In a lab on Amnicola Highway, 23-year-old Daniel Rau stands among drums of acidic waste from mining sites that contain trace amounts of metals critical for semiconductors, magnets, fiber optic cables, military weapons and wind turbines.
His company, Kunin Technologies, recently won an award from the U.S. Department of Energy to recover a metal called gallium from the waste. The U.S. has not had a domestic supply of the semiconductor component since 1987.
“All the most important technologies of the 21st century are coming from these weird, niche metals that are recovered as byproducts,” Rau said in an interview. “We don’t produce any of these today.”
Rau, a Chicago native, graduated from Vanderbilt University in 2024 with a degree in chemical engineering. He then moved to California to begin fundraising for a start-up that would, as its slogan says, enable the U.S. to “mine every element on the periodic table in America again.”
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