Old mine, new tricks! It sounds like an easy way to make money, and perhaps it will be for a mining company which has taken a fresh look at 90-years of waste rock to discover a big resource of one of the world’s hot “new” minerals, lithium.
Rio Tinto, a London-based mining giant with its best assets in Australia, owns the Borox mine on the western edge of the Mojave desert in California which produces boron, an industrial element with widespread uses that range from detergent to insecticides.
Boron And Lithium
The Rio Tinto Borax mine in California. Photo by David McNew/Getty Images.
But what the mine also contains is a world-class deposit of lithium, a key mineral in the batteries powering the world’s growing fleet of electric cars.
Until earlier this year the lithium in the Borax mine was treated as waste and sent to dumps on the outskirts of the project.
As a number of other companies have done over the past few years a project was launched to examine exactly what was in the dumps because demand of minerals change over time and what was once of little value, or overlooked, can suddenly become very valuable.
That is exactly what appears to have happened at Rio Tinto’s Borax mine where the company’s technical team, which started out looking for gold in the waste, found what could turn out to be the biggest deposit of lithium in the U.S. – sitting on the surface, no mining required.
Testing is continuing on the waste with the plan being to find a way to turn the lithium in the waste into a material called lithium carbonate which is one of the raw materials (along with lithium hydroxide) preferred by battery makers.
A satellite view of the Rio Tinto Borax mine. The mine is the largest borax mine in the world. Photo ... [+]
According to first reports from Rio Tinto a small-scale trial has proved successful with the next step being to move from a pilot plant to a full-scale test costing close to $50 million and producing around 5000 tons a year of lithium carbonate.
Revisiting old waste dumps, taking a fresh look at a mineral resource for something missed when a mine was opened is becoming more common in mining as demand for minerals changes and technology improves.
Old Mines Reveal Their Secrets
BHP, the world’s biggest mining company, is another example of rediscovering value in an old asset, a nickel processing division which was for sale until last year when demand for high-grade nickel used in batteries accelerated sharply.
From being an unwanted legacy business that management want to boot out the door Nickel West is now the recipient of fresh capital to expand production of battery-grade nickel chemicals.
Alcoa’s Gold
Alcoa another example of a company which made an unexpected discovery while mining bauxite (the ore or aluminum) in Western Australia.
Though the bauxite mines had been operating for decades a nearby gold discovery convinced Alcoa management to assay some of its bauxite for gold – and there it was, leading to the developed of the Hedges goldmine.
Rio Tinto’s lithium discovery in California fits with the company’s attempts to enter the battery-metals business either through acquisition or discovery.
In Australia, the big miner is reported to have been planning a bid for Kidman Resources which made a major discovery, but fell to a takeover bid by another company interested in battery metals, the diversified Australian industrial company, Wesfarmers.
Rio Tinto has also made a major lithium (and boron) discovery in the East European country of Serbia.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timtreadgold/2019/10/22/old-mines-new-tricks-hidden-value-in-a-pile-of-californian-waste-rock/
2019-10-22 07:34:14Z
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