| Jetti Resources LLC sells a means of extracting copper from low-grade primary sulfides, including chalcopyrite. The technology company promises to unlock a vast amount of copper, including at sites where the ores may have otherwise been treated as waste. Source: Jetti Resources LLC |
➤ Copper grades are declining and miners are looking for new resources amid rising demand.
➤ Jetti Resources offers tech to tap into lower-grade ores often thought of as waste.
➤ Resource optimization also drops copper's environmental footprint.
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As the world electrifies and transitions to cleaner energy resources, it needs more copper. Mining companies have not done enough exploration to unearth the amount of metal needed to meet demand.
Jetti Resources LLC, however, promises dramatic increases in the production of copper cathode, a high-purity form of copper essential to electrical wires, batteries and other technological applications.
The company's showcase commercial operation is located at Capstone Mining Corp.'s Pinto Valley mine in Arizona. Jetti has been operating at the mine for three years and doubled copper production from the leach operation after the first year, Jetti Resources co-founder and CEO Mike Outwin said. Outwin said Jetti is constructing a second commercial operation in the Americas that will go live in 2022.
Jetti's technology inserts a catalyst into a company's normal processing flow to extract copper from low-grade primary sulfides, such as chalcopyrite, which are abundant but not economical to process and often disposed of as waste. The conventional low-cost method of leaching copper material from ore is generally ineffective on primary sulfides, Jetti said.
Jetti has the backing of major industry players, including Teck Resources Ltd., BHP Group Ltd., Freeport-McMoRan Inc., Mitsubishi Corp. and Orion Resource Partners.
The company commissioned a 2021 study by CRU Group, which estimated that Jetti's technology could tap into a total addressable market of roughly 234 million tonnes of copper worth an estimated $2.4 trillion. That study forecast that a transition to cleaner energy will drive a gap between copper supply and demand of up to 10.9 million tonnes annually by 2050. If Jetti's technology were to meet 100% of its estimated total addressable market, it would result in enough copper to close that gap, the study said.
S&P Global Commodity Insights spoke with Outwin about the company's technology. The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
S&P Global Commodity Insights: Jetti says it has captured the "holy grail" of copper mining. Tell us briefly about what this technology is, how it works and why is it so important.
Mike Outwin:
So, the mining industry has to look somewhere for copper. The mining industry for a very long time has considered this one option — which is the low-grade material that they don't put through a concentrator — as being a potential source of additional copper pounds.
The reason why it has been called the holy grail — primary sulfide leaching or chalcopyrite leaching — is because the industry for a lot of years has installed leaching and [solvent extraction and electrowinning] capacity at mines around the world to process easy-to-access copper mineralogy such as oxides and secondary sulfides. Those things leach easily. You've got all this infrastructure that has been built to process those materials, and they account for about 20% of global copper production annually.
It's thought of as the low-cost method for processing copper ore. It's really the only option you've got for low-grade material because you can't justify the crushing and energy expenditures for concentration on the low-grade material.
So, the industry has just been very intent on finding a way to use leaching for primary sulfides, yet they haven't been able to find it.
Technology after technology has failed. There's been this kind of aura around primary sulfide mineralogy, being able to leach it. Because if you did unlock it, then you're opening up very serious amounts of additional pounds of copper, and you're doing it in a relatively low-cost way.
How did Jetti Resources crack that code?
My co-founder [Andrew Perlman] and I started sponsoring research at the University of British Columbia 10 years ago. We supported some very basic science, which wasn't even developed technology yet, that we were getting behind.
We started to support it just to see if there was something there, if there are any fatal flaws to these ideas or if it was really just an idea. They identified a suite of chemicals that seemed to be, after a lot of additional testing that we did, very effective at getting copper out of chalcopyrite.
It was just taking a huge amount of experience and scientific firepower, putting it at this problem and tackling it from a different perspective. We weren't a big mining company; my co-founder and I didn't have a big [research and development] department. We just had experience from startups that we'd supported in Silicon Valley and in the oil and gas space. We took some of the learnings and the pitfalls and errors that we made over on the advanced technology [development] side, as startup guys, and applied that to this problem.
Tens of millions of dollars and a decade later, we were able to figure it out. It's not like it happened overnight or that it was something easy. It was extraordinarily hard. But we now have a mature technology that is very much commercial and produces extra tons of cathode every single day.
| Capstone Mining Corp. partnered with Jetti Resources LLC to use its technology at the Pinto Valley mine in Arizona. Source: Jetti Resources LLC |
Are there any trade-offs or particular concerns that people have to think about before they deploy this at their mine site?
One of the advantages of Jetti's technology is that it's very, very simple from an implementation and deployment standpoint. There are no process flow sheet changes that the existing operation has to make. We plug in directly to the existing leaching infrastructure.
You don't have big [capital expenditure], and you don't have the permitting hurdles to get through because we're using an existing leach system and not adjusting it other than the addition of a catalyst.
Every single technology that's been tried out over the last 30 to 40 years by the mining industry on the chalcopyrite problem has faltered because of either high capex, difficulty in terms of integrating into existing flow sheets, the operation, environmental issues or technical problems, such as energy balance.
For the same emissions, you're getting more copper. We're helping the industry drive for the production of what you could consider greener copper. The industry wants to do this; they truly want to produce cleaner copper.
We're all about resource optimization. We're not talking about 5% increases in copper production or 10% increases. We're talking about literally 100% to 200% additional copper production from leach in many situations as a result of our technology for the same emissions and water consumption that you would have without us.
Observers say the industry needs to spend more on exploration as copper discoveries have dwindled. With the need for copper rising, do you think some of the interest Jetti is seeing is because the boom in demand caught people off guard?
I think that's right. The world needs more copper now, not in 20 years. That means it needs it today and next year and the year after that.
Building a new mine these days, on average, I think takes 15 years to 20 years, depending on what jurisdiction, from drilling your holes through pre-feasibility, feasibility, permitting and construction. It's clearly not an easy thing to do, and it takes a very long time. It takes, oftentimes, billions of dollars of capital expenditure and negotiation with communities and consideration of environmental issues.
[CRU Group] did a study last year that said that Jetti's total addressable market from now to 2050 was, was, I believe, $2.3 trillion or $2.4 trillion of copper production at current prices at that point last year. That's a lot of copper.
There are other companies focused on exploration, but exploration isn't going to solve the copper needs that the industry has right now or in the next decade. Even if you found a new Escondida in the next year or two, you're not going to have that copper production until the late 2030s.
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