Do you smell what the rock is cooking? Well, if you’ve been paying attention to the critical minerals space, the answer might just be microbes.
Yes, those tiny organisms once synonymous with obsessive hand washing and gallons of hand sanitizer are now being leveraged in completely new ways. Actually, “new” might be the wrong word—they’ve been around since the dawn of life itself. And that’s exactly what makes their potential so exciting.
Take Endolith, a start-up based in Boulder, Colorado, who spun out of another microbial powerhouse by the name of Cemvita. Endolith is currently combining two major themes currently dominating your news feed: data and copper.
In simple terms, CEO and founder, Liz Dennett, and her team are playing nature’s matchmaker: copper ore, meet microbe. Their approach involves building biohatcheries at mining sites. These hatcheries constantly produce nature’s oldest miners—microbes that munch on ore and help liberate copper into an ionic aqueous state. That copper is later recovered as a metal cathode through a process called solvent extraction and electrowinning (SXEW)—which is basically fancy talk for “metal ions becoming metal solids using electricity.
Source: Endolith
Even more compelling: they’re using a cloud-native system to monitor microbial performance in real time, enabling instant adjustments and reducing costly downtime. That data they collect not only helps them be better and become a more efficient solution but offers insights into the mining companies themselves about what they’re digging up.
The ore of choice? Chalcopyrite—a stubborn, thermodynamically stable mineral that combines copper, iron, and sulfur. It’s also the most abundant copper-bearing mineral on Earth. When grades are high enough, it’s usually sent off to a smelter after physical processing. That’s where ESG concerns really kick in: the energy use and emissions from smelting are immense. And with ore grades declining globally, the industry is under increasing pressure to extract more copper from less material.
Turns out, if you give humans enough time, we’ll get so good at something that we start creating new problems (cue wild gesturing at the climate crisis).
Processing chalcopyrite isn’t new technology. In fact, it’s believed that copper heap leaching has been around since at least the 1700s in Spain. Picture this: a massive pile of ore is drenched with chemicals (think acids and bases) and then… you wait. Sometimes two years or more. You might recover 30% of the copper if you’re lucky.
But there’s a silver lining—this method bypasses smelting altogether. From an emissions perspective, that’s a huge win. And considering the copper demand projections, every bit counts. The IEA projects a 30% copper supply deficit by 2035 under its STEPS scenario. In a net-zero future, that deficit widens to 40%.
Mined copper supply from existing and announced projects and primary supply requirements by scenario
Source: IEA
Plenty of others are also recognizing the opportunity in chalcopyrite heap leaching and alternative extraction.
- Jetti Resources (Boulder), backed by industry heavyweights like BHP, Mitsubishi, and Teck, has been scaling its catalytic technology since 2014 with commercial deployments in the U.S. and Chile.
_ - PH7 Technologies (Vancouver) uses a non-aqueous closed loop system to recover metals from sources like spent catalysts for platinum group metals and are now tackling copper ore.
_ - Maverick Biometals (San Antonio) uses its LithX lixiviant platform to extract critical minerals from oilfield wastewater—with further applications in the copper space.
_ - Still Bright (Newark) recently raised an oversubscribed Seed round to scale its vanadium-based electrochemistry, promising copper recovery in minutes instead of months.
Copper isn’t the only mineral drawing microbial interest.
REEgen, based in Ithaca, New York, is brewing a microbial super broth—glucose-fed custom bacteria that, when applied to waste streams like coal ash or slag, produce organic acids that pull out valuable metals.
The result? What was once a hazardous waste headache becomes not only less toxic and cheaper to dispose of, but also a new source of rare earth elements (REEs)—the kind used in everything from iPhones to wind turbines. And when 95% of REE production is controlled by China, it’s no surprise that major companies are moving fast: Apple recently invested $500M in MP Materials, while GM signed a rare earth supply agreement with Noveon Magnetics.
Of course, it’s not all smooth sailing. The mining industry is notoriously slow to change, with long permitting processes and limited risk appetite. It’s a commodity business—every operational shift impacts the bottom line. And scaling these solutions to truly “drop-in” levels is no small feat. This is the real world, and real-world conditions must be considered, something that’s almost impossible to simulate in a laboratory meaningfully.
Still, I’m optimistic. Earth already knows how to do a lot—without us. There was a time when humans didn’t exist, and the world kept spinning just fine. Maybe the smarter play is learning how to work with nature rather than against it. Microbes might just be showing us how.
