The surge in copper demand promises to boost prices to new heights. As the global economy moves away from fossil fuels, it will need twice as much copper in the coming years than humanity has mined throughout its entire existence.
A New Jersey-based startup founded in 2022, still bright, and believes that novels (and cleaner ways) have been found to cut these costs.
“The fact that we already mined something that can be easily mined and that more mines need to be produced each year — the fact that we're talking like over 60 mines seems impossible as there's no way to get there.”
However, if a company can extract more copper from the ore it is already mining, it can meet the majority of that demand.
Still Bright has developed a new method of extracting copper. This says that almost all of the copper can be recovered from a typical ore without a pretreatment step that will lose up to 20% of the metal. It is a waste mountain that is effective enough to be used even for tailings, and still contains a small amount of metal left by the mine.
“Copper lost as wasted can actually be handled and the copper is back,” Allen said.
To drive production from single digits to hundreds of tons a year, Still Bright raised a $18.7 million seed round led by material impacts and a groundbreaking energy venture, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. Azolla Ventures, Fortescue, Impact Science Ventures and SOSV participated.
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Still Bright's technology allows copper to be extracted without generating harmful contamination. Most companies essentially burn unwanted parts of the ore, releasing most of it into the atmosphere – ore containing still bright ore is dipped into ore based solutions to pull metal out of the ore. When vanadium solutions are used, the company's systems use electricity to regenerate them.
Core technology was inspired by a kind of long-term energy storage known as the “vanadium flow battery.” In it, vanadium-based solutions that can be stored in large tanks are charged and discharged by passing through the membrane.
“All of these are kind of coincidences. Technical inventor, company CTO John. [Vardner]he was working on two different projects,” Allen said. One was a vanadium flow battery and the other was a vanadium extraction of copper. I happened to be doing both. ”
Still Bright's modular systems can be installed in mines spanning a variety of sizes. Vanadium-based processes work so quickly that their equipment is much smaller than typical refiners for the same amount of copper production. “It takes just a few minutes, up to an hour. This will keep everything really small.”
Smaller sizes also pay economic dividends. Allen said Still Bright's equipment is 70% to 90% cheaper than a typical cone brace. Currently, the company's processes operate in the same way as a typical refinery, but Allen expects it to change. “There are many opportunities for us to get cheaper,” he said.
Still Bright plans to build a demonstration unit that can produce 500 tonnes of copper each year in 2027 or 2028. This is a major leap from the current pilot scale units, earning 2 tons a year. The ultimate commercial scale system produces 10,000 tonnes a year.
However, the clock is ticking. Still cheerful people want to start refining copper in a sufficiently large number of them to benefit from the tariffs that President Trump may impose on metal imports. If so, then you can use the revenue to develop and deploy commercially-scale units.
“We believe we have a way to become one of the cheapest copper producers,” Allen said.
This article has been updated to correct the name of one investor. Not Apollo Venture, Azola Venture still invested brightly.