Clareo’s Satish Rao, Wiles Kase and Abhishekh Parmar are contributors to Global Mining Review’s March 2026 edition, with a special report on Unearthing the Americas. Clareo’s experts pinpointed three critical trends that are reshaping the mining industry from Canada to Chile.
Securing critical minerals from byproducts
Our analysis of emerging technologies for recycling tailings and byproducts shows how innovative enterprises are unlocking value from previously discarded materials. Investment can produce outstanding gains: a recent Colorado School of Mines study found that recovering less than 10% of cobalt already mined but lost to waste streams would supply the entire US battery market, and reclaiming under 1% of germanium from existing zinc and molybdenum operations would eliminate import requirements.
Copper leaching and geothermal energy
US brownfield copper operations face ore grades as low as 0.2-0.3%, and conventional processing is uneconomical at these grades. Significant copper volumes, even exceeding those low ore concentrations, are held in stockpiles, but until now, they’ve proved uneconomical to re-process. Addressing the looming copper supply crisis, the report explores copper leaching advances like Rio Tinto’s Nuton bio-heap leaching technology, which targets 25 million pounds annually. In another innovation, Freeport-McMoRan are using geothermal energy integration to accelerate leach kinetics, with studies showing copper output increases by 1.2% per degree Celsius.
Allied partnerships and collaborations
The report also examines how geopolitics, including alliances and collaborations, are reshaping global supply security. To name a few, the EU secured preferential access to Chilean lithium in 2023, Canada struck a Critical Minerals Agreement with the EU in 2024, and Australia expanded its partnership with India.
These trends signal a future in which competitive advantage will be defined not only by geology, but by the ability to innovate, partner, and adapt. For miners and policymakers, this requires urgency and imagination.
View the full report in the March edition of the Global Mining Review.
