How a startup in New Jersey found a compact way to reduce copper costs

High demand for copper promises to push prices to new horizons. With the global economy moving away from fossil fuels, you will need this Fate of copper In the coming years, more than humanity has been extracted throughout all its existence.

It is still bright, a startup based in New Jersey, founded in 2022, believes that it has found a novel (and hygiene) to reduce these costs.

“The fact that we have already used light things easily, and the fact that we need many mines to enter production every year-we are talking like 60 meters-does it seem impossible, such as the lack of a way to get there,” Randy Allen, co-founder and CEO Still brightTell Techcrunch.

But a large part of this request can be met if companies can extract more copper from the raw they are already doing.

It has been developed brightly a new way to extract copper, a method it says can restore almost all copper from typical materials without pre -processing steps that lose up to 20 % of the metal. It is sufficiently effective so that it can be used on waste, and disposal piles that still contain smaller amounts of mineral that the mines leave.

“That is, copper is lost as it is lost, we can actually address this and restore copper,” Allen said.

To increase production from individual numbers to hundreds of tons per year, it was still brightly a $ 18.7 million seed tour led by the material impact and Energy Energy projects, and the company TECHRUNCH told the company exclusively. Share Apollo Ventures, Fortescue, Impact Science Ventures and SOSV.

Bright technology still allows it to extract copper without producing harmful pollution. Where most companies mainly burn unwanted parts of raw-which are emitted by many of them in the atmosphere-the materials containing copper are still soaked in a solution based on vanadium, which directs the mineral from raw. When spending a solution of vanadium, the company’s system uses electricity to renew it.

The basic technology is inspired by a type of long -term energy storage known as the vanadium flow battery. In it, a solution based on vanadium is shipped that can be stored in large tanks and unloaded by its flow through the membrane.

“All this is a kind of event. The artistic inventor, CTO, for the company John, was working on two different projects,” said Allen, one of them on Fanadium Flow batteries and another about the use of fans to extract copper. “It connects the points. One person happened both.”

It is still possible to install the normative system of Bright in mines stretching on a set of sizes. Since the process of Vanadium -based operation works very quickly, the company’s equipment is much smaller than a typical refinery of the same amount of copper production. “Treatment is within minutes, up to one hour. This allows us to keep everything really small.”

The small size pays financial profits as well. Allen said that the equipment is still ranging from 70 % to 90 % of the model PYRORTATALULURGIAL equipment. Currently, the company process costs the same thing to run as typical rows, but Allen is expected to change. “There are a lot of opportunities for us to be cheaper,” he said.

It is still bright planning to build a display unit in 2027 or 2028 capable of producing 500 tons of copper annually. It is a great leap of the current experimental scale unit, which is made tinnitated annually. The final trade system will produce 10,000 tons per year.

The watch is thick though. It is still bright wanting to start improving copper in large quantities enough to take advantage of any tariff that President Trump might impose on metal imports. If so, he can use these revenues to develop and deploy commercial domain units.

“We see ourselves as a path to be among the cheapest copper producers,” Allen said.