Tuesday, 1 April 2025 / Edition 52

As a tech entrepreneur, I get a kick out of seeing ventures get funding and have runway—even more so when they’re from my current homebase of Denver. Today’s edition covers a Denver-based company utilizing a group of critters that generally get a bad rep: microbes.

Today also marks the one-year anniversary of Enspired 🎉Woot! I’ve enjoyed writing and engaging with all of you, and I always welcome your thoughts and input on article ideas, topics you liked or didn’t like, etc. You can reach me at editorial@aapg.org.

Sarah Compton

Editor, Enspired

Power From Earth’s Rotation

KanawatTH/Shutterstock.com

Way (way, way) back when I was in high school, we were getting ready for a class debate, and we were told to prepare by setting out to prove ourselves wrong.

A trio of U.S. researchers unintentionally did just that when they discovered it might be possible to harness the power of Earth’s rotation through the planet’s magnetic field.

New possibilities: The researchers were working under the assumption that such a feat was impossible. Their initial theory was that any electrons pushed by Earth’s magnetic field would quickly rearrange themselves and cancel out any differences in charge.

What they did: To test those assumptions, the team used a 29.9-centimeter-long, hollow cylinder made from manganese-zinc ferrite—a material that will encourage a magnetic field to be less tightly constrained.

• They placed the cylinder in a pitch black, windowless laboratory to minimize photoelectric interference. They also angled it to make it perpendicular to Earth’s rotation and magnetic field.

What they found:

• After accounting for other variables, a voltage of 18 microvolts remained. This voltage disappeared when different cylinders or angles were used.

• The remaining voltage indicated that Earth’s rotation was generating that power.

• The researchers observed the same response from the material in a second location in a residential building.

• “The device appeared to violate the conclusion that any conductor at rest with respect to Earth’s surface cannot generate power from its magnetic field,” Princeton astrophysicist Christopher Chyba said.

Replication needed: Before anyone gets too excited, Chyba said, “The first thing that needs to happen is that some independent group needs to reproduce—or rebut—our results, with a system closely similar to our own.”

If that’s not a call to geoscientists who are experts in Earth’s magnetic fields and the impacts it can have, I’m not sure what is!

To learn more about the research and discovery, look here.

Sponsored

Expro’s York McCauley at CCUS 2025

York McCauley, Business Development Director at Expro, discusses the company’s portfolio and the technologies available to drive the CCUS sector forward. With a range of solutions from exploration to abandonment and beyond, Expro has the expertise and experience to derisk and optimize CCUS operations.

Mining with Microbes

Alioui MA/ Shutterstock.com

As with oil and gas, recovery rates of metals from ores are sometimes as low as 1 percent!

What’s new:

• A Denver-based company, Endolith, is trying to make extraction methods more environmentally friendly.

• The company has raised an oversubscribed funding round led by Collaborative Fund and Overture, with participation from Grok Ventures, Nomadic Venture Partners, and Nucleus Capital. 

Driving the innovation: Certain mechanical and chemical techniques, including chemical leaching agents such as mercury or sulfur, can improve recovery rates, but these are often expensive and/or harmful to the environment. I’ve come across many a warning in my gold panning hobby saying some pieces of gold might still have mercury attached to them—yikes!

Endolith’s model: In a flurry of biogeochemistry, geomicrobiology, biotechnology, and a slew of other combined specialties, the Endolith team is focusing its efforts on copper and lithium.

For copper, Endolith takes these steps:

1. Sample the heap leach, raffinate, and other fluids to obtain the baseline of current operations. The heap leach could be tailings or a pile of leftover ore, and it likely still has commercial amounts of metals present.

2. Install biohatcheries within the heap leach system.

3. Researchers continually inoculate the population of microbes that will produce the biolixiviants—chemicals with a biologic origin that extract elements from their ores—into the heap.

4. Cloud-based computing platforms monitor microbial activity and environmental conditions, allowing for nearly real-time adaptations to the inoculation. These can improve extraction.

Key highlights:

• The real-time monitoring and analysis are key here, because both can increase effectiveness of the microbes in the right way at the right time—they don't simply throw more bugs at the problem.

• A lot of lithium deposits in the United States are in clay deposits with a high carbonate content, and one of their solutions selectively removes the carbonates before leaching, which reduces the amount of sulfuric acid required to extract lithium.

To learn more, go here and here.

Sponsored

Viridien’s Head of Carbon Storage, Malcolm Kent at CCUS 2025

In this video, Kent describes the latest trends shaping the carbon storage and monitoring industry, sharing his extensive expertise. Hear about the innovative solutions and strategies driving progress in this critical field and learn about Viridien's contributions to the industry.

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