Evaluation of Technological Changes’ Impact on Scarcity of Minerals by a Value Chain Approach: Introducing a Conceptual Model

Abstract

Adopting a policy and deciding on long-term investment in the mining industry by a government or<br />private sector actors depends strongly on the ability to predict the scarcity of mineral reserves. Change<br />in scarcity of mineral reserves is a function of several technological and non-technological factors.<br />Among them, change in technology is the most significant factor affecting scarcity. This paper aims to<br />investigate the relationship between mineral scarcity changes and technological changes. In this study,<br />the effective factors on mineral scarcity were initially considered, and the main and most commonly<br />proposed approaches in the field of scarcity were briefly analysed. The problems associated with these<br />approaches in explaining the relationship between scarcity and changes in technology are then<br />discussed. These approaches are mainly limited to the past available data, whose direction is the<br />development “from scarcity to technological changes"; therefore, they are inefficient in predicting<br />scarcity due to technological changes. To overcome such limitations, a chain technology method was<br />introduced with an approach moving “from technological changes to scarcity". In this approach,<br />scarcity is firstly explained based on the objective technological changes, and secondly it is related to<br />some technologies affecting scarcity, such as mineral exploration, exploitation, mineral processing,<br />metal production, consumer goods and recycling of scrap metals. The results obtained from this paper<br />can be effectively used to make decisions regarding investment in the mineral industry.