With the mining industry facing mounting pressure to decarbonise operations while securing future supplies of energy transition commodities, companies across the critical minerals mining sector are exploring alternatives to conventional excavation and processing.
Among them is US-based Thunderstone, which is developing electrified mining technology designed to improve fluid movement through ore bodies, with potential applications across heap leaching, tailings recovery and future in-situ mining systems.
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Thunderstone CEO Eric Wasson-Burns discusses the principles behind the company’s approach, the commercial and geological constraints facing deployment, and whether emerging extraction technologies can materially contribute to critical mineral supply growth in an increasingly fragmented energy and geopolitical landscape.
Alejandro Gonzalez (AG): You describe what Thunderstone does as enabling “metal extraction without the mine”. Could you unpack this for us?
Eric Wasson-Burns (EWB): In operational terms, enabling ‘metal extraction without the mine’ means shifting the focus from physical excavation to advanced fluid control, positioning Thunderstone as a future enabler of in-situ mining. The technology is designed to engage either at existing heap leach operations or tailings ponds to manage risk and improve recovery.
For longer-term, fully in-situ scenarios, the process eliminates traditional above-ground or underground excavation. Instead, it uses a system of installed subsurface electrodes directed underground to leach deposits directly in place, stimulating and directing the flow of liquids through the ore.
This allows for precision-managed fluid efficiency in recovering commodities, effectively replacing the need for heavy digging with an electrically controlled, localised liquid recovery system.
AG: How does your technology’s use of high-voltage electrical discharge to control liquid permeability differ from existing approaches such as hydraulic fracturing or conventional in-situ recovery?
EWB: The technology uses a range of voltages to manipulate fluid movement without the need for the high fluid pressure, nor mechanical force used in existing hydraulic and comminution technologies. Much of the mechanism is under exploration in our lab where we primarily work with unconsolidated geological formations.
We imagine at the pore and fracture scale, high-voltage discharges increase the diameter of existing pore necks and connect previously isolated flow networks, effectively enhancing or discouraging preferential flow pathways native to the original geology.
Additionally, at lower voltages, the system can operate within an osmotic and ionic flow regime where ions and accompanying water are moved directionally through a solid matrix within an electric field, allowing for precise control over the hydrodynamics without significant changes to the underlying hydrogeology of the site. Crucially, we have observed significant reversibility in the ore, meaning that once the electric field is removed, the material behaves and flows exactly as it did originally.
AG: How does your approach benchmark against established methods?
EWB: While our technology is currently in an early de-risking phase, initial results indicate potential advantages in recovery rates and extraction timelines compared to traditional methods. Our approach specifically targets the most clogged-up portions of mine heaps that currently provide next to no economic value. Large portions of these heaps are typically inaccessible because the fluid simply isn’t moving; we step in to create the necessary lixiviant flow to make those stagnant zones economical.
In early laboratory testing, we have seen pregnant leach solution (PLS) concentrations that are on par with, or even in excess of, standard industry baselines, even in geology dominated by minimally active clay-like flow regimes. By unlocking these previously inaccessible areas and generating a high-concentration, high-purity concentrated PLS, the technology may also significantly reduce downstream refining effort.
This enhanced purity streamlines the entire processing chain, preserving margins and allowing operators to realise better price points and fewer energy-intensive process steps without the intensive processing typically required by conventional leaching.
AG: How has the technology been tested to date, and under what geological conditions does it fail or become uneconomical?
EWB: The technology is currently in the early stages of development, with testing primarily conducted at the laboratory scale using surface-based ores (1–30m), primarily nickel laterites. To date, trials have focused primarily on the meter-scale columns where the system has successfully stimulated flow without encountering significant limitations due to ore density or poor native flow, and we haven’t identified any inherent structural limits.
Operationally, the process is best suited for high-porosity geologies, specifically those like nickel laterite with >10% porosity, where traditional fluid movement is often restricted by tortuous pathways.
By using electrical stimulation rather than relying on natural hydraulic flow, the technology bypasses the typical trade-off between surface area and flow rate, making it now economically feasible where it wasn’t previously due to flow inhibition such as in tailings, heap leaches, or (potentially) high-porosity sedimentary and sandstone-type deposits.
While explicit depth and pressure limits have not yet been identified beyond the surface-based regime, the technology is specifically engineered to unlock value from geological assets that possess the necessary surface area but currently require intensive processing due to flow constraints.
AG: What are the technical and regulatory barriers to scaling?
EWB: The barriers to existing scaling challenges centre on the massive physical footprint, subsurface instability and severe environmental liabilities inherent to traditional extraction.
Traditional mining relies on high-risk mechanical operations, requiring immense kinetic energy to blast and haul rock, which creates dangerous open pits, deep shafts and long-term liabilities like high-pressure processing vessels and hazardous tailings dams.
We address these subsurface and environmental barriers through our long-term in-situ vision; by shifting the extraction method from mechanical-reliant processes to electrical precision, we can realise in-situ extraction where it currently isn’t viable.
By using targeted electrical pulses to fracture the ore body in-situ and control liquid permeability at a microscopic level, the technology allows for precision extraction while keeping the surface landscape and surrounding ecosystems entirely intact. This “extract the metal, leave the mountain” approach eliminates the crush-and-grind phase, thereby removing the need for toxic sludge storage and catastrophic tailings dam failures.
By replacing massive machinery and heavy infrastructure with a localised, in-place recovery method, the technology drastically lowers capital expenditure and de-risks the environmental permitting process, effectively neutralising the primary safety, regulatory and long-term reputational liabilities that typically delay project scaling.
AG: Given the fragmented geopolitical outlook for energy markets and supply chains, how do you see your technology playing a role?
EWB: Our technology is built to address the challenges of supply chain instability head-on. A fundamental vulnerability in global supply chains – and the conventional mining industry – is the inability to extract and deliver metals at the rate society demands, which is only increasing.
Traditional mine sites are inherently incompatible with overnight, ten-times shifts in production. The only extraction model that comes close to responding to such volatility is the hydrocarbon sector, where oil wells can rapidly adjust output on demand.
Mining has never had this luxury because it requires the physical movement of millions of tonnes of rock, constrained by fixed operational licences and rigid infrastructure that cannot be turned on and off at will.
By realising our long-term vision of building a mine site centred on installed subsurface wells and stimulating fluid flow, we introduce unprecedented elasticity to raw material sourcing. This is critical because global energy transitions invariably trigger large, sudden spikes in critical mineral requirements.
Currently, many breakthrough technologies risk failing to reach the market simply because they cannot secure the volumes of metals needed to scale. Implementing a technology that can instantly realise these required volumes and delivery rates at the absolute top of the upstream value chain will have the most leverage over market stability. This operational elasticity is required to help alleviate supply chain shocks, mitigating broader risks across national security, technology deployment and energy infrastructure.
