Greffe Titouan, Frenzel Max, Werner Tim T, Mudd Gavin, Wang Peng, Margni Manuele, Bulle Cécile
CIRAIG, Institute of Environmental Sciences, UQAM, Montreal, Quebec H2X 3Y7, Canada.
Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Helmholtz Institute Freiberg for Resource Technology (HIF), Chemnitzer Str. 40, Freiberg 09599, Germany.
Environ Sci Technol. 2024 Dec 17;58(50):22213-22223. doi: 10.1021/acs.est.4c05293. Epub 2024 Dec 4.
Mineral resources are essential for reaching net-zero ambitions by 2050. There is a rising diversity of metals in electricity generation and storage technologies, as well as for mobility technologies. However, little is known about the future supply of minor elements historically mined in low volumes such as indium, tellurium, germanium, or tantalum. Those minor elements are found in lower concentrations in the ores of major elements and therefore rarely form economic deposits on their own. Such elements are often produced as byproducts of a host (or "target commodity", which underpins the bulk of a mine's profitability) in ore, e.g., in porphyry ore, tellurium is a byproduct where copper is the host. As a result, the primary supply of those minor elements depends on the supply of the major elements. Such dependency has not been accounted for in scenarios of the mineral supply. To address this gap, we developed a methodology to harmonize scattered data of mineral resource estimates and to calculate the mass ratio between the byproduct and the host in ores and concentrates, called the byproduct-to-host (BtH) ratio. We collected crude ore tonnage and element grades, among other key data, from the state-of-the-art literature and publicly available mining company reports. Our data set covers 3422 deposits across 141 countries providing 22 275 BtH ratios. The future supply of minor elements can be derived by multiplying the primary production of host elements by the developed BtH ratios, noting the limitations of data representativity. The open-access nature of this work facilitates the enrichment and update of this data set in the coming years.
矿产资源对于实现到2050年的净零排放目标至关重要。发电和存储技术以及移动技术中所使用的金属种类日益增多。然而，对于历史上开采量较低的微量元素（如铟、碲、锗或钽）的未来供应情况，我们却知之甚少。这些微量元素在主要元素的矿石中含量较低，因此很少能单独形成有经济价值的矿床。此类元素通常作为矿石中主体（或“目标商品”，它支撑着矿山的大部分盈利能力）的副产品产生，例如在斑岩矿石中，碲是以铜为主体的副产品。因此，这些微量元素的主要供应取决于主要元素的供应。在矿产供应情景中，这种依赖性并未得到考虑。为了填补这一空白，我们开发了一种方法，用于整合分散的矿产资源估计数据，并计算矿石和精矿中副产品与主体之间的质量比，即副产品与主体（BtH）比。我们从最新文献和公开的矿业公司报告中收集了原矿吨位和元素品位等关键数据。我们的数据集涵盖了141个国家的3422个矿床，提供了22275个BtH比。考虑到数据代表性的局限性，通过将主体元素的初级产量乘以所开发的BtH比，即可得出微量元素的未来供应量。这项工作的开放获取性质便于在未来几年对该数据集进行充实和更新。
