What does I-Rox, the startup funded by Bill Gates that wants to revolutionize mining

9 December 20221 year ago babelfish

Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Bill Gates' fund for clean technologies, has invested 12 million in I-Rox, a startup that has developed a technology to reduce the energy consumption of mining

A European fund linked to Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the fund set up by Bill Gates to support technologies useful for decarbonisation, has invested 12 million euros in I-ROX, a startup based in France.

I-ROX is part of the US group I-Pulse, which develops technologies and processes on electricity for industrial purposes.

MAKING THE MINING INDUSTRY SUSTAINABLE

I-ROX has developed a technology capable of reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions in mining, which could therefore help make an activity less impactful – the extraction of metals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel or copper – essential for the ecological transition but generally little tolerated by public opinion.

THE TECHNOLOGY OF I-ROX

I-ROX's technology uses electricity – or rather: short bursts of high-intensity electrical energy – to crush rocks and minerals. The rock crushing and grinding phase is the most energy-intensive of the entire extraction process.

“REINVENTING THE ENTIRE MINING PROCESS”

Robert Friedland, president of I-Pulse, said that “more than 4 percent of the world's energy consumption is used to crush and grind rock. This energy consumption represents a huge cost in both money and carbon emissions.”

"To achieve climate neutrality and go beyond that," he added, the mining industry must reinvent the entire mining process, and especially the way it generates and consumes energy.

THE BREAKTHROUGH INTEREST IN THE MINING INDUSTRY

Breakthrough Energy Ventures is particularly interested in technological solutions that allow the mining industry to be optimized and made more "sustainable". The fund, for example, is among the investors of KoBold Metals, a US startup that uses artificial intelligence to optimize the search for deposits of metals for batteries (such as nickel and cobalt) in Greenland .

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/energia/irox-investimento-breakthrough-energy-ventures/ on Fri, 09 Dec 2022 06:33:53 +0000.