Voices of Resourcing Tomorrow 2025
- 16 December 2025
Resourcing Tomorrow again brought leaders of many of the world’s top mining and service companies, governments and independent thought leaders to London for a three-day event that put critical industry themes under an international spotlight.
More than 2300 attendees from over 90 countries heard nearly 400 speakers deliver keynotes and participate in thought provoking panels and roundtables.
Mining Beacon editor Richard Roberts caught more than 40 individual presentations and discussions to record the diverse and powerful messaging from this year’s event.
Here, below, are the voices of Resourcing Tomorrow 2025.
Demanding times
“We estimate that by 2035 our annual demand for rare earth elements is going to be at least three times as high as it is now, and that's just for UK-based manufacturing.” – UK Department for Business chief scientific adviser, Julia Sutcliffe
“WoodMac’s incentive price today is about US$4.25 a pound for new projects. We're sitting at $1 a pound above that and you’re not seeing a whole wave of copper supply coming on. Either companies aren’t believing in the spot price or there's just not enough organic projects in the pipeline to actually be developed.” – Hudbay Minerals vice president – corporate development, Mark Gupta
“Interestingly when you look at the world’s top 20 undeveloped copper projects the biggest single problem isn't actually the copper price. It's the social license. It's not having the license and the community support.” – Centreview Partners partner, James Hartop
“If the 19th century ran on coal and iron, the 21st century will run on copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt and rare earth elements – the critical minerals needed for clean energy technologies and advanced digital devices. We will need far more of these materials than we produce today ... yet our industry’s current trajectory doesn’t give confidence we’ll meet that demand. Not with business as usual. Unless we dramatically change how we mine and finance mining, we risk falling short.” – Worley vice president, resources, Darryn Quayle
“Iron and steel are re-emerging not just as building blocks of modern economies but as strategic enablers of the energy transition, industrial resilience and national security, as well as a support base for disruption and innovation.” – Ivanhoe Atlantic vice president innovation and commercial development, Melinda Moore
“Global demand for critical minerals is growing faster than our ability to discover, permit and develop new mines. At the same time geopolitical uncertainty, trade tensions and shifting defence and technology needs are placing enormous pressure on supply chains. This combination makes one thing very clear – circularity is becoming essential. It's not an option anymore.” – CTA Environmental Consultants president Canadian operations, Ana Gabriela Juarez
Changing mining mindsets
“There’s a real opportunity right now to reimagine what the exploration business looks like and essentially align expectations with what good exploration requires. I think at the earlier stages being a private company makes more sense. Having your shares publicly listed at those really early stages introduces capital that may not be aligned with longer term goals. You need to remain nimble and agile.” – former Kingsrose Mining managing director, Fabian Baker
“Historically there was always a view that public funding is not the right tool because it sometimes bypasses proper analysis of a project’s viability. Now it is different in the context of onshoring some assets closer to the customer base and not relying too much on far away processing capabilities. We do see, particularly in Washington [and] in Brussels, money flowing in to co-invest with industrial parties to develop assets closer to the buyers.” – Traxys head of business development – debt & equity solutions, William De Landtsheer
“We are coming from global thinking to more regional thinking now. We see lots of projects developing regionally that are addressing domestic or regional markets and you have to play a role in that as well because it changes the dynamics of the trading.” – De Landtsheer again
“If we want a different outcome with people and leaders who are going to take these organisations into a place in an age of AI, geopolitical tensions and fragmentation, we have to look for different answers.” – Vale Base Metals CEO, Shaun Usmar
“The circular economy community looks at the mining community more as ... the beginning of the linear economy. But I think this mindset has to change, and this is the opportunity for the industry, because actually being at the beginning creates a lot of knowledge about the raw material [and] creates a lot of decision power about what happens with the raw material later on. I think mining should see itself in the centre of the circular economy.” – The World Resources Forum managing director, Dr Mathias Schluep
“Think about where the average European steel mill is sited. It’s in the perfect place for the 19th century. It’s a couple of hundred thousand kilometres up a river, next to an indigenous source of iron ore and coal. It’s in the absolute worst position for the 21st century. We’ve got an opportunity to really change the way things are done and the way things are built.” – Blastr chief financial officer, David Morant
