The mining industry spent decades and millions of dollars trying to overcome the intractable problem of extracting metal from the mineral deposits that contain 70% of the world’s copper.
Solving the challenge of how to get copper from these massive primary sulfide deposits has long been known as the “holy grail” of the copper mining industry.
This is because neither of the two methods of copper extraction were effective:
1
Most primary sulfide ore is too low grade to justify the cost of traditional pyrometallurgical processing, which requires crushing, milling, floating, smelting and refining and large amounts of energy.
2
The alternative, low-cost hydrometallurgical method, using acid leaching, was not effective, either, because of a natural blocking “passivation” layer which prevented the copper being extracted.
The result
As a result, the copper in these deposits around the world was left “stranded” because there was no commercially feasible way to extract the copper and it was classified as waste.
Today, Jetti’s unique catalytic technology solves this problem by enabling the low-cost leaching process to be applied efficiently and effectively on copper trapped in these challenging mineral ores.