Small-scale solutions to large-scale problems in the mining industry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada has identified 31 metals and minerals as vital to the country’s economic and national security, and to the transition to a low-carbon economy. In response, the government has implemented policies to support domestic production and refining capacity thereof. As the Ministry of Natural Resources aptly summarized in their 2022 Critical Minerals Strategy “from solar panels to semiconductors, wind turbines to advanced batteries for storage and transportation, the world needs critical minerals to build these products. Simply put, there is no energy transition without critical minerals”. A cursory investigation reveals an interesting finding; many of these domestic critical minerals are found in very small deposits, often under one million tonnes. This presents a challenge for the mining industry in British Columbia (and globally), which has been dominated by large-scale open pit operations, designed under the economies-of scale business model for the last half-century. While these large-scale operations have drastically increased the domestic production of certain metals (primarily copper and molybdenum), the nearly singular focus on these types of operations has led companies to become rigid and inflexible in the way they design mines, and drastically limited the types and sizes of deposits which could be developed as a result. As the vast majority of critical minerals in British Columbia are found in deposits several orders of magnitude smaller than those which are amenable to the economies of scale business models, an interesting quandary becomes evident; the existing mining industry business models prevalent in British Columbia are not well suited to respond to this challenge. This thesis first seeks to explore the technical, economic and legislative evolution of the mining industry in British Columbia in order to understand how the industry came to be dominated by these large-scale operations. Building from these insights, an innovative small-scale business model for the mining industry is outlined, designed to increase the domestic production of critical minerals, within the economic, regulatory and technical constraints of the industry today.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".