Satish Rao, Managing Director at Clareo, attended the Columbia Electrochemical Energy Center (CEEC) Fall Symposium on 24 September 2025, participating on a panel discussing the current state of mining R&D and exploring emerging pathways for critical mineral extraction and recovery.
The symposium, part of NY Climate Week 2025, brought together industry leaders, researchers and technology developers to address the technical barriers to large-scale deployment of sustainable mining solutions. Here are some of the key points of discussion:
The critical minerals challenge
The mining sector faces growing technical hurdles. Lower ore grades, with copper head grades now averaging below 1%, mean miners need to process considerably more rock for the same amount of yield, leading to a sharp rise in energy and water use. At the same time, ore complexity is increasing. Elevated levels of arsenic, mercury, and other harmful elements require extensive removal and treatment, which significantly raises environmental and operational costs.
Vast tailings and byproduct streams present both challenge and opportunity. These materials, often fine and chemically reactive, hold untapped value but remain difficult to process economically using conventional methods.
Emerging technical solutions
For copper specifically, leaching chalcopyrite has long proven technically challenging due to passivation layers that limit conventional acid leaching effectiveness. However, innovative approaches are showing promise. Mechanical activation, alternative leachants including glycine and chloride systems, and engineered bioleaching have achieved substantial recovery improvements in pilot tests, with commercial adoption now advancing.
Advanced tailings reprocessing—combining flotation, hydrometallurgy, and magnetic separation—delivers improved recovery rates. Success depends on site-specific adaptation and flexible, iterative development to fit with existing operations. Meanwhile, environmental restrictions are fostering new innovations. Dry stacking and closed-loop water recycling systems are lowering water use, with closed-loop recycling reducing freshwater intake by up to 40%. Hypothesis-driven R&D sprints with targeted, short-cycle experiments speed up validation of new recovery flowsheets.
The role of electrochemistry
Electrochemical technologies are proving particularly valuable across multiple applications. Direct lithium extraction through electrodialysis and electrodeposition achieves 65-95% lithium recovery from brines with substantially lower water usage, demonstrated through joint industry-university pilots.
In battery recycling, electrochemical processes enable the selective recovery of cobalt and nickel, achieving purities of 96.4% and 94.1% respectively from spent lithium-ion batteries. Pilots are scaling up through collaborations between battery manufacturers and research institutions. Functionalised electrochemical platforms are similarly advancing the selective recovery of rare earth elements and gold from mining effluents and spent batteries.
Accelerating the pathway from research to commercialization
Delivering practical solutions demands agile innovation frameworks. Cross-disciplinary teams conducting hypothesis-driven development cycles, rapid prototyping, and open data sharing are reducing the time from laboratory insights to operational impact.
Tailings valorisation exemplifies this collaborative approach. Operators, equipment suppliers and universities are co-developing flowsheets for legacy tailings recovery. As one example, Codelco has collaborated with Minera Valle Central since 1992 to reprocess tailings from the El Teniente Division, recovering copper and molybdenum from both fresh and historic tailings using flotation processes powered entirely by renewable energy.
Mining needs to accelerate the shift towards startup collaborations, portfolio strategies, and knowledge networks—linking industry, universities, and tech vendors—fundamentally transforms how deep tech problems are tackled, replacing slow, linear development with iterative, results-focused testing and shared risk.
