BANiQL

Here is a fact about the clean-energy economy that is not, on its face, very clean: to make the nickel that goes into an electric-car battery, the conventional method is to take rock, add sulfuric acid, and then apply the kind of heat and pressure you would associate with the inside of a steam boiler. The industry name for this is high-pressure acid leaching, or HPAL, and it works. It also produces, by rough reckoning, something like 98 percent waste for every 2 percent of nickel recovered. You get the metal. You also get a tailings pond.

BANIQL - styled BANiQL, with a lowercase i that you will either find charming or not notice - is a 12-person startup incorporated in San Jose in 2021 that would like to change the arithmetic of that trade. Its pitch is not that it has invented a new metal or a new battery. Its pitch is narrower and, in a way, more interesting: that the chemistry we use to refine nickel is old, brute-force, and improvable, and that a better process can run at lower temperature, at ordinary atmospheric pressure, using less acid, and leave behind residue you could plausibly put back in the ground.

The company puts numbers on this, and the numbers are the whole point. Roughly 80 percent less energy and carbon dioxide than HPAL. Around 30 percent lower cost. Temperatures up to 70 percent lower, and none of HPAL's extreme pressure. And - the claim that makes the rest matter - virtually zero waste, with byproducts that can be repurposed into fertilizer and construction materials rather than parked in a pond. If even most of that holds at scale, it is the sort of unglamorous improvement that quietly moves an industry.

The unglamorousness is the tell. Nobody builds a consumer brand on "low-temperature atmospheric-pressure selective leaching." But the battery supply chain has a bottleneck that gets far less attention than gigafactories and cell chemistry, and it is exactly here, in the middle, where raw ore becomes usable metal. Build all the battery plants you want; if refining the nickel stays dirty and expensive, the economics never quite close. BANIQL is working on the part nobody puts on a billboard.

BANIQL's geography is a strategy. The company develops its core process at an R&D center in the United States and runs ton-scale prototype production in Indonesia - which holds roughly 25 percent of the world's nickel reserves. Build where the science is; scale where the rock is.

The IP approach is deliberate in the same way. BANIQL filed its first extraction patent in 2022, a second covering green and selective chemistry in 2024, with a third underway - and it keeps certain catalyst formulas as trade secrets. Rather than license early, it runs internal pilots to keep full control of the technology while it de-risks. That patent-first posture is what carried it to the WIPO Global Awards 2025 finals, chosen from 780 applicants across 95 countries.

The market it is aiming at is large and unsentimental: cathode manufacturers and EV supply-chain buyers across Indonesia, South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines. BANIQL has secured 20-plus tonnes of nickel ore supply and access to major mine sites, and lists collaborators including the University of Toronto and Microsoft. Whether the process holds its numbers at commercial volume is the open question every hard-tech company faces. For now the pilots are running, the patents are filed, and the investors keep re-upping.