Recently, the EU and Australia signed a pact to increase investment in critical minerals projects — a move aimed at directly reducing dependence on China. According to the European Commission, the EU gets 100% of its heavy rare earth elements, 85% of its light rare earth elements, and 80% of its lithium from China. This news comes on the heels of tariffs by President Joe Biden targeting (among other products) Chinese-produced rare earths and lithium, which have a similarly dominant position in the American ecosystem. One crucial reason for China’s dominance is a history of looser environmental regulations, enabling the harsh chemical leaching that is the go-to approach for rare earths. The search for critical minerals is not just these rare earths: Copper has also been in the news, as prices have soared this year due to mine underperformance and strong demand. Lux’s own forecast of lithium production shows that there’s likely to be a 1-Mtonne shortfall by 2030. Where will the metals come from as demand increases throughout the rest of the decade? As our recent report “Critical Minerals Strategies: Regional Challenges and Opportunities” highlighted, companies and governments are moving with unprecedented speed to deploy solutions.
I’m increasingly convinced that bioleaching (or biomining) is the answer. The basic approach here is to use microbes to either directly capture and separate metals of interest from brines or other aqueous streams or use microbes to produce some kind of enzyme that breaks down compounds of interest to allow extraction of metals. In both cases, the goal is to replace an environmentally damaging process (chemical-intensive leaching, high-temperature roasting) with something that’s less damaging and potentially higher performing. I’m particularly bullish on this approach for three reasons.
First, check out the Lux Tech Signal (our custom data science tool for measuring innovation activity) for bioleaching below:
This text signal tells an interesting story. You can see a clear rise in interest in the 2006 to 2009 time frame roughly coinciding with the spike in precious metals and commodity prices ahead of the global financial crisis. At that time, platinum and gold were under particular pressure, and there was a lot of interest in alternative extraction methods like bioleaching as well as alternative metals and catalysts. When the prices dropped, innovation activity dried up and didn’t recover until the recent uptick around 2021, and is likely to reach an all-time high this year. This second inflection point indicates that some of these new technologies are going to be increasingly ready for the market in the next two to four years — right on time, as the issues of metal supply will really be hitting their most intense phase.
Bioleaching has also benefited tremendously from innovation activity that’s not directly captured on this text signal since 2009. There’s been a huge decrease in the cost of genome sequencing and microbial strain development, thanks to huge amounts of R&D and investment in synthetic biology (synbio). These techniques are the fundamental underlying approach to developing better bioleaching microbes, and their relative maturity will make it a lot easier and faster to develop high-performance microbial strains to address the diversity of resources and metals out there. It’s not a surprise to me that we’ve seen a notable uptick in the number of biomining startups, starting around 2020, when synbio really hit the big time in terms of funding. Synbio techniques are still only improving, which bodes well for biomining approaches, too.
Secondly, there’s increasing consumer and government pressure on mining and minerals extraction. Check out the maturity curve for rare earths from the Lux MotivAI:
Rare earths are already in the zone of mainstream acceptance, meaning that there’s an increasingly solid consensus around what these metals are and the issues attached to them. Case in point: One of the key underlying consumer themes is a growing awareness of cleantech as a double-edged sword for the environment, with the damage caused by mining and minerals extraction increasingly hard to ignore. This popular awareness is manifesting in policy — for example, Chile recently nationalized its lithium industry and mandated the use of direct lithium extraction in large part due to environmental concerns about large-scale evaporation ponds. Even in China, a crackdown and clean-up efforts have begun on those relatively dirty mining activities. This combination of consumer sentiment and policy makes biomining and bioleaching increasingly attractive.
Finally, while using microbes for mining sounds pretty futuristic, the technology is actually more mature than you might think. Some 5% of global gold production and 15% of copper production are already using bioleaching or bioextraction. That’s a significantly stronger track record than direct lithium extraction, a novel mining technology that gets talked about (and that Lux gets asked about) a lot more. These existing proofs of concept, combined with improvements in the technology, will give startups a better on ramp to commercialization than you might expect.
I worry that major players in the industry are sleeping on this opportunity — biomining and bioleaching approaches are quite flexible in terms of the metals and minerals they can target, so this is really an opportunity for a wide range of players to get involved. What’s interesting is the opportunity is not only for traditional chemicals and mining companies; groups in agriculture with experience in fermentation could even make a play in this area. The time to act is now, especially as many of these companies are moving into the pilot stage and need resources. Of course, biomining will only be one piece of the puzzle: there are many important technologies (not just extraction) as the start-ups at our recent Ideathon on Critical Minerals showed.