26 AUGUST 2023 WorldWide Drilling Resource® New Research Says Critical Metals for Renewable Energy Products Can Be Found in Existing Mines Adapted from Information by the Geological Society of America Ramping up renewable energy products will require a range of critical metals. One of these elements, tellurium, is gaining in popularity for use in photovoltaics, or solar panels. As global demand for solar panels continues to increase, so does the need for critical metals like tellurium. Tellurium isn’t mined as a solo mineral. Currently, most tellurium is collected as a by-product from copper mining. “The fundamental question is: how much tellurium is out there?” said Simon Jowitt, economic geologist at University of Nevada Las Vegas. He and coauthor Brian McNulty are trying to find out where tellurium is and how much could be out there. Jowitt presented their work at the Geological Society of America annual meeting in 2022. Unfortunately, the amount of tellurium in a mine is rarely reported. To fill in the gaps and create estimates of critical minerals, Jowitt and McNulty developed proxies to estimate tellurium content globally. Their first proxy resulted from resource and reserve estimates. In these reports, a mining company uses their own investigation data and estimates how many million tons of metal are in the ground. These figures are used to estimate the value of a mine site. “The second proxy is where we know the size of the deposit,” said Jowitt. In this case, the team uses the amounts of related tellurium minerals like calaverite, a goldtellurium metal. “We can estimate the amount of tellurium in that mineral, combine that with the reported size of the deposit, and again, develop a proxy.” They looked at 518 mineral deposits in active mines known to contain tellurium in the U.S. and Canada. Using their proxies, the researchers calculated 18 gold mines in the two countries could produce approximately 90 tons of tellurium a year from current mining, with another six copper, zinc, and nickel mines in Canada having potential to produce roughly 170 tons per year. According to Jowitt, this is a minimum estimate, because not every gold, copper, and nickel mine in the U.S. and Canada had appropriate data available. With these assessments, they found mines move around 260 tons of tellurium without collecting it. “If you recovered that tellurium, you could bump up global tellurium production by about 25%,” explained Jowitt. “That’s about seventeen and a half million dollars of tellurium that’s being moved around by the minerals industry, but is being lost to waste.” Jowitt noted their tellurium study is just one example of potential for extracting critical metals from existing mining operations. “There’s a whole range of by-product and co-product elements that we are moving around when mining. We need to do better making mineral mining operations more sustainable by extracting what we can from existing mineral deposits. And if we do that, it’s good for the environment, it’s good for the minerals industry . . . and it’s good for company bottom lines.” While their study focused on active mines, Jowitt pointed out extracting critical metals from spoils piles in old mines could be another win-win situation. Removing metals from tailings can be economically profitable, and there’s also an environmental benefit. Jowitt said as the need for carbon-neutral technologies increases, companies will need to consider mining multiple critical metals at once. Given the extremely high demand for these metals, Jowitt believes companies should start thinking about mineral extraction in new ways to keep metal prices from skyrocketing. Tellurium-quartz-pyrite hydrothermal vein. Photo by James St. John. MIN October Issue is UP AND COMING! Space Reservation: August 25th NOON Ad Copy Due: September 1st NOON * For use in WorldWide Drilling Resource® Ad Preparation is FREE at WorldWide*
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