Every electric vehicle on the road runs on a paradox. The battery is clean. The nickel inside it, very often, is not. Conventional nickel extraction leans on a process called high-pressure acid leaching - HPAL - which demands extreme heat, brutal pressure, billion-dollar plants, and leaves behind tailings that haunt the landscape for decades. Eric Januar looked at that and asked a question chemists love and incumbents hate: what if you did not need any of it?
That question became BANIQL, the Silicon Valley deep-tech company where Januar is co-founder and chief executive. The pitch is deceptively simple. Nickel and cobalt are the beating heart of EV batteries and grid storage. Demand is exploding. Supply is filthy. BANIQL wants to make the supply clean - and, crucially, cheap enough that being clean is not a tax but an advantage.
Januar did not arrive at mining through mining. He arrived through the things mining feeds. Twelve years of research and development across electronics, batteries and semiconductors - including a stint at Merck and a successful exit at an earlier startup - taught him how the downstream world actually consumes these metals. He had seen the battery from the inside. BANIQL was the logical, if unlikely, move one rung up the chain: to the rock itself.
The result is a process the company calls BEST - the Baniql Extraction SysTem. It marries electrochemistry with an advanced mechanical reactor design, and the headline claim is the absence of two things: high temperature and high pressure. Strip those out and the whole economics of nickel changes. The plant shrinks. The energy bill collapses. The waste, BANIQL says, goes to net zero.
