“Amazon has struck a deal with Rio Tinto to supply US data centers with copper extracted by microorganisms. The company claims that the process, called bioleaching, produces pure copper from low-quality ore with far lower carbon emissions and water use than conventional smelting,” reports The Doomslayer.
Axios reports:
Rio Tinto late last year began using the process to extract copper from U.S. ores that are traditionally hard to process and often become waste.
It involves using microorganisms — or “bioleaching” — to remove copper from sulphide ores. Rio Tinto is initially working at a once-dormant Gunnison Copper Corp. site in Arizona and hopes to deploy the tech elsewhere in North and South America.
The intrigue: The process ‘removes the need for traditional concentrators, smelters and refineries, significantly shortening the mine-to-market supply chain,’ today’s announcement states.
It also uses far less water — about 55% as much per unit of copper as the global industry average.
Methane-eating microbes are being sold to Whole Foods to make fertilizer and reduce pollution.
A company is using microbes and air to make a meat substitute.
Copper has become so valuable and expensive that copper thieves are causing deadly traffic accidents by stealing copper traffic wires. A copper thief sliced through traffic-signal wiring at a northeast Portland interchange, setting the stage for a crash last month that killed a motorcyclist.
A violent militia stole most of the copper wiring in a major African city, seizing up to one million tons of copper from Sudan’s capital, Khartoum. As a result, became impossible for residents to get power from the grid. As a way of coping, thousands of residents are now using cheap Chinese solar panels to power their light bulbs and TVs.
