Essay by Eric Worrall
“… most mines don’t know exactly what they are tossing out …”
We could get most metals for clean energy without opening new mines
An analysis of active US mines finds they already collect virtually all of the minerals the country needs for batteries, solar panels and wind turbines – but these critical minerals mostly go to waste
21 August 2025
The leftover ore discarded by US mines is packed with key minerals – enough to provide virtually all of the raw material needed to build clean energy technologies. Recovering just a fraction of these minerals could meet the country’s growing demand for green energy without requiring imports or environmentally-damaging new mines – but getting them is easier said than done.
“We have to get better at using the material that we mine,” says Elizabeth Holley at the Colorado School of Mines.
…
These leftovers often contain other useful materials, including dozens of critical mineralsthe US government has identified as essential to military and energy technologies, such as solar panels, wind turbines and batteries. But the supply chains for some of these minerals are controlled by China, sparking urgent concern among the US and its allies they could be wielded for geopolitical leverage. That has spurred a search for alternative mineral sources, including mining byproducts and tailings.
However, most mines don’t know exactly what they are tossing out. “Many of the elements we currently consider critical were not in much use in the past, so no one was analysing for them,” says Holley.
…
Just knowing where these minerals exist is hardly the only barrier. Current refining technology isn’t well-suited for these small, complicated waste streams, and deploying the necessary tech is too expensive for most US mines, says Megan O’Connor at Nth Cycle, a start-up focused on extracting critical minerals from unconventional sources.
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2493449-we-could-get-most-metals-for-clean-energy-without-opening-new-mines/
This seems a strange claim, or at least an odd take on the issue. Most mining engineers I’ve met could recite from memory exactly what is in the waste product of the last mine they worked on. And reprocessing waste from past mining operations is big business, in cases where the waste is valuable.
Those minerals will be extracted when the time is right. But until the value of extraction makes it profitable, a significant strategic need arises, or technological advances bring down the cost, why would anyone bother?
As for the claim such extraction could cover the entire needs of battery, solar panel, wind turbine manufacture, most of the estimates for the required minerals I’ve seen are so gigantic, lets just say expert or not, I’d like to see Elizabeth Holley’s calculations.
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> However, most mines don’t know exactly what they are tossing out. “Many of the elements we currently consider critical were not in much use in the past, so no one was analysing for them,” says Holley.
I can guarantee you that mineral content is scrutinized to parts per billion on an ongoing process basis. Holley clearly doesn’t understand the difference between content and economically recoverable content.
exactly … coffee has arsnic in it … not enough to be poisionous … so what if tailings have trace amounts of XYZ unobtanium … heck, there is gold in seawater … I doubt she actually did any research into the process of extracting these trace amounts … just waved her hands and said “Look a squirrel” …
Not to mention the cross contamination and extra costs associated with the refinement necessary to make the recovery viable
Not just refinement you are going to have to process massive amounts of ore (using a lot of energy) to get tiny quantities which then have to be shipped to some refinery somewhere. The reason they don’t recover them is because it’s not economic otherwise the greedy capitalist would recover them.
If Dr Elizabeth Holley’s views are typical at the Colorado School of Mines, it’s probable the future US mining industry is in for a serious amount of trouble. So what I suspect is she has been taken out of context – no geologist, mining engineer or metallurgical engineer would ever say something so utterly stupid as this: “We could get most metals for clean energy without opening new mines”.
Below, “Right-Handed Shark” has posted a video of a presentation by Dr Simon Michaux to the University of Queensland on, essentially, the quantity of metals and minerals required to achieve Net Zero by 2050.
Dr Michaux is a very unusual beast: He’s Australian – but we’ll forgive him – but he’s also, all in one, a Geologist, a Mining Engineer, a Mineral Processing Engineer, and a Physicist, which is an almost unheard of combination. And also unusual for a mining academic, he has considerable hands-on experience in the mining industry itself, and he’s currently employed by the Finland Geological Survey, a very serious and competent outfit . . . so I recommend he be listened to.