“I think it’s really just get out of the archaic mindset and not just think we need to have procedures, we need to have training and just tick the boxes to drive compliance. We’ve got a wonderful opportunity to make mining sexy again.” – dss+ principal consultant – leadership and culture, Jacques Botha
“Civil societies and NGOs play an essential role as drivers for social change, but also as the voice of thousands of people. In the past we all have seen the interests of business and civil societies being pitted against each other but fortunately new types of NGOs have emerged and they understand business interests and social creation can go hand in hand. The best evidence of that is when in 2023 one of our sites faced a wrong allegation for non-compliance for our social obligations ... and it was actually the NGOs and civil societies who took a stand for us and provided external validation to the government that those allegations were wrong. It’s really thanks to their support that actually our mining permit was saved.” – Eurasian Resources Group head of international ESG compliance, Daniella Savic
“You can shape the way that industry approaches concepts like circularity ...but it takes a lot of coordination. And the biggest challenge that industry sees, at whatever level you play in the value chain, is where you have very big differences in regulation. It would be really good if everybody around the world had all the same standards and all the same regulations. It would make life easy for industry. But it’s not going to happen.” – Advanced Propulsion Centre UK director, automotive transformation, Julian Hetherington
“Lead is more than 99% recovered and recycled, mainly driven by regulation surrounding its toxicity. You look at graphite [and] actually almost none of our graphite is properly recycled because there’s no economic argument and today there is no regulation driving it. So all the batteries that we get to end of life, all the manufacturing scrap that contains graphite in significant quantities ... is essentially going to end up being burnt off or put into some landfill. Criminal.” – Hetherington again
Paradox and parody
“Mining in 2025 sits squarely in this landscape of paradox. The headlines shout about soaring mineral demand, looming shortages and an urgent need for new mines. Every major body has critical minerals at the top of their agenda [and] over 100 countries have released strategies. Yet metal plants are closing. Majors are restructuring. Outside of gold and copper, prices are weaker. New projects are stalling. And the entire mining sector is valued at less than one-third of Nvidia.” – International Council on Mining and Metals CEO, Rohitesh Dhawan
“Mining has never needed innovation more. [But] every innovator I’ve spoken to in the past year tells the same story: Our solution improves safety, efficiency or both. We’ve proven it works in real conditions. But we cannot get companies to bring us on site. This is cultural work – deep, long-term, values-driven change. And it needs to start now.” – Rohitesh Dhawan again
“The thing that struck me most about where we are today is the focus governments around the world have on ... critical minerals or where they are just going to get their minerals from, relative to the complacency of investors. If there was more focus on the opportunity then investors would allocate more capital to this space and valuations wouldn’t be as low as they are.” – BlackRock global head of thematic and sector investing, Evy Hambro
“I think it’s important to say, in the five-year term, maybe even the 10-year term, we have what’s mostly an unsolvable problem. We’re I think 30 years late to the party. We were 30 years late coming to the party in exploration. We have a lot of deposits in the world that are drilled off but at today’s cost of capital and today’s copper prices they don’t make any sense. Which is a challenge.” – Rule Investment Media principal, Rick Rule
“Overall, the mining sector seems to highlight the talent issue as one of the main issues that it has. But if you go to the graduates, if you go to the students, I think their perception is that getting into the industry is actually quite difficult ... and the availability of early career opportunities, not just in the UK but around the world, seems to be very scarce.” – BP ISC risk management analyst, Egor Fedorenko
Politics and geopolitics
“There is lots of capital being deployed by governments, at least on paper, into the sector, driven obviously by geopolitical competition. But there’s only one sovereign in the world today that actually has a long-term strategy around this, and that is China.” – Rothschild & Co global head of mining and metals, Karina Danilyuk
“We do not really see strong financial support for these projects to be launched and if we are not ready to do whatever it takes to launch and support what we deem strategic then it is not a strategic project.” – Albemarle vice president external affairs, EU, Francesco Gattiglio
“It’s really about operationalising. There are a lot of tools available at the table. We have to stack them together meaningfully and engage in this conversation with a sense of urgency, which we do see happening, but there is an action plan and then there is action.” – EIT RawMaterials director of corporate affairs, Anoop Kayarat
