CEO LETTER: A Letter to the Builders
June 2026
Why mining is the place to spend a career, and who we are hiring to prove it
Where Two Engineers Meet
There is an industry worth giving a career to, and it does not yet exist. It would pull the copper the world is starving for out of the ground without poisoning the water, hollowing out the towns, or asking anyone to look away from what their work leaves behind. Building it is among the most consequential work available to anyone right now, and two very different people are moving toward it from opposite ends.One has spent twenty-five years inside mining already, building toward that industry a margin at a time. They have run a concentrator, supervised a smelter, or carried a permit through a decade of hearings. They have made the old method better than it had any right to be: cleaner scrubbers, better-lined ponds, real investment in the people next door. They know precisely how far that gets, because they have lived its limits, held back not by will but by the tools the old method allowed. They are not cynical. They are exact.The other is young, a few years out of a strong technical degree, and wants their work to matter: to change the status quo, not maintain it. For them, the better industry is not an aspiration but a precondition; they will not give mining a look on any lesser terms, and most of their generation has not. In a McKinsey workforce analysis, roughly seven in ten people aged fifteen to thirty said they would probably or definitely never work in mining, and the number of US students training to enter it has fallen by more than half in a decade. That instinct is fair, and it is the standard the work now has to meet, because the work that decides whether the energy transition arrives, and whether the communities who host a deposit grow either wealthier or sicker, is mining work. It is worthy of their focus. Done the old way, it repels the people who care most. Done a better way, it is precisely where they belong.These two have almost nothing in common, and they are arriving on the same ground: not a company, but an industry being remade. Still Bright is here to buttress it with new tools. We recover copper from sulfide ore without a smelter, the part of mining that has done the most harm, and in doing so we are working to make that industry real enough to build a career inside. Both of these people are who we are hiring.
Hydrometallurgy Has Won Before
There is a precedent for this, and it is copper's own. In 1959, a chemist at General Mills, the cereal company, patented a reagent that could pull copper selectively out of a leach solution. The knowledge that would reshape copper processing came from outside the industry entirely. The first commercial plant to use it opened at the Bluebird Mine in Arizona in 1968, run not by a major but by a junior explorer. The smelter operators who dominated copper treated solvent extraction and electrowinning as a curiosity, fit for dump leaches and little else. They were wrong. Hydrometallurgy grew from under one percent of refined copper in the late 1960s to roughly a fifth of world production today, and the industry's own histories now credit it with making copper the first green metal. But SX/EW only ever took the easy half. Solvent extraction works on oxide ores and the more soluble sulfides; primary sulfides like chalcopyrite stayed locked, too refractory to leach economically, so the industry agreed they had to be smelted. That is the line drawn fifty years ago, and no one has successfully crossed it since. So the sulfides still go to the smelter, and their sulfur with them: captured as sulfuric acid where the smelter can manage it, escaping as fugitive sulfur dioxide where it cannot. The sulfur lost earlier to the tailings becomes acid mine drainage for generations. That is the price of the line. RACER crosses it, and not by discarding SX/EW but by extending it. Vanadium electrochemistry reduces the copper within the copper sulfides, which makes tank leaching of that copper fast and easy; from there the same solvent extraction and electrowinning that built the oxide business plates the cathode. We do not replace SX/EW. We hand it the half it was never able to reach.[3]Here is the part that matters for who we hire. SX/EW did not scale because a reagent existed. It scaled because metallurgists and operators trained inside the smelting world were willing to back a method their own training called marginal, and to carry everything they knew about how copper behaves into a process that looked nothing like the one they had mastered. The metallurgist who understands how copper deports through an orebody, the operator who knows what fails at three in the morning, the permitting lead who has heard every objection a community can raise: that knowledge is not something we are trying to replace. It is exactly what we are trying to hire.Industries do not shift when the science appears. They shift when the people who mastered the old method decide to carry what they know into the new one.
Why the Problem Is Worth a Career
Copper demand is climbing faster than supply can answer, driven by electrification, the build-out of AI data centers, and continued growth across developing economies. The world will need billions of pounds of new copper this decade, and the conventional pipeline covers only a fraction of it. The reason is not only geology. The dominant way to process copper sulfides, concentration by flotation followed by smelting, carries consequences communities will no longer accept: the potential for acid mine drainage, fugitive emissions, and tailings facilities that remain a liability for generations. Projects stall not because the metal is absent but because the method is no longer welcome. Pebble and Resolution Copper in the United States, Tia Maria in Peru, Cobre Panama: tens of billions of dollars and millions of tonnes, locked in the ground.Still Bright exists to change the method. Our RACER process moves upstream far enough to capture the sulfur as a product, instead of releasing it as fugitive sulfur dioxide or leaving it behind to become acid mine drainage. There is no smelter to permit, and no acid mine drainage risk to tolerate. The commercial case and the environmental case point the same direction, which is the only kind of solution that actually scales. It is the kind of tool that makes the industry worth dedicating a career to.That is the work. It is chemistry, and operations, and field deployment, and it is hard in exactly the way that rewards people who like hard things. The chemistry works. Proving it on every ore body, at every scale, then in the field beside a working mine, is what the next people here will do.
We Are Hiring
We are twelve people today, scaling past twenty as we prove our pilot in Newark and prepare for on-site demonstration. One of our values is Empowering Our People: we support our team toward their own goals, not only the company's, and we are honest about fit. I'm excited to continue building the team that will respectfully challenge each other and force the reality we all want into fruition. This only happens when we care about the impact we are leaving.The thing that has always kept people in mining is the community a mine builds around it. Remove the harm, and that bond becomes a reason to arrive, not only a reason to stay. We are hiring, and broadly. If you are a scientist who wants to own a process from the bench to the pilot line instead of inheriting one that cannot change, this is your bench. If you are an engineer who would rather build the thing than maintain it, we have the thing. If you are the kind of operator who keeps a line running and a lab honest, the business builder who wants to open the partnerships that turn a pilot into an industry, or the person who quietly makes a supply chain and a day-to-day actually work, there is a seat here with your name on it.
Apply at stillbright.co. And if you know a smelter superintendent or a hydrometallurgy PhD who has been quietly looking for the next thing, the one place their experience would compound instead of erode, send them this letter.The hardest problems in the energy transition are physical, and they are waiting in the rock. Come build with us.