Across the United States, there are thousands of mine waste and small hydro dams. When they break, they can cause significant damage and even kill people. RockFix is creating AI and sensors to monitor these dams—catching them before they break to reduce the risk and costs of failures—and creating more resilient dams.
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Gus Marquez
Gus Marquez is co-founder and CEO of RockFix. He has eight years of underground and open-pit copper mining experience across Canada, Chile, and the United States. Marquez led the construction and operations of a new Arizonan copper mine as chief engineer. He believes mine waste is key to permanent carbon sequestration and critical battery metals production. Marquez is a professional engineer and received his M.S. and M.B.A. from Stanford University.
TECHNOLOGY
Critical Need
Metals mining is the bedrock of clean energy: the world needs 1.4 billion tons of copper alone to fuel tomorrow’s batteries and renewable energy projects—double what humans have historically produced. But as we deplete high-grade deposits and turn to low-grade material, we will produce two-to-four times more mine waste (tailings) than ever before. Luckily, tailings contain valuable materials that currently go unused: alkalinity to permanently sequester CO₂ in mineral form, as well as low levels of other critical metals like cobalt, nickel, and copper. How can we unlock these metals for the world?
Technology Vision
RockFix is developing the technology to extract alkalinity and battery metals from copper mine waste using a scalable thermochemical process. RockFix’s reactor will integrate into a mine’s mineral processing flowsheet without disrupting mine operations, turning a CO₂ stream into carbonate minerals (limestone) and also precipitating and extracting valuable metal ions in the process. RockFix will partner with copper mining companies to reprocess mine waste as it’s generated, but it also plans to apply its technology across mines of different metals, as well as legacy mine waste dumps that have been abandoned and still contain important metals.
Potential for Impact
RockFix’s mission is to sequester billions of tons of CO₂ in copper mine waste across the world, as well as increase the world’s production of critical battery metals. It plans to bridge the clean-tech and mining industries to make metals mining a key part of the decarbonization solution through its low-cost and low-impact process. Importantly, RockFix believes in making mine tailings safer to protect ecosystems, as well as bringing clean-tech and economic opportunities to the rural mining communities that serve mining operations.