponds at the end of the process.
Typically, microbes are left alone after being added. Today, biomining companies are looking for ways to do more during that step. Endolith is one of them. - So part of what we are doing is using microbes combined with some cloud computing and some other aspects to take the mines that already exist and squeeze every drop of copper out. - Founded in 2023, the startup is turning heads. They've reportedly raised a little over $20 million from venture capital investment.
They've even received grant funding from the US Department of Energy and have partnered with major mining companies like BHP and Rio Tinto. Endolith has only begun proof-of-concept deployment. Their clients range from greenfield mines, which are sites that have yet to become mines, to existing mines. - So Endolith hasn't really kicked off with field deployment until now, so a lot of people are still waiting to say, "Oh, can you really deliver the same promise when you operate in the real world?"
- So what does Endolith claim to deliver? - Historically, biomining used one type of microbe, a bug called acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans. - Acido-what? - Could you repeat that? - Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans. Top 10 microbe. It is A-tier, maybe even S-tier. - Evidence of microbes at mines date as far back as ancient Greece and China, but it wasn't until the late 1950s that the first heat leaching process using microbes was patented.
Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans - whew! - is one of the most well-known microbes used to extract copper. It's a bacterium that is an extremophile, meaning it can survive harsh places like mine sites. - I guess if I was going to do an analogy, it would be like the Iron Man, the Tony Stark organisms, and we're taking a much more communal Avengers type approach. - Unlike traditional biomining, Endolith focuses on more than just Tony Stark in order to thrive at mine sites. Heap leaches experience extreme changes in conditions. For example, temperature that may affect the performance
of individual microbes or even kill them. Endolith says they select microbes from nature, train them to survive these conditions, and then deploy them as a group. - We take these bugs and these microbial communities and then we'll slowly run them through kind of like an Olympic training camp. An example of this is if we want to deploy in saltwater, we will start at relatively fresh water conditions and we'll slowly increase the salt water or we'll slowly increase the temperature or we'll slowly increase the arsenic concentration.
- Before the microbes hit the mines, they start their training here. - Every engineering system has funky noise. - This is Christine Green, Vice President of Technology and Operations at Endolith. - Now that the microbiologists have actually really progressed a lot of the tools, you can see all of those organisms that actually make a difference in copper leachings.
- Endolith relies on genomic tools to monitor the microbial communities as they go through each step of their process. - This is really the hub. This is where all the magic happens. - Once the chosen communities grow up a bit, the bugs run through several scales of testing. - So we like to, you know, plug in a number of different communities at various temperatures and see do they live or die?
We'll take those microbes and place them into the column itself. - As the bugs move to bigger columns, things can change. - So changing the parameters even just slightly will give you a different community. So the various microbes that are present and are good for copper leaching, that's what we're trying to really control. The lab is the best case scenario, right? You can control the temperatures, the particle size distribution, air injection, everything. When you get to the field, you now start to have challenges that you have to overcome.
This is actually one of the reactors that's going on the pilot rig. - Endolith's pilot rig is designed to bring the microbes as close to the heap as possible by hooking up directly to the irrigation system. - So how do you know what is happening inside? That's a challenge of facing a lot of mining companies when it comes to biomining. - Endolith claims they will monitor their microbes in the heat by observing parameters like temperature and pH levels to adjust the communities they're putting to work.
- You're told that it's turned into metal, but you never see it. So you can see the copper ions in solution and the aqueous solution, and then the phase separation where it switches to organic, and we use these two different phases in order to concentrate the copper to a high enough percentage that we can then put it into the electroplating plant and make pure copper cathode. Mining in general, yeah, people seem to think that it's a pretty low tech and they have the picture in their mind of picks and shovels and people in horrible environments,
but actually it's, it's pretty high tech in a lot of ways. You know, we're always looking to increase our recovery from our resource. - Traditionally, heap leaches get about 20 to 50% of copper out. Endolith says they can get more, but the move-fast-and-break-things ethos doesn't apply here. - Startups like Endolith face myriad challenges in the mining industry, and what we've seen with companies and startups is that it takes them a long time to prove out their technology and to show that these are really breakthroughs
that can make it easier to extract these minerals. - Unlike labs, heap leaches are notoriously difficult to control. On top of that, duplicating the process across different deposits is its own beast. No two mines are the same. What works for one may not work for another. - What's surprising about the mining industry is the diversity of considerations towards how to mine. And there are usually, you know, teams at these companies, research and development teams, that spend a lot of time thinking in really creative, innovative ways about how we're going to get more critical minerals.
- The global demand for electricity is expected to double by 2050. Without copper, there would be no power grids, renewable energy equipment, electric vehicles, and data centres. Companies worldwide are using methods that range from genetic modification, chemical catalysts, to sensors and automations on heap leaches. Nuton, a venture backed by mining giant, Rio Tinto, is developing their own microbial solutions. Amazon Web Services has bought their copper for US data centres.
Electrification is one of many ways to curb emissions, but there are still costs to the environment. - Sometimes mining can be incredibly harmful for the environment, but really the environmental problems facing the mining industry come into conflict with another basic reality, which is that we need mining and the industry is always in conflict to figure out how to do that in the most sustainable way. - Generally speaking, the industry believes carbon footprint and environment footprint of microbes is still smaller than opening up a new mine.
