“They are intimately familiar with what it takes to scale these technologies because they know the industry,” she says. “They will be your biggest supporters, but they will also be your biggest critics.”
In addition to the technical challenges, Rasner points out that venture-capital-backed biotechnology startups will struggle to deliver the quick returns their investors expect. Mining companies want a lot of data before adopting a new process, which can take years of testing to compile. “It’s not software,” Rasner says.
Newton, a subsidiary of mining giant Rio Tinto, is a good example of this. The company has been working on a copper bioleaching process for decades that uses a mixture of archaea and bacteria strains in addition to some chemical additives. But it began demonstrating the technology at an Arizona mine late last year.
newton
While Endolith and Newton use naturally occurring microbes, startup 1849 is hoping to get a bigger performance boost by genetically engineering microbes.
“You can do what mining companies have traditionally done,” says CEO Jay Padmakumar. “Or you can try to take moonshot bets and engineer them. If you get it, you’ll win big.”
Genetic engineering will allow 1849 to tailor its microbes to the specific challenges the customer faces. But Buzz Barstow, a microbiologist at Cornell University who studies biotechnology applications in mining, warns that engineering the organisms could also make it harder to grow.
Other companies are trying to avoid that trade-off by implementing products of microbial fermentation instead of living organisms. Alta Resource Technologies, which closed a $28 million investment round in December, is engineering microbes that create proteins capable of extracting and separating rare earth elements. Similarly, REEgen, a startup based in Ithaca, New York, relies on organic acids produced by engineered strains. Gluconobacter oxidans To extract rare earth elements from ore and from waste materials such as metal recycling slag, coal ash, or old electronics. “Germs are manufacturing,” says CEO Alexa Schmitz, an alumnus of Barstow’s lab.
Barstow says this new wave of biotechnology will have to go beyond copper and gold to make a dent in growing demand for the metal. In 2024, he began a project to map genes that could be useful for extracting and separating a wide range of metals. Despite the challenges ahead, he says biotechnology has the potential to transform mining in the same way that fracking transformed natural gas. “Biomining is one of those areas where the need is huge,” he says.
The challenge will be to move very quickly to meet the increasing demand.
