Werner, et al., reported in 2017 that estimates of the world's mineral resources of numerous by-product metals remain highly uncertain at best, despite the high criticality of many of these elements to society (see Part I of this study). This stems from the limited reporting of the concentrations of these elements within mineral deposits by the mining industry, meaning that we require methods to estimate the availability of these resources that overcome this limitation. The authors offer a method for quantifying poorly reported mineral resources of by-product metals that builds upon deposit-by-deposit approaches to global resource estimation as indicated in Part I), arguably the best-practice approach for well-reported commodities, but also adds the use of proxies for by-product grade estimation. This proxy method allows for deposits with known or inferred by-product metals to also be incorporated within global resource estimates and provides a greater basis for assessing future supply potential.
The authors demonstrate and verifies the proffered methodology with indium, a critical metal for which > 1% of identified zinc, tin, and copper deposits potentially hosting indium mineralisation report grades using CRIRSCO (or equivalent) mineral resource reporting codes. The use of the method outlined in this paper will allow
the global resources of any metal commodity, especially the often under-reported by- and co-product metals that are becoming increasingly essential to modern life, to be quantified to a significantly greater level of accuracy and precision than is allowed by previous approaches.
In this study, that authors have introduced a framework by which the global resources of any metal commodity may be estimated in such a way that is reproducible, is leveraged off of existing, publicly available data, does not require overly sophisticated modelling or software, and which explicitly overcomes the lack of reporting by mining companies to produce more detailed and defensible estimates. The uncertainties of these estimates have been discussed, and ways in which they can be qualified (through reporting classifications and multi criteria analysis) and quantified have been embedded into the methodology, which is an improvement upon many previous attempts to characterize global critical metal resources. The authors have identified avenues for refinement in the methodology which must be explored to further reduce these uncertainties.
The application of the methodology to indium has been demonstrated, and the full inventory for indium and further analysis of indium resources is presented in Part III of the authors reports (more).
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