Hot, salty fluids that once flowed through rocks in British Columbia carried tellurium, bismuth, antimony, and platinum group metals—critical ingredients for solar panels, electronics, and catalytic converters—alongside more abundant copper and gold. These critical metals are essential for green technologies like wind turbines and electric vehicles, but their market value is too low to justify mining them alone. They can only be recovered economically as by-products during copper and gold processing. The problem is that no one knows exactly where within a deposit these metals sit—what minerals hold them, how they are distributed, or what geological forces concentrated them there. Without that knowledge, mining companies cannot design processing methods to extract them efficiently. This project tests three linked hypotheses about how post-subduction geology—magma-driven fluids, bismuth-tellurium melts, and the rate at which deposits are uplifted and eroded—controls critical metal enrichment. If successful, it will give mining companies practical indicators for where to find these metals and how to recover them. The work will also produce a predictive model applicable to similar deposits worldwide, helping secure future supplies of materials that quietly underpin the global shift to net-zero energy.
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Critical metals such as tellurium (Te), bismuth (Bi), antimony (Sb), and platinum group metals (PGMs) are essential for the green technologies that will underpin the global transition to net zero. However, despite forecast increased demand, the current market value of many critical metals is too low to make their extraction economically viable as the sole product of a mine. Fortunately, Te, Bi, Sb and PGMs are often associated with more abundant metals such as copper (Cu) and gold (Au), and therefore have the potential to be extracted as by-products during processing of the ore. Efficient recovery of these critical metals as by-products can secure future supplies, while at the same time minimising environmental impact through enhanced extraction efficiency. However, we currently have a poor understanding of where within deposits these critical metal by-products are hosted – mineralogically, spatially, and physically – and what controls this distribution and their concentrations, impeding the design of processing techniques to recover these vital resources. The properties of critical metals which determine how they will behave during mineral processing are controlled by the geological processes that concentrate, transport, and deposit these metals in mineral deposits. However, for many deposit types these processes are still unknown. We will investigate the processes controlling critical metal distribution in the Cu and Au deposits of Newmont Lake in British Columbia, Canada, in collaboration with researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC) and Enduro Metals Corporation, the company which owns the deposits. Newmont Lake deposits contain potential Te, Bi and PGM by-products. Metals in the Newmont Lake deposits were carried by hot, salty water which exsolved from magma. Unlike most deposits of this type which form above subduction zones, where oceanic and continental plates collide, the deposits in British Columbia formed after subduction ceased and these ‘post-subduction’ deposits are often critical metal enriched. We will use a variety of analytical techniques to test three hypotheses for the controls on critical metal enrichment and distribution in the Newmont Lake Cu and Au deposits: Fluids generated by magmas in post-subduction systems are particularly favourable for critical metal transport. Bi-Te melts are important mechanisms for critical metal transport and concentration in post-subduction systems. Exhumation history – how fast an ore deposit is uplifted and eroded – has an important effect on critical metal transport and concentration. These hypotheses are interlinked - the three mechanisms will singularly or collectively control critical metal distribution in these deposits, and hence the suite of recoverable critical metals, the recovery methods, the environmental features of associated wastes, and the economic feasibility of critical metal production. This project will provide mining companies with indicators for different styles of critical metal mineralisation in post-subduction deposits, increase our understanding of post-subduction metal enrichment processes, and provide a framework for Enduro Metals to plan for effective critical metal extraction at Newmont Lake. We will combine our research with that of our UBC collaborators’ Alliance Missions grant to create a model for critical metal enrichment that can be applied to post-subduction deposits worldwide, making exploration more efficient and allowing early planning of processing techniques to extract critical metal by-products, which will help secure supplies. We will also exchange knowledge and skills to establish a long-lasting collaboration between UBC, UCL, and University of Leicester, while training the next generation of critical metals researchers.
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