To give a flavour of his work on the matter, I’ll focus on just one metal – copper – although he covers them all in his presentation (and I’ve taken the liberty of rounding his numbers):
Current global copper production is in the order of 25 million tonnes per annum (Mtpa). And current global copper Reserves are 880 million tonnes (Mt). And in order to build the wind turbines, solar panels, batteries for EVs, increase grid sizes by 3-fold, and to provide grid-scale batteries to provide 28 days of storage to cover for periods when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, 6 BILLION tonnes (Bt) of copper will have to be produced between now and 2050.
But there are a number of problems, which perhaps put things into perspective, and they certainly demonstrate that Dr Holley’s statement – if she actually said it – is total and utter bullsh#t:
To produce 6Bt of copper by 2050 would take 240 years at current rates of production;
In order to produce 6Bt by 2050, global annual production would need to be increased immediately overnight by tomorrow morning from 25Mtpa to . . . 240Mtpa;
But, if that were possible – it definitely isn’t – current global copper Reserves would be depleted in . . . less than 4 years.
And reality is, from the discovery of a Resource (mineralised deposit, which takes years of painstaking geological exploration work in itself) to producing operating mine, is a 15 year exercise AT BEST.
So, even though impossible – “it ain’t going to happen,” says Michaux – there are a multitude of very ignorant and stupid politicians about who will insist on trying to achieve Net Zero by 2050 – what a lovely virtue-signalling message! – which means more mines WILL be opened.
Then bear in mind that when only a few countries attempt to do so, the efforts of these countries are rendered utterly pointless and exercise in idiotic futility.
mineral content is scrutinized to parts per billion
Yeah that claim (the one you’re responding to) I found very hard to believe. I used to work at a SAND mine, and their labs knew exactly what they were getting.
That has been my take when I have seen these articles. If the valuable materials are there, why would mining companies ignore them?
What about waste from coal burning plants. That has been touted a lot lately, but are economically viable amounts present?
Regarding inactive mines, back in the day the miners were digging out the mineral ore du jour, gold, silver, tin, etc. They might have known what the rare earths were but had no use for them.
Even if they had a use for them they would have been uneconomic. For rare earths you want concentrations greater than 5% or greater than 0.5% if recovered as a byproduct of other minerals. The number of places that gold and silver mines could meet that is probably counted on one hand.
From a non rare earth standpoint a mining, processing, transport & refinement increase is still required. There’s more to eliminating Fossil Fuel use than just Wind Turbines and Solar Panels to produce expensive and unreliable energy. There’s the end use that also requires electrification…
Transportation
Cooking
Heating
Maritime Shipping
Ground Shipping
Rail
All would require batteries or OH power line electrification which would need
More Generation
More Transmission
More Distribution
More Aluminum transmission lines
More Copper distribution lines
More Larger capacity Transformers
Vast increases in Copper production for the electric motors needed to replace ICVs
And much more Coal to refine Silica into Silicon and Iron Oxide into Steel
I read someplace that it would take between 4 and 10 times increase in the current annual Global Copper production just to replace the current 41M ICVs in the UK and more than 6 times that devoted to replace the 280M ICVs in the US. The world has 2.2B ICVs that would need replacing to eliminate Gasoline/Diesel usage.
You aren’t going to get those minerals from tailings.
New and extensive mining would be required.
We wouldn’t. We mine whatever we can make a profit at. Once something has gone to the tailings pond it then becomes part of a several mile long by several mile wide by hundreds of feet deep mud pie. It is NOT simple to recover anything from a large mud pie.
Ah, the key word is “economically.” Universities and businesses have been poking around coal ash landfills for years and they have identified rare earths. But for some reason nothing ever happens. I have surmised even those it is technically feasible, the $$ just don’t add up. They usually want the coal plant owner(s) to pony up the financing, which they won’t do.
This happens to be true in Cornwall. Because the tin and copper has been mined for 5000 years.
The tailings are in every stream and are naturally sorted by density.
There probably won’t be enough to power a whole economy but there are significant recoverable rare earth metals at economically viable levels.
Also, anyone who tells you the costs of recovering rare earth metals from waste streams was uneconomic 20 years ago and so will be today… knows nothing of the changes in demand.
If “significant recoverable rare earth metals at economically viable levels” existed, they would be recovered and making a profit for some greedy capitalist pig.
