Byproduct-to-Host Ratios for Assessing the Accessibility of Mineral Resources

Mineral resources are essential for reaching net-zero
ambitions
by 2050. There is a rising diversity of metals in electricity generation
and storage technologies, as well as for mobility technologies. However,
little is known about the future supply of minor elements historically
mined in low volumes such as indium, tellurium, germanium, or tantalum.
Those minor elements are found in lower concentrations in the ores
of major elements and therefore rarely form economic deposits on their
own. Such elements are often produced as byproducts of a host (or
“target commodity”, which underpins the bulk of a mine’s
profitability) in ore, e.g., in porphyry ore, tellurium is a byproduct
where copper is the host. As a result, the primary supply of those
minor elements depends on the supply of the major elements. Such dependency
has not been accounted for in scenarios of the mineral supply. To
address this gap, we developed a methodology to harmonize scattered
data of mineral resource estimates and to calculate the mass ratio
between the byproduct and the host in ores and concentrates, called
the byproduct-to-host (BtH) ratio. We collected crude ore tonnage
and element grades, among other key data, from the state-of-the-art
literature and publicly available mining company reports. Our data
set covers 3422 deposits across 141 countries providing 22 275
BtH ratios. The future supply of minor elements can be derived by
multiplying the primary production of host elements by the developed
BtH ratios, noting the limitations of data representativity. The open-access
nature of this work facilitates the enrichment and update of this
data set in the coming years.

矿产资源对于实现2050年净零排放目标至关重要。当前，电力生产与储能技术以及移动出行技术所使用的金属种类日益丰富。然而，对于铟（indium）、碲（tellurium）、锗（germanium）、钽（tantalum）等历史上低产量开采的微量元素的未来供应情况，目前仍知之甚少。这类微量元素在主元素矿石中的赋存浓度较低，因此极少单独形成具有经济价值的矿床。此类元素通常作为矿石中主元素（或称"目标矿种"，其贡献了矿山绝大多数利润来源）的伴生产品被开采，例如在斑岩型矿石中，铜为主元素，碲则为伴生矿产。因此，这类微量元素的主要供应依赖于主元素的供应，但现有矿产供应情景研究均未考虑这一依赖关系。为填补这一研究空白，本研究开发了一套方法体系，用于整合零散的矿产资源估算数据，并计算矿石与精矿中伴生元素与主元素的质量比值，即伴生元素-主元素比值（byproduct-to-host, BtH）。本研究从前沿学术文献及公开的矿业公司报告中收集了原矿吨位、元素品位等核心数据。本数据集涵盖全球141个国家的3422处矿床，共计提供22275组BtH比值。通过将主元素的原生产量与本研究得到的BtH比值相乘，即可估算微量元素的未来供应情况，同时需注意数据代表性方面的局限性。本研究成果采用开放获取形式，便于未来该数据集的扩充与更新。