Critical Mineral By-product Potential
Last updated:15 October 2024
As part of the Australian Critical Minerals Research and Development Hub, Geoscience Australia is developing methodologies and tools to help understand Australia’s geological resource potential for by-product critical minerals and lead research into development opportunities.
Why are we researching critical mineral by-products?
Approximately 50% of the critical minerals on Australia’s Critical Minerals List are co-products or by-products of major commodities such as zinc, copper, lead, nickel and aluminium, of which Australia has large economically demonstrated resources.
Critical mineral by-products such as gallium, germanium, and indium are commonly found in zinc deposits and are strategically important minerals essential to modern technologies and national security that have small markets and highly concentrated supply chains.
However, many by-product minerals are not considered “material” to the economics of resource extraction. Mining and smelting companies are therefore not obligated to report on grades or transactions and often these by-products are not captured in the refining process.
Consequently, a knowledge gap exists regarding Australia's potential reserves of vital critical minerals.
To fill this gap this project will have an initial focus on understanding gallium, germanium and indium potential from Australian zinc deposits.
Large sphalerite grains (black) within semi-massive pyrite (gold) and wollastonite (white) with minor antimony, lead and gold in a hydrothermal breccia.
What are we doing?
As part of this project Geoscience Australia is:
- Developing a methodology and output tool to predictively quantify Australia’s resource potential for gallium, germanium and indium in Australian zinc deposits.
- The methodology will use whole rock and mineral chemistry data to determine statistical relationships of geochemical associations of gallium, germanium and indium in Australian zinc deposits.
- Collecting additional samples and data to strengthen the statistical analysis and provide opportunities to benchmark the predictive outputs.
- Collaborating with industry to understand the current extent of by-product critical mineral processing and to identify future opportunities for Australia.
Our Hub partners are also involved in this project:
- ANSTO is undertaking desktop studies and test work on the technical recovery of germanium from zinc ores and desktop investigations for the extraction of gallium from bauxite refining process liquors and;
- CSIRO is assessing the techno-economic opportunities for Australia to produce germanium and gallium from existing operations.
What is Geoscience Australia’s goal?
Our goal is that this project will provide government and industry with the data and evidence necessary to inform strategic decision-making regarding the production of gallium, germanium and indium from Australia’s existing mining and processing operations.
The project will provide Geoscience Australia with the technical foundations to develop an enduring capability to understand Australia’s potential of all the by-product critical minerals from all major commodity deposit types. While also enhancing understanding of the by-product potential of mine waste resources, which could encourage the reprocessing of mine waste and tailings to extract valuable critical mineral by-products.