The world's by-product and critical metal resources part II: A method for quantifying the resources of rarely reported metals

Abstract

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. 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. Here, we present a method for quantifying poorly reported mineral resources of by-product metals that builds upon deposit-by-deposit approaches to global resource estimation, arguably the best-practice approach for well-reported commodities, but also adds the use of proxies for by-product ..