Some entrepreneurs hope the yawning gap between copper supply and skyrocketing demand could be filled, at least in part, in mine tailings.
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With his shock of prematurely whitened hair and his novel idea for extracting new value from mine waste, Mohammad Doostmohammadi almost has the air of a mad scientist about him.
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But his project is far from the work of science fiction.
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The Vancouver-based chemical engineer has developed a unique electrochemical processing method for combing through mine tailings to recover metals critical to the global energy transition.
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Take the yawning gap between copper supply and skyrocketing demand in the age of artificial intelligence, which could lead to an annual shortfall of 10 million tonnes by 2040, according to a recent report from S&P Global Energy.
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FP West: Energy Insider
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That’s almost twice the annual output of Chile, the world’s biggest copper-producing country.
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To fill the gap, the industry would need to get approvals and build the equivalent of the world’s 20 biggest existing mines.
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However, Doostmohammadi says, there’s an estimated 20 million tonnes of copper sitting in the spent tailings of North American mines.
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“It’s huge,” he says, of the potential opportunity for recycling: He sees treasure in all that tailings trash.
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“We are tackling the material that is already mined, that is already extracted from the earth sitting somewhere else,” he said. “And we extract copper from it.”
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At the moment, Doostmohammadi’s company, pH7 Technologies, is applying an electrochemical process that’s normally used to recycle platinum metals from industrial waste. The process involves catalysts from the oil and gas industry, pharmaceutical manufacturing and even automotive catalytic converters.
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The company has built a commercial-scale, 30,000-sq.-ft. recycling plant in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby.
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It has also raised a $55-million round of Series B financing to fund the company’s growth, including two demonstrations of the technology at mine sites in B.C. and Chile.
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However, pH7 isn’t alone in the tailings-recycling game.
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Doostmohammadi, who founded the company during the COVID-19 pandemic, says the field is “actually getting (to be) quite competitive” with operators using a host of other chemical or biological methods for reprocessing ore.
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“Because the opportunity is huge,” he added.
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While this surge of interest is a recent phenomenon, veteran mining executive Michael McPhie said the practice of extracting value from tailings has been around for almost as long as there has been mining.
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“Mining goes back in human history a couple thousand years, and there’s examples of mine waste (from) the Roman era that have been reprocessed a couple of times as technology improves,” McPhie said.
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The technology has improved quite a bit since the age of ancient Rome. This renewed interest in old tailings is also the result of more recent changes in supply and demand.
