He and coauthor Brian McNulty are trying to find out where this tellurium is and how much metal could be there. Jowitt is presenting their work at the Geological Society of America annual meeting on Wednesday.
The amount of tellurium in a mine is rarely reported, GSA notes. To fill in the gaps and create estimates of critical minerals, Jowitt and McNulty developed proxies to estimate tellurium content globally.
Their first proxy results from Resource and Reserve estimates. In these reports, a mining company uses their own investigation data and estimates that there are X-million tons of metal in the ground. These reports are used to estimate the value of a mine site.
“We what we do is take that information—which tells us how big the deposit is, how many million tons of ore or mineralization—and we combine that with information that’s published elsewhere on the concentration of tellurium and the deposit,” says Jowitt….
