All the critical minerals the U.S. needs annually for energy, defense and technology applications are already being mined at existing U.S. facilities, according to a new analysis published today in the journal Science.
The catch? These minerals, such as cobalt, lithium, gallium and rare earth elements like neodymium and yttrium, are currently being discarded as tailings of other mineral streams like gold and zinc, said Elizabeth Holley, associate professor of mining engineering at Colorado School of Mines and lead author of the new paper.
"The challenge lies in recovery," Holley said. "It's like getting salt out of bread dough – we need to do a lot more research, development and policy to make the recovery of these critical minerals economically feasible."
To conduct the analysis, Holley and her team built a database of annual production from federally permitted metal mines in the U.S. They used a statistical resampling technique to pair these data with the geochemical concentrations of critical minerals in ores, recently compiled by the U.S. Geological Survey, Geoscience Australia and the Geologic Survey of Canada.
Using this approach, Holley’s team was able to estimate the quantities of critical minerals being mined and processed every year at U.S. metal mines but not being recovered. Instead, these valuable minerals are ending up as discarded tailings that must be stored and monitored to prevent environmental contamination.
“This is a brand-new view of ‘low hanging fruit’ – we show where each critical mineral exists and the sites at which even 1 percent recovery of a particular critical mineral could make a huge difference, in many cases dramatically reducing or even eliminating the need to import that mineral,” Holley said.
The analysis in Science looks at a total of 70 elements used in applications ranging from consumer electronics like cell phones to medical devices to satellites to renewable energy to fighter jets and shows that unrecovered byproducts from other U.S. mines could meet the demand for all but two – platinum and palladium.
Among the elements included in the analysis are:
Cobalt (Co): The lustrous bluish-gray metal, a key component in electric car batteries, is a byproduct of nickel and copper mining. Recovering less than 10 percent of the cobalt currently being mined and processed but not recovered would be more than enough to fuel the entire U.S. battery market.
The lustrous bluish-gray metal, a key component in electric car batteries, is a byproduct of nickel and copper mining. Recovering less than 10 percent of the cobalt currently being mined and processed but not recovered would be more than enough to fuel the entire U.S. battery market. Germanium (Ge): The brittle silvery-white semi-metal used for electronics and infrared optics, including sensors on missiles and defense satellites, is present in zinc and molybdenum mines. If the U.S. recovered less than 1 percent of the germanium currently mined and processed but not recovered from U.S. mines, it would not have to import any germanium to meet industry needs.
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