Ceibo, a Chilean mining technology startup, has named Cleve Lightfoot to its board as an advisor. Lightfoot previously served as BHP’s head of innovation and a general manager at Glencore. The company, backed by BHP, secured a deal with Glencore in November 2024 to test its copper leaching technology.
Ceibo, along with Jetti Resources and Rio Tinto’s Nuton venture, is working on catalysts designed to extract copper from low-grade ore. As finding and developing new deposits becomes increasingly challenging, leaching offers a way to boost and extend output at existing mines. This comes at a crucial time as the industry anticipates a surge in demand for copper, a key metal in the energy transition.
In December, Ceibo was acknowledged by the Cleantech Group, being included in the 2024 LATAM Cleantech 25. The list recognizes private, sustainable innovation companies in Latin America expected to make a significant impact within the next five to ten years.
“Having technologies that can use and leverage the existing infrastructure is very important for the industry. That’s the subset where we’re based on,” said Ceibo CEO Cristobal Undurraga.
Ceibo’s process is designed to extract copper from sulfide ores using existing leaching plants. The process uses electrochemical reactions to improve recovery rates to achieve faster cycles. Lomas Bayas, which has some of the lowest grades in the industry at 0.25%, is considering leaching as a way to extend its operational life by at least seven years.
In an interview with MINING.com, Ceibo CEO Cristobal Undurraga stated, “Having technologies that can use and leverage the existing infrastructure is very important for the industry. That’s the subset where we’re based on, and the world has about five million tons of leaching capacity, so it can become a really big number in time and contribute to decarbonization.”
Undurraga also noted, “Ceibo technology has a high recovery rate, and we’ve demonstrated with ores from more than 30 parts of the world already, and that we can recover between 70 to 80% in timeframes that are somewhere between 150 to 250 days…compared to bioleaching platforms or technologies that are based on bioleaching.”
He added that the technology integrates with existing infrastructure, which minimizes the capital expenditure. “And for different cases we’ve run, the payback of that incremental investment is less than a year,” Undurraga said. “Within one year, your investment gets paid, and that’s very efficient compared to a concentrator or a larger investment.”
Ceibo currently partners with seven of the top 10 mining companies and works with “about 40% of world production,” according to Undurraga.
“The amount of copper that the world needs during the next 25 years is just enormous,” Undurraga said. “It’s not only that demand is going to increase but the supply is falling, so the gap is going to be somewhere like 25 million tons pretty quickly.” He continued, “And it’s going to be even quicker if you measure it by mining times. It takes 10 years to break ground on a new mine, if not 20. The question we all face is – how can we increase production as fast as we can?”
