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Prosperi-Porta, Caesar Nicola

University of British Columbia

Canada has identified 31 metals and minerals as vital to the country’s economic and national security, and to the transition to a low-carbon economy. In response, the government has implemented policies to support domestic production and refining capacity thereof. As the Ministry of Natural Resources aptly summarized in their 2022 Critical Minerals Strategy “from solar panels to semiconductors, wind turbines to advanced batteries for storage and transportation, the world needs critical minerals to build these products. Simply put, there is no energy transition without critical minerals”. A cursory investigation reveals an interesting finding; many of these domestic critical minerals are found in very small deposits, often under one million tonnes. This presents a challenge for the mining industry in British Columbia (and globally), which has been dominated by large-scale open pit operations, designed under the economies-of scale business model for the last half-century. While these large-scale operations have drastically increased the domestic production of certain metals (primarily copper and molybdenum), the nearly singular focus on these types of operations has led companies to become rigid and inflexible in the way they design mines, and drastically limited the types and sizes of deposits which could be developed as a result. As the vast majority of critical minerals in British Columbia are found in deposits several orders of magnitude smaller than those which are amenable to the economies of scale business models, an interesting quandary becomes evident; the existing mining industry business models prevalent in British Columbia are not well suited to respond to this challenge. This thesis first seeks to explore the technical, economic and legislative evolution of the mining industry in British Columbia in order to understand how the industry came to be dominated by these large-scale operations. Building from these insights, an innovative small-scale business model for the mining industry is outlined, designed to increase the domestic production of critical minerals, within the economic, regulatory and technical constraints of the industry today.

Text

2024-10-10

Attribution 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89376

Mining Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/