Or you could take advantage of this fabulous opportunity overlooked by all those greedy capitalist pigs and recover those rare earth metals at economically viable levels.
You would be surprised at how many people hear about natural resources but assume that they don’t exist. So they don’t exploit them. For proof, reread what you wrote.
Alluvial deposits have been exploited in the past for tin and copper in those regions. Reference: Tin streaming
Am willing to listen to any mechanism that prevents streams from sorting rare earth metals by density?
It works for other elements. Not sure how it can be stopped.
But, as you have correctly surmised, I am not a miner and am not the right person to exploit these resources, myself.
So, MCortney could become a greedy capitalist pig & stop his rantings on here !!
Well, we can hope (:-))
Perhaps they could apply for a Government Subsidy to defray the Herculean costs of that mineral stream exploitation
Just like Wind Energy isn’t economically recoverable without Government Subsidies. Without Government funding Wind and Solar are Worthless.
If you’re so certain that there’s a fortune to be made by doing that, then go for it. I hope you become very rich. More likely you’ll go very broke and possibly be sent to jail for ignoring the rules we miners have to follow.
I agree. It’s why I’m not doing it. And the fact the rights all belong to the Prince of Wales, of course.
Still, no-one has found a way that I can be wrong about the resources being there in economic concentrations.
Only that it’s not being exploited by anyone at the moment so (as Scarecrow Repair thinks) nothing new can be discovered.
Maybe the mistake you are making is to assume that there are any mines in Cornwall left open that could expand their operations to alluvia?
They have all closed.
If you can’t get the rights then it’s not an economic concentration. If you can’t get the rights then you cannot call it a Resource. Those are legal terms that include the ability to be able to lawfully extract whatever the good stuff is. Calling something that no one has the right to lawfully mine a Resource is fraud in most stock exchanges. See “sent to jail” in the post to which you responded.
Anyone can apply to the Duchy of Cornwall for the right to mine. They will have to pay the Duchy for the right.
As I linked above, it’s been done before for tin and copper. Just not for rare earth metals as there was no demand, until recently. And now the mines that have the local skills, are closed.
It’s not illegal to mine on someone else’s land. Only to do so without permission.
Are you another like Scarecrow Repair who thinks that nothing new can ever be done?
Or do you think that rare earth metals are not separatable by flowing water? Don’t know how that can be the case but, if so, then the resources will not be concentrated up and will not be economic to extract.
Rare earth minerals are not rare and found all over the world they are called rare because they mostly appear in low concentrations unlike gold, silver, copper or tin. Rare earth mines are where the concentration is high enough to make it worth mining but you still have to process a lot of material to get enough to make it worth while.
If the ROI is there to mine tailings for rare earth minerals while meeting all rules and regulations then mines will process those tailings. After all, mines and miners are in the mineral extraction business and investors are always looking for a way to make a good investment. All this hand waving saying minerals are present so we should mine them is just a waste of air.
MCourtney – not sure why you are getting all the downvotes.
Can you provide information regarding previous mining, tailings and metal refining? I would think that newer methods recoup more metals than older methods and starting from the leftovers would be a place to start.
Please and thank you. Have a blessed day.
Mr. dyne: My guess is, the article tells us of a Dr. Holley, who is telling enviros what they want to hear (no new mines!) and promoting further processing tailings that is plainly not practical. My fellow Courtney made a point that occurred to me when commenters posted how carefully tailings are handled now- older tailings were not microprocessed 100 years ago or more. Some mine tailings are in fact being further processed, I’m not in mining but that is no surprise. Some took his comment to support Holley, I guess, even though he didn’t. Commenters here familiar with mining seem to know that Dr. Holley’s idea is wildly impractical.
For my part, I’ve seen film of California gold “mining” where they used firehoses to wash away hills. Are Californians gonna let Dr. Holley flush out all those creekbeds for a couple grams of rare earth! That gets my blood pressure up, too!
Doc Holley has mining world experience, not just an academic. Perhaps she meant “we can or will get better at …”
I’ve sure mining corporations are not “leaving money on the table”.
