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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It’s a good idea to squeeze all the value possible out of your waste but using wind, solar and batteries as your excuse is mind numbingly stupid. Wind, solar and storage can not support the grid, stop building them.
While the good Doctor has a point tailings treatment is in the wishful thinking department – most tailings are analysed to the nearest parts per billion in the hope there is something of value that can be added to the mine income. It is best to extract the alleged critical minerals before they end up in the tailings storage facility (TSF) – way too expensive to reclaim from a TSF. The degree of subsidy required is far greater than the subsidy to build a wind farm off Bondi Beach in sunny Oz.
The only time I saw consistent profits being made on a small scale was soon after the gold price was freed up and a cottage industry sprung up using cyanide to treat tailings from the older mines, now profitable due a rise in the price of gold.
It does not happen every day unfortunately.
People whose business is mining for profit getting unsolicited advice from people who likely have never done an honest days work in their lives.
I’m just piling pn but these “know-it-alls” just don’t get it. Modern mining (post 1900) and refining get every economic bit out of the feed-stock, Obviously she has made little use from colleagues from CSM who could had helped her understand her errors in logic.
At Sumpter, Oregon, there’s an area where the tailings from the gold mines were haphazardly dumped. The last of three massive gold dredges was shut down in 1954 but the “historic” landscape devastation remains.
The big dredges were only after the BIG gold. There’s likely millions of dollars worth of flake down to microscopic size gold in all those tailings, but prospecting them is forbidden. I’m surprised the EPA never called it a Superfund site and demanded it all be flattened out and restored. (Of course without doing any gold recovery from the mess.)
Some oldtimers who worked on the 3rd dredge told me they regularly saw good sized nuggets run through and into the tailings. They were not allowed to try grabbing any.
I wonder how much silver could be extracted from deeper in the Comstock silver mine using robotic equipment? It was excavated as deep as practical with late 1800’s and early 1900’s technology. Extraction in the underground mines ended in the 1920’s while an open pit mine was dug into the 1980’s.
Fifty+ years in the natural resource/mining industry and still dealing with self-described experts. Mining (like math) is hard.