Critical minerals, or metals, are considered as such not because they are rare in nature, but because they are rare on the market. Due to a lack of processing and primary transformation facilities, any disruption in their supply chain can throw the high-tech industrial base into disarray. Since most strategic metals must be produced in small amounts with diverse, still stringent specifications, it means that process development is expensive and complex compared to the anticipated market. Best example is for rare earths, which are not rare. The market is dominated by China where they are byproducts of the Bayan Obo iron mine. Alternately, there are six rare-earth advance projects in Québec that are comparable in size with Bayan Obo. The issue is not to produce a rare-earth concentrate; it is the complex and noxious hydrometallurgy required to separate these metals.
Currently, the entire imports of U.S. for processed rare-earth is of about $190 millions per year, which would be equivalent to a small-scale mining operation. This hardly justifies the process development costs. Furthermore, these critical minerals and metals products needs to be customized for different clients and uses, each with their own sets of diversely stringent specifications. Think of graphite, which is associated with battery manufacturing, but still needed for dozens of other applications that have very different purities and flake-size specifications. Solely targeting the battery market may curtail the viability of a project.
Critical minerals from different deposits have their own characteristics in terms of purity, grain size, and morphology. They are not necessarily optimal for every application. These variations can only be partly mitigated by the beneficiation process, which needs to be finely tuned to meet the different clients’ requirements. Furthermore, most deposits are not uniform, meaning that a robust or flexible tout-venant process is needed, and that a different portion of the deposit may be better suited for different market requirements. Comprehensive mineral characterization is needed to design the metallurgical process, which itself requires extensive and systematic testing. These issues change the paradigm of exploration, since the suitability of the minerals requires them to be evaluated early in the exploration process, even prior to the definition drilling and resource estimation. This may seem of sequence for most geologists and promoters.
Another issue is that most of these projects are not large enough to support infrastructure construction. As per example, typical graphite or spodumene projects aims at about 100,000 tons per years for a selling price of less than $1,000 per tons, for a revenue of $100 million per year. So, they cannot justify the capex incurred by construction of long access roads, natural gas pipeline, or power lines. These commodities being bulky and low value, long-distance trucking of the concentrate takes a severe toll on revenues, limiting the distance to nearest rail head, port, or manufacturing hubs to a few hundreds of kilometres. Remote projects are unlikely to be viable. Inversely, proximity to infrastructure often implies proximity to communities, and more complex social acceptability. Environmental and social impact study requirements for small projects are often just as complex and costly as those for much larger initiatives, adding significant constraints to development budgets.
Not all critical mineral projects are viable, and their development requires a true holistic approach. Evaluating the operation logistics is needed at the onset of the exploration program and property acquisition. Once a deposit is found or acquired, geometallurgical characterization and extensive bench-scale metallurgical testing is needed as soon as drill core is available. Drill programs need to be conceived with the premises that abundant large-diameter core will be needed for extensive testing. Since most revenues will be generated from first transformation, a vertically integrated operation, or an alliance with a strategic partner is needed. Expect numerous runners, but a handful of winners in this race, even if these winners are desperately needed by the high-tech manufacturing industry.
