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

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