Meeting the needs of the energy transition is a once-in-a-generation challenge like no other before. To meet the projected metal demand to support this, the global community will produce increased volumes of mine waste requiring best practice management. Mine waste is suspected to be a host of critical metals and minerals. If identified as significant resources of critical metals, remining waste can support global effort to adopt circular economy principles.
Whilst a straightforward proposition, practical investigations show this is anything but. Mine waste materials are complex and heterogenous, potentially originating from multiple ore sources, processed by different methods, and subjected to weathering under changing climatic conditions.
In a keynote lecture at Process Mineralogy '24, Anita Parbhakar-Fox will show how a sampling campaign has been undertaken in Australia to identify critical metal resources in waste. Results demonstrate that mineralogical characterisation is the key to identifying valorisation options for not only recovering critical metals/minerals, but to also reduce associated environmental legacy issues and mining footprints.
Anita Parbhakar-Fox is a Principal Research Fellow in Applied Geochemistry and the founding leader of the Mine Waste Transformation through Characterisation group at the University of Queensland, Australia. Anita's group focuses on mine waste characterisation to improve mine planning and waste management practices. She has developed new tests and protocols for improving waste characterisation and is also involved in identifying remediation options for abandoned/ historical mine sites. Currently, Anita is leading government and industry funded projects characterising a range of mine waste materials across Australia to evaluate their economic potential with a focus on critical metal recovery.
Anita will also be involved with Critical Minerals '24 which follows Process Mineralogy '24, presenting a paper on the reprocessing of a Tasmanian mine dam containing 38 Mt of pyritic tailings to recover critical minerals. She is also co-author of another paper at Critical Minerals '24, to be presented by her husband Nathan Fox, which will explore rare earth element opportunities in Australia’s mine waste and unconventional sources.
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I’m so honoured to be giving this keynote in November at the esteemed Process Mineralogy conference in Cape Town!
ReplyDeleteIt’s been a while since I’ve been in South Africa so I hope to catch up with local mine waste researchers during this trip- please reach out if you have availability to meet this November.
‘Process Mineralogy’ and its companion the inaugural ‘Critical Minerals’ conference will bring together so many global experts working on the technical aspects of mineral processing and metal extraction upon which the Mining Industry is reliant. I love coming to these conferences and learning from the amazing delegates that attend.
Hope to see you there too!
Anita Parbhakar-Fox (via LinkedIn)