Bacteria could unlock billions in battery metals.
BacTech Environmental CEO Ross Orr remembers years ago when the company tested its technology—which uses bacteria to “eat” around metals that would otherwise be hard to extract—in Sudbury, Ont. The century’s worth of mining waste discarded in the area includes low-grade nickel and cobalt, mixed in with sulphides so “nasty” they need to be stored underwater lest they combust.
The little bacteria did their jobs, said the leader of the Toronto-headquartered firm, whose slogan is “Our bugs eat rocks.” But its ability to separate the waste into useful products, like inputs for cement, doesn’t compare to the potential economic upside of using the technology to produce minerals critical to the production of EVs.
“At the time, there was no value for the other products,” Orr told The Logic in an interview. “We think now there is.”
The reasons are twofold.
First, the growing pressure from investors and governments with net-zero targets to minimize waste is pushing the mining industry to repurpose its byproducts, called “tailings,” instead of impounding them.
Second, soaring demand for battery materials is incentivizing the industry to try to recover critical minerals from the sludge.
Environmental scientists have used bioremediation techniques like bacteria technology for years, Orr noted, to deal with not only mining byproducts like arsenic, but also oil spills or processing wastewater. While it had shown some economic upside as a gold-mining tool, now there’s money in using it to sieve out metals like nickel.
“With the push for critical metals, we now have this amazing tech for a win-win [scenario],” said Nadia Mykytczuk, CEO of not-for-profit mining innovation hub MIRARCO in Sudbury.
MIRARCO, which stands for Mining Innovation, Rehabilitation, and Applied Research Corporation, got $875,000 from the mining giant Vale and $750,000 from the Ontario government last month to recover more nickel and cobalt from mining waste. Biotechnologists are being increasingly recognized as important members of the mining industry, she said.
The organization is building a new facility to help bring more research to market and launch more commercial pilots, she said. MIRARCO estimates that $8 billion to $10 billion worth of nickel could be hidden in Sudbury’s mining waste. University of Toronto researchers working on bioleaching have put the figure as high as $11 billion.
“You could really equate it to the new gold rush. It is going to be the most rapid growth in mining that we’ve ever seen in our lifetime, certainly, and for many more generations before,” said Mykytczuk.
“There is an incredible opportunity for Canada to be leaders. … We have an opportunity to accelerate the development, implementation and uptake of new technologies to ensure that we have sustainable mining practices as we try to meet these demands.”
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