Top 5 Mineral Discoveries of the Last 5 Years
The world’s industries and commodities market are driven by supply and demand. As population and economies grow, the more the demand. Luckily, supply is also growing thanks to new discoveries of mineral deposits.
A few remarkable announcements have been made regarding key metals like gold, iron, and lithium in the past 5 years.
Will these discoveries upend their respective markets, and cause a decline in commodity price? Or prove to be an interesting investment?
1. Uganda’s Gold Discovery – Estimated Value: $34 Trillion
In 2022, the poor, landlocked African country of Uganda made waves by announcing it had discovered a 31 million ton gold deposit, which could yield a total of 320,158 tons of refined gold if exploited.
As gold prices have exploded in the past few months, this would be worth $34T, excluding exploitation costs.
Among the recent mega mineral deposits of the past years, this is however the one with the most suspicious claims.
Firstly, 3 years later, little news came out of any plan to start exploitation of that resource.
Secondly, the number seems a little astonishing, as only 187,000 metric tons have been mined in all of human history, with an estimated underground reserves of 57,000 metric tons. So this would mean that Uganda has in its underground more gold than the rest of the planet combined.
Thirdly, Uganda is looking at rather high taxes on the potential resource, likely discouraging any international company from taking the risk to look even further.
“Under the new bill, the government will hold 15% free equity in all large and medium mining ventures, as well as have the right to buy up to 20% of extra shares in the mining ventures at the commercial rate.”
Source: Mining Technology
Most likely, the gold deposit in question is at a very low concentration, making its exploitation too difficult to be economically viable. Other technical difficulties like a too-deep deposit, unstable ground, or other geological issues might also make exploitation challenging.
Or the deposit is simply grossly over-evaluated, something that occurs from time to time, especially in African countries eager to inflate the profile of their resource riches.
Still, Wagadai Mining, a Chinese company, is looking to start some gold production in the region and will employ 3,000 people. So we will see if the deposit is remotely as large as the Ugandan government claims.
2. Western Australia’s Iron Ore Deposit – Estimated Value: $5.7 Trillion
Australia is one of the world’s centers for iron production, with the red dirt of the Pilbara region one of the world’s largest iron deposits. This high concentration of iron ore has been the core asset and the basis of the fortune of some of the world’s largest mining companies, like Rio Tinto (RIO -1.27%).
The abundance of iron in Western Australia appears to be even larger than previously thought, with the discovery of a 55 billion tons ore deposit in the Hamersley region.
Source: Geoscience Australia
This would make the Hamersley region deposit by far the largest in the world, bigger than the previous largest iron deposits, the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly in Russia, and the nearby Australian Pilbara.
Source: IDR
Due to iron’s relatively lower price, this massive deposit would be worth “only” $5.7T at current iron prices.
This deposit is likely to be highly profitable, as it contains as much as 60% iron, making refining relatively easy.
However, profitable exploitation will require a massive infrastructure build-up, with new rail and port facilities, and environmental risk studies will be needed as well. It will also need to be evaluated versus the risk of crashing the global iron market, with a slow ramp-up of production much more likely.
In this region, some of the active iron mining companies that can be mentioned are Hamersley Iron Pty Limited, a subsidiary of Rio Tinto, the Hamersley Iron Ore Project by Equinox Resources (EQN.AX +2.6%) and Fortescue (FMG.AX -0.19%).
3. McDermitt Caldera Lithium Deposit (USA) – $1.5 Trillion
Currently, most of the world’s lithium comes either from the “lithium triangle” (Bolivia, Argentina, Chile) or from deposits in Australia, with some smaller sources spread all over the world.
This could change with the discovery of a large lithium deposit in the McDermitt Caldera, a 16-million-year-old supervolcano located along the Nevada-Oregon border.
As the US looks to re-industrialization, and also free itself from dependence on China for green energy technologies, this discovery comes at the right time. Especially as this is a larger deposit than the lithium found in the Bolivian salt flat.
Source: Chemistry World
This newfound lithium source is thanks to an unusual clay, composed of the mineral illite, containing 1.3% to 2.4% of lithium in the volcanic crater. This is almost double the lithium present in the main lithium-bearing clay mineral, the more common magnesium smectite.
As a cherry on the cake, the clay is rather easy to access.
‘They seem to have hit the sweet spot where the clays are preserved close to the surface, so they won’t have to extract as much rock, yet it hasn’t been weathered away yet.’
Thomas Benson -Geologist at Lithium Americas Corporation
It is not to say that nothing could derail plans to exploit this American lithium deposit. Indigenous communities are not looking forward to the building of a massive mine in a fragile ecology.
Already, a proposed lithium mine on the Nevada side of the McDermitt Caldera at Thacker Pass has attracted multiple lawsuits, including from the nearby Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone and Burns Paiute tribes.
Extracting the lithium from the clay will also require a tremendous volume of acid, which could leach into the local water resources. And the extraction itself could stretch even thinner already rare water supplies.
