Las Vegas City Wire

Energy products will need a multitude of precious metals in order to be manufactured in the future.

Metals such as tellurium are being utilized more in the production of solar panels, a recent news release from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) said. 

As solar panels become more in vogue in homes and businesses, the demand for tellurium—which is a byproduct of copper extraction—will increase.

“The fundamental question is: how much tellurium is out there?” Simon Jowitt, economic geologist at UNLV, said in the release.

Jowitt, along with fellow school geoscientist Brian McNulty, presented their findings to that question during the Geological Society of America yearly meeting on Oct. 12 in Denver.

In order to provide an estimate of how much tellurium there is worldwide, Jowitt and McNulty established substitutes to provide an estimate on crucial minerals. The first proxy was data from mining companies, where they calculated how much metal a mine held that provided details on the value of its contents.

“What we do is take that information—which tells us how big the deposit is, how many million tons of ore or mineralization—and we combine that with information that’s published elsewhere on the concentration of tellurium and the deposit,” Jowitt said.

The research examined 18 gold mines in the U.S. and Canada and sifted through 518 mineral deposits to conclude that 90 tons of tellurium per year could be produced from current mining, with another 170 tons of tellurium per year coming from six copper, zinc and nickel mines in Canada.