Market Opportunity
The Arsenic Crisis Stranding Billions in Critical Minerals
With only four smelters worldwide accepting high-arsenic concentrates and China imposing a 0.5% limit, mines face an existential processing bottleneck
Scale of the Problem
Rising Percent of Global Production Contains Excess Arsenic
The numbers tell a stark story. Production of complex concentrates increased 700% between 2013 and 2016. Major operations like Peru's Marcapunta produce concentrates with 8% arsenic. Chile's Ministro Hales averages 4% arsenic. Bulgaria's Chelopech runs 6%. These aren't marginal operations - they're major mines with billions in stranded value.
McKinsey projects high-arsenic concentrate will grow from 8% of supply to 13% by 2028, requiring $2-5 billion in new treatment capacity. The industry's only high-volume solution, Tsumeb smelter in Namibia, ceased operations in 2025.
Current Solutions Are Failing
Why Traditional Approaches Cannot Scale
Smelting Capacity
Only 4 smelters accept >0.5% As concentrates globally. Environmental regulations have closed facilities in Peru, Mexico, USA, Sweden, Philippines, and Japan since the 1990s.
Shipping Economics
Transporting concentrates to distant specialized smelters adds $50-150/tonne in logistics costs, often exceeding the value of marginal deposits.
Blending Limitations
Mixing dirty concentrate with clean material only works when clean supply exceeds contaminated. As ore grades decline globally, this ratio reverses.
Roasting Technology
Capital-intensive roasters produce toxic arsenic trioxide requiring perpetual storage. Only Tsumeb and Ministro Hales operate them commercially.
Emerging Alternatives
Biological enhancement accelerates leaching but requires weeks where chemistry delivers hours, novel reagents promise selective extraction but face stability issues at scale, and high-temperature electrochemical routes wait for renewable electricity that remains intermittent.
The Lindy Effect, formalized by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, predicts that technologies gain robustness through survival. The Bayer process and cyanidation haven't lasted 130+ years by accident. They use cheap, stable reagents: sodium hydroxide, sulfuric acid, cyanide. Re-2Ox uses the same commodity chemicals, just applied sequentially. Novel competitors introduce untested reagents costing hundreds of dollars per kilogram. We use reagents costing dollars per tonne with century-long industrial track records.
The innovation isn't breakthrough chemistry. It's proven unit operations configured for feeds others refuse: strip penalty elements under alkaline conditions, recover metals under acidic conditions, recycle solutions continuously.
The Economics of Penalties
How Arsenic Destroys Project Economics: For a concentrate with 1% arsenic there is typically a base rate fee, with each 0.1% over threshold increasing that fee. When taken together this can amount to a 30-50% reduction in payable value. For more extreme cases in excess of 5% arsenic, penalties can exceed $200/tonne. Most smelters simply reject the material and the mine must either stockpile or cease production.
Strategic Value
Beyond Commodity Markets
Re-2Ox enables strategic advantages beyond penalty removal. North American manufacturers seeking supply chain independence, defense contractors requiring ITAR-compliant materials, and renewable energy producers needing traceable metal sources all benefit from our ability to process domestic feeds that would otherwise require Chinese refinement.
The Growing Crisis
Why This Problem Accelerates From Here
Declining Ore Grades
Average grades have fallen consistently, and lower grades mean higher impurity concentrations in final concentrates.
Regulatory Tightening
China reduced arsenic tolerance from 1% to 0.5%. Further restrictions are under discussion with Europe and other jurisdictions considering similar limits.
Stranded Resources
Industry estimates show that while tailings dam failures are rare, every tailings facility represents similar risk, forcing stricter oversight.
Capital Constraints
Building new smelting capacity costs $500M-1B with 5+ year timelines. Environmental permits increasingly difficult to obtain.
Our Solution