31 APRIL 2024 WorldWide Drilling Resource® Could Old Tailings be a Viable Source of Critical Minerals? Adapted from Information by the U.S. Geological Survey The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is investing more than $2 million in cooperative agreements with 14 states to study the potential for critical mineral resources in mine waste. This funding will allow the USGS and certain states to better map locations of mine waste and measure the potential for critical minerals which may exist there. “These agreements are allowing us and the states to take a second look at places that were once known for their mineral production to see if there might yet be some new critical mineral potential, just waiting to be found,” said Darcy McPhee, program manager for the USGS Earth Mapping Resources Initiative (Earth MRI), which provided the funding for the agreements. During the mining process, topsoil, waste rock, and other materials are removed to get to the ore. Concentrating the valuable minerals during initial processing leaves behind what are called tailings, which are frequently discarded and stored at the mine site while the valuable minerals are taken away for further processing. In the past, mines in the United States have focused on reliably profitable metals such as gold, silver, iron, copper, lead, and zinc. However, many newer technologies such as renewable energy generation, electric vehicle batteries, and consumer electronics rely on small amounts of mineral commodities which are rare in the earth’s crust and frequently unprofitable to mine by themselves. In some cases, these rare mineral commodities occur alongside the traditionally profitable metals. Historical mines extracted metals which were profitable at the time, but not the rare mineral commodities like cobalt and indium and other critical minerals. Since those minerals weren’t needed then, they were often left in the tailing piles. The USGS started creating a national mine waste inventory to identify where mine waste exists on the landscape. Using the USMIN database, USGS scientists have plotted the location of historic mine features, including known tailing piles, along with which minerals were produced there. Funding from these new cooperative agreements is allowing states like Arizona, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Virginia, and Washington to add data from their own mine waste inventories to the national inventory. Once the locations of mine waste are known, research is needed to determine whether critical minerals can be found in the tailings and, if so, how they might be produced and what effects producing them might have on local ecosystems and communities. Funding from these new agreements will allow Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, New York, North Carolina, and Washington to collect samples from tailing sites, create geologic maps, and analyze the surrounding area to determine the potential for critical minerals in the mine waste might be. The USGS and state geological surveys are taking a second look at mine waste for critical mineral potential. MIN JUNE AD COPY DEADLINE MAY 1st.
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