As demand for greater environmental responsibility across the mining and resource sectors increases, interest in using natural bacteria in a wider variety of commercial applications to extract valuable metals is also accelerating. Outside of the gold industry, the Company sees a new generation of metallurgical opportunities emerging, each with significant upside potential.
“I’m very happy with the progress being made with our Ponce Enriquez project in Ecuador, and it’s this confidence that allows me to consider diversification opportunities that are not only potentially lucrative for shareholders, but also best-suited to be tackled by our unique and expanding team of specialized industry experts,” said Ross Orr, President and CEO of BacTech. “In this sense, targeting and expanding into relatively untapped, yet high-demand recovery areas, will allow us to develop projects of considerable value on a global basis across a broad spectrum of metal industries using proprietary green technology. Presently, we’re evaluating a number of opportunities that are currently deemed ‘uneconomic’ for competing bio-processing and recovery technologies, or simply too great of an environmental risk for traditional processors. It’s an outstanding position for the Company to be in.”
For example, the electric vehicle (EV) battery market is a high-stakes area where both mining companies and auto manufacturers alike have a vested interest in extracting and sourcing valuable metals such as cobalt, nickel, lithium and manganese with minimal environmental impact and favourable process economics. And with EV batteries comprising up to one-third of an electric vehicle’s overall cost, in a market worth tens of billions of dollars, manufacturers will continue to watch, compete for, and keep these metal commodities in high demand for years to come. Mining technologies that are designed to provide economic, environmental, and social benefits to resource companies, customers, and stakeholders, occupy a far better position than those that do not.
“For over two decades BacTech’s intellectual property has focused on the development and commercial implementation of large-scale complex bioreactors for economic treatment of refractory gold concentrates,” said Dr. Paul C. Miller, BacTech Vice President, Technology & Engineering. “We’re one of just a few companies that possess such expertise in which naturally occurring microbes are introduced to a large-scale engineered environment to accelerate metal leaching and provide a favourable economic extraction process in just a few days. Importantly, the expertise and commercial know-how developed by BacTech has included the economic integration of bioleaching into the total metal recovery process. This know-how has kept pace with a portfolio of advances made in other areas of metallurgy which now allows us to assemble unique flowsheets incorporating a suite of novel but commercially proven processing techniques. These advances in other areas of metallurgy, in combination with bioleach processing, may serve to considerably increase scopes of application.
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