Platinum Group Metals Extraction from Asteroids vs Earth: An Overview of the Industrial Ecosystems, Technologies and Risks

Abstract

As consumption of the Earth’s finite resources continues to increase, significant stress is placed on the global economy, including the depletion of critical minerals and environmental pollution. One of the proposals to address this future scarcity is to exploit resources from near-Earth objects (NEOs), such as asteroids. The right NEOs could provide enormous quantities of resources, including platinum group metals (PMGs), for companies involved in this industry. However, the current technologies and equipment used to extract metals from the Earth are not suitable due to the difference in gravity on asteroids and new technologies must be developed to enable successful mineral extraction on NEOs. Several companies and startups have been creating prospecting technologies during the past years to make asteroid mining a reality. This paper provides a bibliographic overview of the major players operating in the global asteroid and Earth mining market. It compares terrestrial mining technologies and asteroid mining R&D projects, and discusses the Earth mining industry’s conservative vision for investing in R&D. Space mining is an embryonic industry. There is significant potential to extract critical minerals from NEOs, however the economic feasibility remains uncertain due to the low level of maturity in the required technologies. Despite significant advances in the past 20 years, it is clear that space mining remains a very high risk business activity.