Ultimately, great power competition and the growing importance of lithium for EVs, green electric grids, and reindustrialization overall might overcome any local concern in favor of national interest. If this is the case, Lithium Americas Corp. (LAC +0.54%) could be one of the companies to benefit.
4. China’s Wangu Gold Field – $106 Billion
If there is one country looking at gold as a potential currency and alternative to the US dollar, it is certainly China. Already today, China is the world’s largest gold miner, but almost all of this production stays in the country.
Source: Voronoi
A new discovery in the Pingjiang County of the Hunan Province, the Wangu Gold Field, is estimated to contain as much as 1,000 tons of gold once extracted and refined. This would represent as much as $106B at today’s gold prices.
Source: Daily Mail
This discovery would alone be more than the gold resource discovery made annually in China since 2013.
However, it might prove a difficult-to-develop project, with more than 40 gold veins located at depths exceeding 2,000 meters, with some extending beyond 3,000 meters underground.
For this reason, some analysts are doubting the viability of some of the resources, which might be too hard to reach.
“The 1,000-tonne potential resource sounds aspirational. The 300-tonne figure appears more reasonable—perhaps an inferred or indicated resource. Much more drilling would be needed to turn this into a reserve,”
John Reade – World Gold Council senior market strategist
Still, even a smaller deposit in practice would solidify China’s spot as the #1 gold producer in the world and help it diversify its international assets from foreign currencies like the US dollar.
5. Smackover Formation Lithium Brine (Arkansas, USA) – Estimated Value: Not Specified
Nevada is not the only US state with newly discovered lithium resources. Arkansas, with the Smackover Formation in the southern part of the state, could also be rich in battery metals.
We covered this discovery in detail when it was announced at the end of 2024, in “Does Arkansas Hold the Answer to Our Lithium Needs?”.
Source: Science Advances
The exact resources available are not yet completely clear, but the deposit is massive according to AI-powered calculations.
“We calculated that there are 5.1 to 19 million tons of lithium in Smackover Formation brines in southern Arkansas, which represents 35 to 136% of the current US lithium resource estimate.”
US Geological Survey
Interestingly, this lithium resource is available in underground brines, water containing dissolved minerals.
As the region is already being drilled for oil, and close to many oil & gas service providers and infrastructure, “drilling for lithium” could likely be done very efficiently in that region. Something that Exxon (XOM -1.08%) is already planning to do.
Overall Impact Of Discoveries
Gold
When it comes to gold, except if the Uganda discovery turns out to be as large as claimed, the recent discoveries of new mineral resources should not significantly affect gold prices. This is because gold is a very durable metal, and most of the almost 200,000 tons mined in mankind’s history are still used and available today.
So even massive discoveries like the 300-1,000 tons of the Wangu Gold Field do not really change the supply situation, and gold stays very rare. Maybe not as much a fixed available quantity as Bitcoin, but still quite close.
Iron
For iron, the question is more one of discipline among the largest companies in the industry to not crash the market. Ultimately, even the available resources already known in Russia and Western Australia could be mined quicker to produce more annually, as many have decades if not centuries worth of mineral reserves.
In practice, the company or companies developing the Hamersley region deposit will have little incentive to rush and overproduce, preferring to collect reasonable margins for the 10-20 years it will take to develop the proper infrastructure to move millions of tons of iron ore per year.
Lithium
The lithium production industry has been in a crisis triggered by low prices for several years now, after a massive spike in 2022 led the industry into overcapacity as soon as new projects came online.
Source: Trading Economics
This situation should normally correct itself thanks to the low price freezing new investments. However, as lithium becomes increasingly a strategic mineral, and not just an economic commodity, we might see new projects being approved anyway, especially in the USA under the Trump administration.
So the new discoveries in Arkansas and Nevada could cause a durable overproduction, with the US producing its own domestic lithium and hurting the prospect of export to the US by Chinese, Australian, or South American producers, forcing them to redirect their production to other markets.
Ultimately, if the production of lithium in the USA (or Europe) comes with sufficient lithium capabilities, it could help reduce the stranglehold of China over EV and battery technologies. This will nevertheless take years, likely at least a decade, as it will take time to build new mines, new refineries, and a parallel entire EV and battery supply chain.
In the meantime, the demand for batteries and EVs versus lithium supply might be the strongest factor in determining international lithium prices.
Conclusion: What These Mineral Discoveries Mean for Global Markets
New discoveries of minerals make for spectacular headlines and dreams of poor countries quickly becoming fabulously rich. In practice, even massive success stories, like the discovery of a lot of oil offshore Guyana’s coasts, might take several decades to turn into durable economic growth.
This is because of the difference between finding proof of minerals in the ground, and the practical extraction of metal, often locked thousands of meters under the ground, or requiring massive chemical and water resources to be purified.
Often, solving these issues will require hard work and massive infrastructure build-up, while also limiting the true profitability of mineral extraction.
Nevertheless, these discoveries also prove that for most natural resources with large deposits on Earth, like iron, lithium, and even gold, we are likely still a long way from running out of new supply.