Co-product Tantalum: Digging Once for Two Minerals
The automobile industry is undergoing a significant shift from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles (EV). The EV supply chain is experiencing an industry wide huge increase in demand pushing all segments to grow rapidly particularly the lithium metals as current EV demand growth continues to outpace supply of lithium and other EV battery materials. This is also good news for the tantalum industry because when lithium is sourced through hard rock mining tantalum is commonly found as a co-product. As an example, the Wodgina mine in Western Australia (WA) has one of the world’s largest reserves of both lithium and tantalum. The accelerated lithium production plan for Wodgina also accelerates production of tantalum as a co-product of the lithium mining operation. This further increases and diversifies supply of tantalum, a critical raw material for many high growth electronic, automotive, additive manufacturing, aerospace, medical, and defense related applications.
Not only is the tantalum co-product supply from lithium mining good news for diversified supply to the tantalum industry but also good news for the environment. The tantalum co-product ore is recovered from a tailings or waste stream of the lithium mining through the use of tantalum recovery plants (TRP). Using TRP’s to recover the tantalum from the waste stream is essentially a “green” process, recovering the tantalum ore for use in the tantalum industry. Therefore, tantalum recovery as a co-product of lithium mining not only pulls a valuable and strategic metal from a waste stream but does so without requiring use, for the initial mining step, of additional resources like electricity, fuel, water, etc: Digging Once for Two minerals!
Global Advanced Metals (GAM), a world-leading producer of innovative and conflict-free tantalum products, has exclusive rights to the tantalum co-product at Wodgina and Greenbushes, two of the largest lithium mines in WA. GAM owns tantalum recovery plants (TRPs) at each of the lithium processing trains. Lithium and tantalum containing ore is mined, crushed, mixed with water, and sent through GAM’s TRPs to separate a low-grade tantalum concentrate before the material is further processed for lithium separation1.
The increase in tantalum supply from WA will raise the percentage of global supply from this region from the more recent single digit percentages, to between 30-40% of global primary tantalum concentrate supply over the next 2-3 years. Tantalum demand is going through a long-term high growth phase. Tantalum capacitors, for example, are critical components in 5G, Automotive Driver Assist Systems (and other automotive components), cloud computing, and many other high growth electronic applications. Tantalum sputtering targets provide a necessary material in almost all semiconductors. Tantalum is a key component in high temperature environments such as aircraft engines and long life/high reliability requirements such as medical implants2.
As lithium output expands to meet the demands of the clean energy revolution, so too will the output, stability and diversity of “green” tantalum supply to meet the increasing connectivity, medical, aerospace, additive manufacturing, and defense demands.
1 Lithium is the lightest metal (0.534g/cm3), and tantalum is one of the most dense (16.6g/cm3) proving that opposites attract.
2 There are tantalum capacitors in the Mars rover. Reliability is important up there as, like down here, it’s nearly impossible to get an electrician when you need one.