That is not much mining experience it’s pretty much all academia she might have seen the coal face between 2007-2009
Professional Experience
2012 – 2014: Teaching Assistant Professor, Department of Geology & Geological Engineering, Colorado School of Mines2010 – 2012: Adjunct Faculty, Regis University2009: Exploration Geologist, Ur-Energy, Littleton, Colorado2007 – 2009: Project Geologist, contracting to Underworld Resources, Yukon, Canada; Queensland Minerals, Australia; Reunion Gold Corporation, Suriname2004 – 2005: Science and Mathematics Instructor, Pacific View Charter School, Oceanside, California2004 – 2005: Staff Geologist, Geothermal Surveys Inc., Pasadena, California
Thank you for the link to her Colorado School of Mines page.
Her experience ends 5 years after earning her bachelors – after that it’s all academia – in other words, all theory, no application.
Maybe, maybe not. Just like ‘rare earth’ minerals are among the most prolific around the world mining them is only profitable where human costs aren’t an issue. I see tailings as a future possibility of minerals if/when current resources run dry.
I see two possible advantages for processing tailings.
First, it’s already been broken free from the rest of the rocks. I don’t know how much explosives cost, but if you combine it with insurance, it might be noticable.
Secondly, if it’s at a mine that is currently in operation, you might not need as much in the way of permits.
Usually the hard part is getting it out fast enough. If a Processing Plant has a capacity of 100,000 tons per day, but the process to recover the rare earths can only handle 10,000 tons per day (or less) then the mine won’t be slowed down to wait for the added process. Similarly, we have had to pass on some promising looking technologies because there just isn’t enough flat ground near where we’re working (where our permits and licenses will allow us to make changes like earthmoving and putting up buildings) to add the needed infrastructure. We make our money by being very efficient as what we do. And our permits have a long lead time and aren’t quickly changed.
Any change to our existing processes usually involves a huge opportunity cost – if there’s a 1% chance a change to the circuit will take the Plant down for multiple days we won’t do it because that’s millions in lost revenue against “I think it will recover more”. Sometimes small pockets of ore or coal at the bottom of a pit are not as valuable as the savings in haulage costs by shortening the waste hauls for the remaining mining by backfilling the pit. These calculations are usually in the tens of millions of dollars so they can be significant.
The main assumption here is that the public and policy leaders remain as ignorant as always on the relatively obscure topic of resource economics. It’s not a bad bet given the track record.
Once again, socialists speak out of both sides of their mouth.
Most of these big government types are absolutely convinced that thanks to their “fancy” degrees, they are better at almost everything, then are the people who are actually doing the work.
“thAn ” are….
Paging Jeff Williams –
Jeff Williams please pick up the white courtesy phone …
AI Overview
The oceans contain an estimated 20 million tons of dissolved gold, which, at current market prices, is worth over $900 trillion.
AI Overview
The U.S. national debt is approximately $37 trillion as of late August 2025
Post WWI Germany tried to extract that dissolved gold with such success that they stopped it. Gold divided by ocean volume…unobtainium would be easier to exploit. Just turn on your TV.
“Milchmädchenrechnung”…as so often, but hey with AI and bluetooh atteched who knows? everything is better with bluetooth. sarc
When talking about gold in the oceans you are talking about 13 parts per TRILLION! That’s far less dense that low density Solar or Wind fuel and only slightly more dense than the typical Democrat Presidential Candidate… Or Renewable Energy Proponent.
I think you have that backwards. Democrats in general are incredibly dense.
Mr. Alberts: In most cases, yes, but think of the lightness of Kamala! In her case, hard to find density in such a vacuum.
I get the gravity of the situation…neutron star dense
Black Holes Matter
In fact, An enormous quantity of ocean water, approximately 5.45 billion cubic yards, would need to be processed to extract just one ounce of gold. This is an estimated volume equivalent to over 14 million Olympic-sized swimming pools. The concentration of gold is so dilute that extracting it from seawater is not commercially viable.
Mr. A: I only know gold mining from movies, my impression is that they use enormous quantity of water to flush out enormous loads of dirt. So, obviously, to get gold out of ocean water, you need to dump in enormous loads of dirt, right?
