E116: The Narnia box for critical minerals

This week on Everybody in the Pool, we’re diving into one of the biggest bottlenecks in the clean energy transition: critical minerals—the lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, and precious metals we need for EVs, batteries, and the grid. The problem isn’t that we’re running out. It’s that extraction and refining are expensive, polluting, and increasingly constrained by geopolitics.

My guest is Adam Uliana, co-founder and CEO of Chemfinity Technologies, a startup spun out of UC Berkeley that’s building a modular “metal-selective Brita filter” for refining. Chemfinity’s system takes messy inputs—like e-waste, catalytic converters, industrial wastewater, and even mine tailings—and separates out high-purity metals one at a time using tunable “nano-sponge” materials. In other words: a potential way to recover critical minerals with dramatically fewer steps, less energy, and a much smaller footprint.

We get into:

• What “critical minerals” are and why the supply chain is such a vulnerability
• The climate and human costs of mining—and why recycling and recovery matter
• How Chemfinity’s process works (liquify the feedstock, then filter metals out in sequence)
• The real technical unlock: highly selective nanoscale materials that can distinguish near-identical metals
• What scaling looks like: pilots now, modular systems later—including shipping-container deployments at mining sites
• The business model question: when Chemfinity sells equipment vs. when it makes sense to sell recovered metals

Links:

• Chemfinity Technologies: https://www.chemfinitytech.com/
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