Colloquium - Simon Jowitt

Humanity mines more metals and minerals than at any other point in our history, and mining is vital to modern life, maintaining expected standards of living, providing the raw materials required by a range of industries, and much more. However, despite these record rates of production the overall demand trends for mined metals and minerals continue to generally increase even coincident with increasing amounts of recycling of some metals. This increasing demand is being further impacted by the energy transition to low- and zero-CO2 energy generation, energy storage, and transport, which is already accelerating demand for a variety of different metals and minerals. These metal and mineral demands are being driven by moves toward effective climate change mitigation as well as consumer demands and investment. All of this indicates that the next few decades will require more mining than already current record levels of production, especially of a range of metals and minerals that are considered critical by governments, governmental departments and individual organizations. The fact that a range of critical metals and minerals are produced as byproducts of other metals also inherently reduces their security of supply and makes increasing production of these byproduct critical commodities difficult. In addition, the low recycling rates of a significant number of critical metals also means that achieving circular economies at a point in time when sufficient amounts of these metals are present in the economy as in-use stocks and thus are available for recycling remains problematic. This presentation will provide an overview of the importance of mining to modern society, outline the metal and mineral supply challenges presented by climate change mitigation, and discuss how we can balance the need for climate change mitigation and the demand for technologies such as electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines and upgraded electrical grid systems with the challenges associated with supplying the metals and minerals that these needs require. Additional discussion will focus on the likely impact of the energy transition on metal demand and mining, the increasing impact of environmental, social and governance/governmental (ESG) factors on mining, and the challenges and opportunities for geoscientists and the minerals industry globally and domestically.

 

Simon M. Jowitt is the Director of the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology, Nevada State Geologist, and the Arthur Brant Chair of Exploration Geology at the University of Nevada Reno. He has degrees from the University of Edinburgh, the Camborne School of Mines, and the University of Leicester and spent eight years at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia before moving to spend seven years as an Assistant and then tenured Associate Professor of Economic Geology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He joined the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology at the University of Nevada Reno in 2023. His research focuses on the use of geochemistry to unravel geological processes in a variety of settings with direct application to understanding not only mineralizing systems but also igneous petrology, mineral exploration, global tectonics and the links between magmatism and metallogeny. He has also undertaken extensive research on mineral economics, global metal resources and the security of supply of the critical elements, and the “economic” side of economic geology, as demonstrated by a number of recent publications on global base, precious, and critical metal and mineral resources and the impact of the energy transition on the global minerals industry. He has published more than 125 scientific papers, peer-reviewed book chapters and geological survey reports since 2010 and was awarded the SEG’s Waldemar Lindgren Award in 2014.