The transition away from fossil fuels towards electric energy sources is creating enormous new demand for critical, strategic metals including nickel (Ni) and cobalt (Co). At the same time, the incumbent mineral processing technologies that supply these metals have large environmental liabilities, not just in terms of land and water use and contamination, but also greenhouse gas emissions.
The entire mining sector represents 7% of global GHG emissions annually and is an important target for decarbonization. There is thus an urgent need for new approaches to mineral processing that unlock challenging deposits with poor ore grades, and reduce environmental impacts locally and globally. Furthermore, many critical metals including Ni and Co will experience severe global supply shortfalls by 2030 unless improved mineral processing technologies can be brought online.
Brokkr Mineral Resources Corporation is developing a low-cost, nature-based technology for the low carbon extraction of battery-grade nickel and cobalt.
State-of-the-art, low-footprint, nature-based solutions to mineral processing have strong potential to overcome these challenges and are gaining significant momentum. But most are very far from commercialization with tremendous technical barriers even to validation at the lab scale.
Brokkr Mineral Resources Corporation has developed a first-of-its-kind, nature-based (bio) hydrometallurgical circuit that leverages electrogenic bacteria for the extraction and purification of nickel and cobalt from low-grade Ni laterite deposits.
This project, funded by NorthX, is designed to achieve essential validation milestones that will advance the technology to commercial adoption with significant benefits for the electrification of the economy and the decarbonization of strategic metals supply chains.
