A growing demand for copper worldwide is fuelling companies like pH7 Technologies to find ways to extract copper and other critical minerals from low-grade ore, tailings and mine waste.
The Vancouver-based company is currently developing a process that uses heap leaching to recover copper from sulfide ores, like chalcopyrite, whereas traditional heap leaching is usually confined to oxide ores. Mohammad Doostmohammadi, the company’s CEO and founder, who has a master’s degree in chemical engineering and has worked as a mining engineer, said in an interview with CIM Magazine that sulfide ores, which are low-grade and expensive to extract, represent 80 per cent of copper deposits worldwide…
