A huge supply of critical minerals is right under our feet

A study recently published in the journal Science has quantified for the first time the extent to which current mining operations in America are wasting other valuable minerals. And the amounts are astonishing.

The USA has extensive mining operations for iron, copper, gold, silver, and of course coal. The rock that contains these resources, though, is typically just ignored, wasted, abandoned as mountains of mine tailings. These tailings actually contain significant quantities of other minerals, some of which are almost as valuable as the main product, if not more so. Byproduct recovery could provide a reliable and cheap domestic source of many minerals, including so-called critical and rare earth minerals, that are currently imported from abroad.

For example, the study found that, across 54 active mines, there is enormous recovery potential of 70 critical minerals. In the case of lithium alone, one year of US mine waste could yield enough lithium to power 10 million electric vehicles. Now, EVs are not a major priority of the current administration, but Trump has flagged domestic critical mineral production as a general priority, and has even issued a controversial executive order that would allow critical mineral mining on currently protected federal lands.

At the moment, the US imports most of its lithium from Australia, Chile and China. The study shows that recovering just 4% of the available lithium from existing mining operations would more than offset current imports. It's a similar story with many other critical minerals like cobalt (mainly imported from the Democratic Republic of the Congo), nickel, manganese, germanium, etc.

In its usual chaotic way, the Trump administration has repealed and gutted large parts of Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, which would have prioritized critical mineral production and many of the clean tech industries that rely on them, while at the same time lamenting America's lack of extraction facilities for those same minerals. A solution is staring them right on the face. 

A similar situation almost certainly exists right here in Canada, which also has an extensive mining industry, and which also complains about having to import critical minerals from the likes of China and DRC. Byproduct recovery is the solution.