Production and Refining

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Production and Refining

The Production Stream

There are three key components to any mining operation:

  1. the mine
  2. milling and metallurgy
  3. waste management

These three components form a production stream, where if any one of these were to stop functioning, a mine would need to cease operations.

Refining of Metals

The production of many critical metals is dependent on the production of carrier (base) metals (see Figure below). The picture below summarises the chemical and physical linkages between metals and the set of metallurgical processes that has been developed to accommodate these linkages. Base metals which are potential sources of CRMs can be seen as part of a systems-integrated metal production approach.

Metallurgical concentrates produced from mining operations need a final refining stage to produce pure metals. Elements, such as In, Ga, Ge, Te, Se and Cd among others can be electrolytically recovered at this stage to ensure the final metal produced is 99.99% pure (See Appendix A for more detail).

Many critical raw materials (green) are recovered as a by-product of primary base metal (grey) production.