Engineering microbes for miners to unlock billions in trapped metal
1849 bio designs microbes enabling cheap metal extraction allowing miners to unlock value from low quality copper and gold ores. Surprisingly, the mining industry is one of the largest scale users of biotech in the world with biomining processes accounting for ~1% of global copper production. Biomining is ultra-low cost, running around ~$1/ton of ore vs ~$7/ton for conventional processes. Unfortunately, while biomining is cheap, it can’t be applied to over 80% of copper ores, leaving vast resources without profitable extraction methods. An estimated ~$800B of copper sit today in waste materials and stockpiles with negative unit economics. While a great deal of effort has been spent on optimizing microbial metal extraction processes, very little effort has been spent on optimizing the microbes themselves. To change that, we’re creating new biotech tools and platforms applied directly to the types of biology most relevant to miners. This enables us to develop new microbes and tackle some of the most difficult problems in biomining, unlocking billions in value from unprofitable resources while being more environmentally friendly than conventional processes. We’re world class microbial engineers. We met while doing our PhDs in synthetic biology, where we spent our time applying and developing the most advanced bioengineering technologies to engineer living cells.
Active Founders
Jai Padmakumar, Founder
Co-founder and CEO of 1849 bio. I get excited working on difficult problems with outsized impacts if you can solve them. I studied Microbiology and Applied Math at the University of Washington before doing my PhD at MIT in a synthetic biology lab. I've spent my time pushing the limits of what’s possible in bioengineering. 1849 is my second startup, the first of which I co-founded during grad school and led the early science at.
Yongjin Park, Founder
I am the co-founder and CSO of 1849 bio. I studied chemical engineering at KAIST and did my PhD at MIT in the Department of Biological Engineering. During my PhD, I developed core technology used in the world's first engineered probiotic that went into clinical trial. After completing PhD, I worked in deep biotech companies, developing microbial products that were administered to over 6M acres of farmland in the US (about the area of Belgium!).
Company Launches
TL;DR – We’re building microbes for metal extraction, enabling cleaner and cheaper mining of difficult-to-process ores. This will unlock 100M tonnes of copper stranded in ores that are not profitable to mine.
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Hey all! We’re Yongjin and Jai, co-founders of 1849 bio, a team of genetic engineers developing microbes for metal extraction. We met while doing our PhDs at MIT and have spent the better portion of our adult lives hacking living organisms to do cool/useful tasks.
Now, we’re on a mission to make the mining industry more sustainable and ensure a stable metal supply for the green energy transition.
The Challenge:
The drive to electrify the world is driving an unprecedented demand for metals like copper, nickel, lithium, and other rare earths. Unfortunately, ramping up metal production is incredibly difficult. Copper is expected to face a ~20% supply gap by 2031, threatening to slow the rollout of critical technologies like EVs and wind turbines.
New mines are difficult to open, taking an average of 16.5 years in the US after a new ore body has been identified. These bodies of metal themselves have become more difficult to identify. After decades of selective mining, most copper today exists in low grade ores (ore that contains very little copper), making economical extraction with conventional methods impossible.
Approximately 100M tonnes of copper is trapped in stockpiles and waste materials without any means to profitably extract the metal.
The Solution:
Biology! It turns out the mining industry is one of the largest-scale users of biotech in the world. ~1.2% of copper production in 2019-2020 was done using microbes in a process called “bioleaching.” The basic idea here is to:
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Stack ore into a giant pile — think miles long and 100s of feet tall. This pile is called a “heap.”
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Grow a very unique group of organisms that love acid and use both iron in the rocks and CO2 from the air as food sources. This triggers a series of chemical reactions that ultimately separates the solid copper from the ore into a liquid form.
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Collect this liquid at the bottom and run a current through it.
Then you have pure copper!
Miners have been using this process for copper extraction for decades (and in some cases, for other metals like gold, nickel, and cobalt). The process is cleaner and ~7x cheaper than conventional processes. It also produces fewer tailings (mine waste), a growing environmental problem and liability for miners
Why isn’t this used everywhere?
- It doesn’t work for 80% of copper ores. Owing to some complex chemistry, the dominant copper ore, chalcopyrite, can’t be processed using bioleaching.
- It’s really slow, narrowing its use cases. While a conventional process can melt ore down and give you pure copper in an hour, bioleaching operates on a timescale of months to years.
We’re using our deep background in bioengineering to build platforms and tools specifically for the types of biology miners need. By engineering the microbes themselves, we are introducing a new set of capabilities to the mining industry:
- Bioleaching solutions that work on difficult-to-process ores, like chalcopyrite, unlock billions of dollars of value currently trapped in uneconomical materials.
- Faster metal extraction timelines, getting miners their cash faster.
- Low CapEx, sustainable metal extraction. Our solutions fit into existing mine infrastructure and processes.
Our asks:
- If you know anyone in the mining industry, we’d love to meet them!
- If you know anyone working in the e-waste recycling industry, we’d love to chat with them, too. We can tune our process for e-waste recycling and are looking into applications for that as well.
Reach out to intro@1849.bio!