Chilean copper leaching tech company Ceibo appoints former BHP head of innovation 

Ceibo, a BHP- backed Chilean mining technology startup that struck a deal with with Glencore in Nov. 2024 to test its copper leaching technology  announced it has appointed Cleve Lightfoot, former head of innovation at BHP and ex-Glencore general manager, to its board as an advisor.Ceibo, Jetti Resources and Rio Tinto Group’s Nuton venture are among firms looking to roll out catalysts for liberating copper from low-grade ore. With new deposits getting harder to find and develop, leaching offers a way to boost and extend output at existing mines at a time when the industry is scrambling to meet an expected surge in demand for the wiring metal key to the energy transition. In December, Ceibo was named to Cleantech Group’s 2024 LATAM Cleantech 25 – an annual list of Latin American private sustainable innovation companies that are poised to make a significant impact in the next five to ten years.“Having technologies that can use and leverage the existing infrastructure is very important for the industry. That’s the subset where we’re based on”Ceibo CEO Cristobal UndurragaCeibo said its process extracts copper from sulfide ores using existing leaching plants, with electrochemical reactions bolstering recovery rates in shorter cycles. Lomas Bayas, with some of the lowest grades in the business at just 0.25%, sees leaching as a way to extend its life by at least seven years.“Having technologies that can use and leverage the existing infrastructure is very important for the industry. That’s the subset where we’re based on, and the world has about five million tons of leaching capacity, so it can become a really big number in time and contribute to decarbonization,” Ceibo CEO Cristobal Undurraga said in an interview with MINING.com. “Ceibo technology has a high recovery rate, and we’ve demonstrated with ores from more than 30 parts of the world already, and that we can recover between 70 to 80% in timeframes that are somewhere between 150 to 250 days…compared to bioleaching platforms or technologies that are based on bioleaching,” he said.  Undurraga said the technology connects to the existing infrastructure, which minimizes the incremental capex. “And for different cases we’ve run, the payback of that incremental investment is less than a year,” Undurraga said. “Within one year, your investment gets paid, and that’s very efficient compared to a concentrator or a larger investment.”Ceibo currently has partnerships with seven of the top 10 miners, and Undurraga noted it is working with “about 40% of world production.” “The amount of copper that the world needs during the next 25 years is just enormous,” Undurraga said. “It’s not only that demand is going to increase but the supply is falling, so the gap is going to be somewhere like 25 million tons pretty quickly.” “And it’s going to be even quicker if you measure it by mining times. It takes 10 years to break ground on a new mine, if not 20. The question we all face is – how can we increase production as fast as we can?” (With files from Bloomberg)Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Mining.com Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Mining.com