Mass-Balance-Consistent Geological Stock Accounting: A New Approach toward Sustainable Management of Mineral Resources.

Global resource extraction raises concerns about environmental pressures and the security of mineral supply. Strategies to address these concerns depend on robust information on natural resource endowments, and on suitable methods to monitor and model their changes over time. However, current mineral resources and reserves reporting and accounting workflows are poorly suited for addressing mineral depletion or answering questions about the long-term sustainable supply.

Understanding the spatial variation in lithium concentration of high Andean Salars using diagnostic factors.

Salars (basins of internal drainage) in the "Lithium Triangle" countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile) hold >50 % of the global lithium resources within lithium-rich brines. Given the imperative for lithium production to enable the energy transition and that salars by their very nature are highly variable, so a framework to both characterise their differences as well as identifying their similarities would be beneficial to understanding their provenance and potential for exploitation. In this study, data for 29 salars based on environmental factors: rainfall, evaporation as well as their physical characteristic: pan size and basin size have been used to characterise them along with those describing their setting land-use/cover and geological outcrop.

Platinum Demand and Potential Bottlenecks in the Global Green Transition: A Dynamic Material Flow Analysis.

Platinum, as a key catalytic material, is important for the global green transition due both to its current main use in autocatalysts and its increasing use in emerging and renewable energy technologies such as fuel cells and electrolyzers. In this study, we developed a dynamic material flow analysis model to characterize the global platinum cycle between 1975 and 2016 and to develop scenarios for future global platinum demand to 2050. Our results show that the autocatalyst and jewelry uses represent the most primary platinum use and possess the highest platinum stocks in use by 2016; however, when closed loop recycling is considered, the gross platinum demand from the glass industry would be the largest.