Sorry, but it struck me as funny to imagine the nazis dumping dirt to get the gold.
What use is a formula when the input data is false? There is a difference between a resource and a trace element, and Holley obviously doesn’t understand this. Ask first if she believes all property is theft; the answer will indicate if the interview needs to continue.
I guess I don’t see Holley’s attitude in this article beyond the single one sentence quote, which might have been poorly worded, or could have been quite isolated out of context with what I assume was an interview. Do you have any info about her beyond the CSOM page on her?
I guess I don’t see a problem with this isolated statement either. It may not be very accurate to if there really are economical mineral/element assemblages to be exploited, I don’t know. But I don’t see she’s an ax grinder. I think the writer of the article is.
Ironic that the image at the bottom of this guest post right above the “Study: Mining Minerals to Support Renewable Energy is Wrecking the Environment” headline shows the orange water discharge (largely iron oxide) from the August 2015 Colorado Gold King mine wastewater disaster. The long inactive Gold King had been bought by a purchaser who’d also bought the old nearby inactive Mogul Mine entirely for the purposes of seeing if he could profitably extract the rare earth minerals that the burgeoning ‘green energy’ industry was demanding. But leave it to Gina McCarthy’s EPA subcontractors who were inexplicably trying to ‘monitor’ the plug in the Red & Bonita Mine below the Gold King (paragraph 2 here), those guys negligently skipped their work orders (paragraphs 3.03 & 3.04 here) on how to first properly see if there was water pressure buildup behind the dirt entrance enclosure to the Gold King, and just starting digging it out straightaway with a backhoe until . . . . . oopsy.
What’s even more irritating is that law waste water spills does not have a mens re clause, so criminal intent is not needed for a conviction. Of course the subcontractors didn’t get charged (AFAIK) but people who accidentally caused orders of magnitude smaller spills by accident have been prosecuted.
And a local geologist had been writing letters to the local paper trying to warn them that they were headed for a world of trouble by trying to control runoff water by just damming it up, and that they needed to consult geotechnical engineers to be sure it would work. He was ignored. Probably didn’t have enough degrees to be considered as “knowledgeable”.
I had my poor man’s 1-week tent camping summer vacation every year for just short of 20 years right in that same area* — prior to 2015, the standing joke among the 4×4 offroad tour drivers pointing out the scenery to their tourist riders was how dumb it looked for the EPA trying to stuff ‘corks’ into the mines when there was no physical way to seal shut a mountain full of water. Jamb one into a mine entrance and that’ll stop the mine water from coming out?? Utterly laughable, it’ll just seep out somewhere else, there’s no stopping it.
*(since I more or less knew the area like the back of my hand, when the news came out that a “containment dam” had been breached, I knew of no dam in that area, and in an effort to find out exactly what they were talking about, I was one of the first, if not the first, to catch EPA in the process of deleting their incident photos of the blowout – see the first indented paragraph here before Paul Driessen’s 2015 WUWT guest post on the disaster)
There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them. – Orwell.
And he was bang on the money.
most mines don’t know exactly what they are tossing out.
That doesn’t say much for mining geologists who identify and assess mineral deposits for extraction…
Next up, mining old landfills.
That’s in a couple of hundred years. Provided there are enough metals to make it worthwhile then (it isn’t yet).
The upper layers will mostly old windmill blades by then.
Maybe they could replace sails? 😎
For the last few years, I’ve been referring to land fills as future mine sites.
Especially in the older layers, there’s going to be a lot of iron in them.
Ms. Holley states the obvious. There was a time when the prospectors, and even assayers, didn’t recognize what are now considered common minerals. They just saw something with a metallic luster that wasn’t pyrite or gold. Most of what got thrown out in the late-1800s either was too small to be recognizable or had no known use at the time. In most cases, the tailings were ‘stored’ outside the mine in what are commonly called waste or tailings piles. Famously, most Platinum Group Minerals recovered from California dredging or hydraulic mining had little value at the time and got tossed just like the magnetite and chromite that were common in the Black Sands.
