Nice article. I just subscribed and going through the archive. I see some startups that are specifically going after using tailings as a resource. I suspect for vast majority of tailings, its not economical to further process it. Is that correct, any other barriers preventing further extraction ? What do you think are the best opportunities for these startups ?
There are some interesting possibilities in getting more value from tailings. In some cases (like Simon Jowitt said in this piece https://greenrocks.substack.com/p/tellurium-climate-mining-solar-energy-indium ), it just takes adding on capacity to current plants to get more value elements from ore. Extracting rare earths from coal ash has gotten a lot of attention, but sometimes it distracts from the regulatory issue that governments may be lax to enforce rehabilitation after a mine closing. Some places require deposits before beginning mining that would cover those clean-up costs, but when a mine operates for decades, those funds can be directed elsewhere. Mine waste is a gnarly issue, and I'll try to cover more of innovations there
Nice article. I just subscribed and going through the archive. I see some startups that are specifically going after using tailings as a resource. I suspect for vast majority of tailings, its not economical to further process it. Is that correct, any other barriers preventing further extraction ? What do you think are the best opportunities for these startups ?
There are some interesting possibilities in getting more value from tailings. In some cases (like Simon Jowitt said in this piece https://greenrocks.substack.com/p/tellurium-climate-mining-solar-energy-indium ), it just takes adding on capacity to current plants to get more value elements from ore. Extracting rare earths from coal ash has gotten a lot of attention, but sometimes it distracts from the regulatory issue that governments may be lax to enforce rehabilitation after a mine closing. Some places require deposits before beginning mining that would cover those clean-up costs, but when a mine operates for decades, those funds can be directed elsewhere. Mine waste is a gnarly issue, and I'll try to cover more of innovations there