A recent discovery by Jetti Resources could unlock millions of tons of new copper to feed power grids, building sites and car fleets.
The warnings keep getting louder: the world is hurtling toward a desperate shortage of copper. Humans are more dependent than ever on a metal we’ve used for 10,000 years; new deposits are drying up, and the type of breakthrough technologies that transformed other commodities have failed to materialize for copper.In what could prove a game changer for global supply, a US startup says it’s solved a puzzle that has frustrated the mining world for decades.
The miners are responding to an increasingly urgent problem. Copper is ubiquitous in the modern world, used in everything from phones and computers to water pipes and cables. And while the global drive to decarbonize is based on phasing out dirty natural resources like oil and coal, an electrified future will need more copper than ever before.
The reason is a principle as old as mining itself: ore is pulled up from the earth, the easiest metal is extracted, and anything too difficult or expensive to process is tossed aside as waste. Over the past decade alone, an estimated 43 million tons of copper have been mined but never processed, worth more than $2 trillion at current prices, creating huge opportunities for anyone who can successfully recover those riches.
So far Jetti’s process has been running on just one mine, at Pinto Valley in Arizona. But the results have been so promising three of the world’s biggest copper miners — including BHP — have bought stakes in the company. Its latest fundraising was at a valuation of $2.5 billion. While Jetti’s process is the most advanced, Rio Tinto says it’s also cracked the challenge in lab trials. Rio has been offering its Nuton technology as a sweetener to junior mining companies that it invests in: if the smaller firms successfully develop their mining projects, then Rio will deploy the Nuton process to boost profitability. It’s signed three such deals already this year.
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