Now, most prospectors are geologists with degrees, who, if not familiar with every mineral they encounter in the field, have access to the tools to identify them. They also have access to the means to identify trace elements in solid-solution or as micron-size particles. Therefore, the greatest opportunities for discovering something that formerly had no market value is in the dumps of long-abandoned mines. That is, if the environmentalists don’t insist on ‘remediating’ the dumps by back-filling the shafts and tunnels, or otherwise burying them so that they are not readily accessible for examination and sampling.
However, flotation of minerals like sphalerite (zinc sulfide) is still an important first step in concentrating the sulfide of interest. Just because a particular mineral or minerals may be present in the broken or finely-ground (comminuted) rock doesn’t mean that it will be easy or economic to extract the element(s) of interest. Often times, a custom-tailored processing stream or specialized flotation chemical needs to be found. Sometimes, the use of toxic chemicals like cyanide, or the roasting of pyrite, will run into permitting obstacles.
We have made a lot of progress in ‘getting better at what we mine,” but sometimes that isn’t enough. Things like the distance from a smelter, and the means to get the ore to a smelter economically, play significant roles in whether something can be mined at a profit. That is, the topography, the cost of transportation, beneficiation, smelting, refining, and the market prices of the necessary chemicals and finished product all determine whether one has a mine or a hole in the ground with some interesting minerals. Even the size of the deposit plays a role because if it costs $100 million to build the infrastructure necessary to mine something that will produce $100 million in profit, the initial investment eats up all the potential profit.
I think that Ms. Holly is being unjustifiably optimistic (and simplistic) about what is necessary to meet the demands of consumers. Because, if the elements necessary to support new technology can only be obtained at prices that make the end product (such as batteries) too expensive, people won’t buy the batteries.
I’ve visited two types of mineral recovery facilities. One was a Humphrey spiral concentrator, and the other was a froth flotation facility. I don’t remember the dates but the first was about 1970, the second about 1977.
They operate on very different principles, the first being density differences of sized particles, the second depending on surface tension creating an affinity of organic materials for different sulfides, thus attaching themselves to bubbles made from thin films of the organics.
Perhaps of interest to some of the geologists and chemists here, while doing a chemistry project in high school, dissolving the opaque minerals in beach sands to test for the presence of nickel-iron (as in meteorites), I observed that zircon behaved like a catalyst to breakdown Aqua Regia, with bubbles (chlorine?) forming on the crystal surface and attaching themselves to the small zircons (zirconium orthosilicate). They would float to the liquid surface where they could be skimmed off, creating a clean zircon product. This could perhaps be useful for radiometric age-dating or producing a refractory sand for high-temperature casting.
One never knows what will be discovered by careful observation, followed up by, “That’s interesting! I wonder why that happened?”
With respect to the last paragraph: Scientific discoveries rarely have an “Eureka!” moment, but much more commonly as someone saying “That’s odd…”
Like the guy who accidentally invented the first synthetic dye while attempting to synthesize quinine. When what he used to dissolve the black looking, tarry, goo from yet another failure turned a brilliant purple… he took his lab notes and established his own company to commercialize it and invent more synthetic dyes.
Transporting a ton one km in the pit by haul truck is ~30x more expensive than transporting a ton 1km by rail, which in turn is ~30x more expensive than transporting a ton 1km on an ocean freighter. Costs add up quickly.
Thanks for the numbers. For things like road aggregate, the dominate cost is typically transportation from the source to the end use. Thus the desire to have aggregate sources near the construction project, be it roads or buildings.
“We have to get better at using the material that we XXXXX,”
The XXXXX represents just about anything. Sawdust and bark used to be left in piles where trees were cut into haulable lengths or at mills. Potato peelings were dumped into streams. Overburden was left by open coal cuts. At least in the USA, we’ve gotten better.
Chicago slaughter houses used to brag that they used everything but the squeal from the pigs. There was a time I tried to convince some aggregate producers in California to put in a sluice box to produce gold and ‘platinum’ (PGMs) as a by-product where it was abundant. The response was, “We’re aggregate producers, not miners.” I consider such an attitude short-sighted. Their real business was to make money for the owner(s). If a monthly clean-up were to pay their electricity bill, then they had a higher profit.
Leftover little pits of potato from cutting french fries and other potato products used to be thrown away, until someone at Ore-Ida invented Tater Tots.
