Extracting Mineral By-Products

Project goal:

To establish new domestic industries and secure supply chains in strategic minerals that are by-products of other mining projects and prevent the unregulated export of critical minerals in mineral concentrates.

Challenge / Opportunity:

  • Gallium, germanium and indium are examples of critical minerals essential to modern industrial and defence technologies that are not commercially viable industries due to small trading volumes and concentrated supply chains. For example, the global production of germanium metal was estimated to be 140 tonnes in 2021. These minerals have been the subject to recent Chinese trade restrictions on the export of technologies and materials.
  • Like many critical minerals, these minerals do not occur in sufficient concentrations to mine as a standalone commodity, but are secondary elements in more valuable mineral deposits, such as bauxite and zinc. By-product minerals are rarely reported as a mineral resource and there is limited knowledge of the national reserves and few incentives for industry to extract in other metallurgical processes.
  • There are no standard processes in Australia for extracting these minerals, which presents a technical challenge for industry. As a result, currently many Australian critical minerals are not extracted from ore but sent to tailings or exported in mineral concentrates and the value is realised in other jurisdictions.
  • Australia is well positioned to meet global demand and secure supply chains for many of these minerals, on account of our zinc and aluminium industries (noting germanium is not currently recovered from Australian refineries).

Project status:

  • Geoscience Australia has developed predictive methodologies to estimate in-situ resource potential of critical mineral by-products from zinc deposits and is developing a reporting tool that will provide decision makers and industry with information on potential by-product production.
  • ANSTO is developing alternative flowsheets/technologies for zinc refining processes for the recovery of germanium, working closely with Australian zinc operators. These processing pathways will be tested in coming months.
  • CSIRO is undertaking a techno-economic assessment of ANSTO’s processes to help Government and industry evaluate the commercial implications of extracting critical mineral by-products.

Resources

Find out more about this project:

Critical Mineral By-Product Potential factsheet

Geoscience Australia’s project page Critical Mineral By-product Potential