Welcome back Intelligent Miners. I hope you had a great summer/winter and are ready to dive into some fresh content!
September 2025 on The Intelligent Miner is all about exploration and development – not just in the traditional, ‘let’s find new mineral deposits and build a mine’ sense – I think that, in this day and age, that rather misses the point – but in the broader ‘how can we redefine resources to meet future demands in a more timely and responsible way?’
Allow me to elaborate… While identifying new mineral resources and expanding current mining operations will remain core to miner’s growth plans and skill sets, demand for certain metals is accelerating to the point where supply deficits are looming (I’m looking at you copper). Refined production of critical metals like nickel, cobalt, graphite, and rare earths is also becoming more geographically concentrated. Accessing funding and permits to bring new mining projects online is increasingly complicated, and timelines from discovery to production can stretch, in some cases, to 20+ years.
So, what’s a mining company to do? First, we need to expand our definition of a ‘resource’. Hundreds of years of mining activity across the globe mean that mineral and metal deposits are no longer exclusively located in the ground. Tailings – or mineral residues – leftover from processing operations often contain large quantities of metals that were previously unknown or too difficult to recover.
Ditto for waste dumps. There are millions of tonnes of ‘waste’ rock piled up at both active and legacy sites. Some could contain valuable metals that are now economically and technically feasible to recover. For example, Central Asia Metals’ copper recovery plant at Kounrad in central Kazakhstan processes material leftover from years of open-pit mining. The operation consistently ranks in the lowest quartile of the global copper cash cost curve.
Second, the linear take-make-waste model upon which consumerism is based means that there are also stocks of important metals sitting in, or on their way to landfill: over 100 million electric vehicle batteries are expected to be retired by 2030. Bringing these back into supply through recycling will go a long way to reducing pressure on primary metals production.
I’m not suggesting that mining companies replace primary extraction with other activities – far from it – but by diversifying portfolios, there’s a chance to make organisations more relevant and resilient. Also, by reconsidering resources and maximising the net present value of assets, companies will not only be better positioned to meet future metal and mineral demands, but could unlock revenue to support more traditional mining projects.
And while we’re on the topic of value, it makes good business sense to recover as much from a resource as possible in the first pass, rather than processing and reprocessing material. This is where circular business models come into play, and industrial symbiosis – where one company’s residues become another’s feedstocks – holds massive potential in certain geographies and commodities.
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Carly