Now you know that favorite deep fried treat was originally made from (about to be) garbage.
The tots were so popular a competitor created Tater Gems, a ‘squashed’ version larger in diameter and thinner than its diameter.
No such thing as renewable energy, no such thing as clean energy. It’s all a WEF fairy tale.
“Renewable”.
What does that really mean?
A farmer might plant a crop of corn. He sells almost all of it but keeps some of the kernels as “seed corn” for the next year’s crop. That’s “renewable” food.
What excess energy does wind or solar produce produce to supply to build new wind and solar energy?
Zero. Zip. Nada.
That farmer can store his “seed corn”.
Wind and Solar depend on (along with taxpayer “green”) fossil fuels and/or hydro to build next year’s cr@p.
My local beach is made up of iron sand. In every handful of sand there is $25 worth of minerals. Unfortunately it costs $26 a handful to extract them.
There are two answers to that problem: 1) Just remove the highest-value minerals, 2) Look for cheaper methods to remove and sort the other minerals. For years, I have played with the phenomenon of dielectrophoresis to separate minerals by their average dielectric constant. When one separates one mineral, such as magnetite, the residue is enriched in the remaining minerals.
I was considering incorporating some of what I knew to separate alluvial minerals for my thesis research. However, my thesis advisor convinced me to stick with the standard techniques of concentrating the minerals with toxic ‘heavy-liquids’ and then identifying the minerals with petrographic microscope point-counting. The thesis committee was calling the shots, so I went along with what they wanted.
or what the EPA is forcing to leech into our rivers.
https://theworld.org/stories/2015/08/21/gold-king-mine-accident
Story tip
Britain’s biggest windfarm operator in crisis after Trump axes key deal
Stop-work order branded ‘political hostage-taking’ to further US president’s pursuit of Greenland
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/08/25/major-british-windfarm-operator-crisis-after-trump-deal/
Got it. People who know nothing of minerals, metals or mining are going to tell mineralogists, metallurgists and miners how to do their jobs. Sure.
Here is another piece of absurdity from New Scientist by the same author:
Microwaving rocks could help mining operations pull CO2 out of the air
Back to the original topic. What are the politics behind the assertion that the metals needed for a renewable energy future in the US can be extracted from waste rock without opening new mines in the US?
Why is someone who should know better, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines, claiming that it can be done?
Mining companies know full well that sooner or later, Democrats will be back in charge of the federal government. When that happens — its’ a when, not an if — environmental permits for any new mines which are either in development or which have become operational at the time the Democrats regain power will be quickly revoked.
And so mining companies are loathe to invest serious money in new US mines. Hence the suggestion that a look should be taken at operational mines which are already permitted and which have somehow survived the onslaught of anti-mining regulations that have been dumped on the industry in the last fifty years.
These mining companies will hang on to an operational legacy mine as long as possible before the mine is either played out, or else some Democrat in a position of power decides that the mine should be shut down before its economic ore has been fully extracted.
Suppose for purposes of argument that secondary ores containing the metals needed for the renewable energy transition could be found among the piles of waste rock at existing mines.
How much will it cost to separate those metals from the waste rock, where will the separation processing be done, where will the follow-on metal refining be done, what kinds of processes are needed for initial separation and subsequent refining, and what kinds of environmental permits will the separation & refining plants require?
If these questions can’t be answered in great detail for each and every existing mine which might come under consideration for a secondary ore expansion, then the entire concept is fantasyland.
Dr. Simon Micheaux has a slightly less optimistic view:
An oxymoron. Ore by definition has economic value. If it was discarded it has no economic value to the miner.
The current Rio Tinto started life as a waste processor because they developed a process that could turn mineral waste into metals with increasing demand and price..
It is the ignorant, unqualified, do-gooder mob who have given the mining industry substantial extra costs. Some of our mines were not permitted until we agreed to return all mined material to the open cut. That sort of damages the economics of retreatment of stockpiles. Geoff S
My point exactly. The money expended exposing the rocks underground are then hidden and made inaccessible, wasting the money that was spent, and requiring that nearly as much be spent to re-examine what was once in plain sight.