(Image courtesy of Chile’s Pontifical Catholic University).
The world is going to need a lot of copper and other critical metals if it is going to pivot away from fossil fuels. But can the mining industry deliver?
The challenges are huge. Ore grades at existing copper mines are steadily falling, big new discoveries are becoming rarer and development times can stretch up to a decade.
Part of the solution is to increase the efficiency of the mining process, which has historically been both highly polluting and wasteful.
Back to the future
The world dug up 650 million metric tons of copper between 1910 and 2010 but 100 million tons never made it to market, according to a 2020 research paper by Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute.
All that metal is still there lying in tailings ponds, a potentially massive resource awaiting the right technology to unlock it.
Rio Tinto has already successfully…
