Shoring up the critical minerals needed to fuel the AI and energy transition doesn’t require sacrificing sustainability. In fact, the two can go hand in hand.
That was the message delivered by two cleantech founders and CEOs at Nrth Festival on Wednesday during a panel conversation moderated by BetaKit staff writer Alex Riehl. The panelists laid out the case for why cleantech is still a valuable investment, even if people aren’t talking about it as much these days.
“I think we’re going to find out pretty quickly that virgin extraction will not scale forever.”
Douglas Pimlott, Carbonyx
Douglas Pimlott is the founder and CEO of Carbonyx, a Vancouver-based startup building electrochemical systems capable of turning industrial waste and CO2 into valuable industrial minerals like silica or carbonate. Pimlott was joined by Destiny Copper CEO and co-founder Greg Hanna. Based in Thorold, Ont., Destiny Copper extracts copper from industrial manufacturing and mining waste.
A decade ago, cleantech was top of mind for investors looking to build out their portfolio. International interest in addressing climate change vaulted the cleantech sector into the public lexicon as a lucrative necessity while humanity tackled its environmental impacts. Ten years on, those conversations have largely taken a backseat to geopolitical upheavals, economic prioritization, and the promise of AI, leading many governments, investors, and organizations to scale back their environmental initiatives and portfolios.
But that change of headwinds doesn’t change the cleantech sector’s potential to grow and deliver returns on environmental impact. If anything, Pimlott said, demand for the critical minerals Carbonyx and Destiny are delivering is growing as the AI boom prompts massive data centre buildouts and the world inches toward the energy transition of EV cars and solar- and wind-powered renewables that all require these materials.
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“These data centres still depend on materials and minerals that are finite and scarce. Things like silica, gallium. The list goes on,” Pimlott said. “Demand is increasing exponentially, while ore grades are decreasing. I think we’re going to find out pretty quickly that virgin extraction will not scale forever, so circular economy solutions like ours … are going to become more and more important.”
Traditional methods of extracting the kinds of materials Carbonyx and Destiny produce are heavily polluting, creating tailings effluent, emissions, and contamination, all of which negate the environmental benefits of things like EVs and solar power, according to Pimlott.
“If the point of extraction isn’t clean, we just export those environmental costs somewhere else, and then we still try to pat ourselves on the back for being clean at the point of use,” he said.
For Pimlott, the rising demand for critical minerals represents an opportunity to put cleantech’s sustainability back into the equation, as an added bonus to an otherwise necessary circular supply-chain process.
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“When we took [Carbonyx] out of the lab and started circulating it to partners, customers, and investors, the pull was really from being able to source the materials from widely available raw material and generating products at a lower cost,” Pimlott said. “The carbon negativity was really … the cherry on top.”
Hanna, who founded Destiny Copper nearly a decade ago, echoed Pimlott’s sentiments, explaining that in many ways sustainability has become a feature, rather than the driving force behind consumer or investor interest.
“In the last 18 months, there’s been a shift away from the pure excitement around green tech,” he said. “However, we were never reliant on carbon credits or anything like that to make it work. The economics had to stand up. The world always gets back to numbers. ‘Is it viable? Will it sustain itself? Oh, and it’s green? I think that ticks all the boxes.’”
“Sustainability and growth aren’t mutually exclusive,” Pimlott added. “Obviously, there’s a strong moral case for cleaner manufacturing, but many people still see it as a cost centre or liability. I think the two companies on stage prove it can be the opposite: it can be clean, while also supporting a strong economy, material sovereignty, national security, and resilience.”
BetaKit is an Nrth media partner. Feature image courtesy of Nrth Festival.