Mohammad Doostmohammadi, founder and CEO of Vancouver-based mining technology startup pH7 Technologies, has raised a $55 million Series B round of financing to continue developing his technology for extracting critical minerals from industrial waste and mine tailings. He believes this approach can help fill gaps for metals important to the energy transition, particularly copper.
Turning Waste into Wealth
With his shock of prematurely whitened hair and his novel idea for extracting new value from mine waste, Doostmohammadi almost has the air of a mad scientist about him. But his project is far from science fiction. The chemical engineer has developed a unique electrochemical processing method for combing through mine tailings to recover metals critical to the global energy transition.
The yawning gap between copper supply and skyrocketing demand, driven by the rise of artificial intelligence, could lead to an annual shortfall of 10 million tonnes by 2040, according to a recent report from S&P Global Energy. That is almost twice the annual output of Chile, the world's biggest copper-producing country. To fill the gap, the industry would need to get approvals and build the equivalent of the world's 20 biggest existing mines.
However, Doostmohammadi notes that there is an estimated 20 million tonnes of copper sitting in the spent tailings of North American mines. “It’s huge,” he says of the potential opportunity for recycling. “We are tackling the material that is already mined, that is already extracted from the earth sitting somewhere else. And we extract copper from it.”
Innovative Technology
pH7 Technologies is applying an electrochemical process normally used to recycle platinum metals from industrial waste, including catalysts from the oil and gas industry, pharmaceutical manufacturing, and automotive catalytic converters. The company has built a commercial-scale, 30,000-square-foot recycling plant in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby.
The Series B financing will fund the company’s growth, including two demonstrations of the technology at mine sites in British Columbia and Chile. However, pH7 is not alone in the tailings-recycling game. Doostmohammadi says the field is “actually getting quite competitive” with operators using a host of other chemical or biological methods for reprocessing ore. “Because the opportunity is huge,” he added.
Historical Context
While this surge of interest is a recent phenomenon, veteran mining executive Michael McPhie notes that extracting value from tailings has been around for almost as long as mining itself. “Mining goes back in human history a couple thousand years, and there’s examples of mine waste from the Roman era that have been reprocessed a couple of times as technology improves,” McPhie said. The technology has improved significantly since ancient Rome, and renewed interest in old tailings is also the result of more recent changes in supply and demand.
