30 Under 30 Energy & Green Tech 2026: Meet The Founders Recharging Our Energy Future

Text below from Forbes.

This year’s honorees are reinventing nuclear reactors, pioneering solar panel recycling, and even fighting global warming by cutting cow burps.

By Jesse Steinmetz, Igor Bosilkovski and Chris Helman

For centuries, small-scale gold miners have used highly toxic mercury to extract tiny particles of gold from crushed ore. If not carefully managed, the resulting slurry can be devastating to the environment. Eric Herrera, cofounder and CEO of San Francisco-based Maverick Metals, believes he has a better method for extracting precious metals — one that’s better for miners, and the environment. Instead of digging vast mines to excavate ore, Herrera’s technology involves drilling holes into areas of rich ore, then pumping in a novel cocktail of proteins that melt the minerals out of the ore to be easily pulled up in liquid form and refined.

“What we’re left with is a soup of critical elements, and we separate them,” says Herrera.

If it sounds bizarre, that’s what Herrera thought when he first made the discovery that led to Maverick’s invention. In 2022 he was on an Explorers Club expedition to the Arctic Circle where he encountered iron-eating bacteria that survived by secreting chemicals that melted minerals around natural iron ore deposits, leaving the iron behind for the bacteria to absorb.

“I didn’t invent the protein,” says the 27-year-old former medical scientist with the U.S. Navy. “I found it in nature and adapted it for industry.”

Read on HERE.