Byproduct-to-Host Ratios for Assessing the Accessibility of Mineral Resources

Abstract

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.