Dr. Liz Dennett: Building Endolith During Mining’s Inflection Point

So what does that mean? Like, be more specific, kind of walk us through, because when you talk about microbes and mining, are you starting up new mines? Like give us, give us the end of the approach.

So the best place I have found to find copper is places there is already copper.

The most, let me take a quick step.

The planet needs so much more copper in the next 25 years and beyond.

So, so, so much.

We can get into those numbers.

But most of the copper on earth is trapped in these low-grade ores.

When I say low-grade, I mean less than half a percent.

Typical ore grades in some of these mines are like 0.3%.

And the way that that is extracted is a process called hydrometallurgy.

They take rocks, they crush them, they make these massive, massive, massive heaps, and they put sulfuric acid in them.

You can use microbes to do that sulfuric acid and get more copper out.

That is what Endolith does in a nutshell.

More broadly, we... enable existing mines to get more copper or get more critical minerals, which means we can squeeze more into the supply chain now.

And the way we do that is through a really unique combination of microbes and cloud computing and a bunch of other cool stuff.

So I think it's a really interesting approach, right? You're, you're able to enhance something that's already happening.

You're not coming up with a completely novel mining process.

So you're the turbo on the naturally aspirated engine, if you will.

A lot of that is by design.

I started my career in oil and gas, which I thought was a very conservative industry, very hard to move into.

Mining is so different.

It is very orthogonal to a lot of the vectors and industrial applications I've worked with.

It's safety is paramount as it has to be, but mining companies are risk averse by design.

And so we've built everything to be fully plug and play.

No downtime, no 100 million capex for a new piece of equipment.