“How is it that the world’s largest economy – with the world’s most predictable long-term copper demand – cannot secure supply of a metal it considers essential? The answer is brutally simple: economics.” – International Council on Mining and Metals CEO, Rohitesh Dhawan
“[Our] data would say that a lot of more supply has to come from the Americas than it has in the last few years, but if you look at what’s happened since 2019 something like US$70 billion has been spent on new copper mines and over half of that was Chinese capital. Almost 20% of it was Russian and Caspian capital. The rest of the world financed about 30% of the mines.” – Wood Mackenzie head of metals and mining consulting, Patrick Barnes
“One risk of our democracies, and it happens as much in the United States as in the UK, is we're constantly reinventing things because ministers and political leaders like to have announcements. One of the things that I've learned working now in the private sector is that CEOs like continuity and predictability and so there's a disconnect between our four-year election cycles ... and industry, which is characterised by decades-long investment horizons.” – McLarty senior managing director for energy and critical minerals, Geoffrey Pyatt
“It took us several decades to get into this hole and it’s going to take us a couple of decades to get to a situation of geopolitical security around minerals.” – Geoffrey Pyatt again
“The thing that we have to understand the most is that we are extremely in a difficult situation where we have such high level of concentration ... 19 out of 22 positions for battery metals controlled by one country in terms of processing. We all understand that it’s China. We understand that the geographic concentration is a big problem for the so-called Western world.” – Ukraine Ministry of Economy, Environment and Agriculture deputy minister, Yegor Perelygin
Mining’s dark web
“Illegal mining, as distinct from legal, artisanal and small-scale mining, is often controlled by syndicates and organised crime with horrific working conditions and little thought to human rights, safety or health or any regard for the environment. The criminality and desperation associated with this can impact the operations of legal miners of all sizes and the safety of their workforces.” – Sibanye-Stillwater director, Elaine Dorward King
“Globally it’s estimated the lost revenue from illegal mining ranges from US$12-to-48 billion per year. The natural question to ask here is, who is buying those minerals? These illegal activities led by unidentified groups, unfortunately, have been one of our major challenges at ERG.” – Eurasian Resources Group head of international ESG compliance, Daniella Savic
“In Peru at the moment about US$8 billion worth of artisanal gold makes its way outside the country on a yearly basis. So it’s not a small market. Where does that gold go? Our refiners are placing a lot more pressure on us in terms of making sure that we understand our entire supply chain – making sure that it's not contaminated.” – Pan American Silver senior vice president, corporate affairs and sustainability, Brent Bergeron
“We're talking about employment of about 45 million people. So artisanal kind of makes you feel like this is a small-scale thing, but it is not at all. This is really quite big. Artisanal mining is taking place in a variety of different contexts, sometimes close to or on mining concessions that are official, sometimes completely disconnected.” – Global Witness head of policy and EU relations, transition minerals, Emily Iona Stewart
“I was recently speaking to a manufacturer of trucks and I said, who’s your biggest customer? And they said, illegal miners. I said, how do you get paid? They said, cash. So there’s one example on the ground which could easily be eradicated. There needs to be more government action.” – BCM Group CEO, Paul Coe
“Formalisation, formalisation, formalisation ... Any attempt by government to formalise the ASM [artisanal and small-scale mining] sector, we believe, is the way to go and we’ve demonstrated this in all the areas we operate.” – AngloGold Ashanti regional head, community relations, Africa, Emmanuel Baidoo
“There have definitely been some celebrated cases of people being breached and seeing operational problems. We’ll probably see more of that because at the end of the day as a mining company we have a lot of tool sets, most of them using AI in some form, and the hacker only has to be right once. We have got to be right all the time in terms of the defence. The key is to minimise damage and repair it as quickly as possible. But it’s a scary world.” – CITIC Pacific Mining general manager for digital technology and innovation, Mark O’Brien
“One of the biggest risks to supply chains is actually from ... disinformation. We’ve been monitoring the mining industry globally and we've seen that 40% of mines globally are under some sort of active campaign right now, whether that’s from environmental activists to local populations, but really importantly, from foreign states as well, particularly Russia and China.” – Refute CEO and co-founder, Tom Garnett
“We found that the same social media bot farms that were used against Rio Tinto [in Serbia] were also used in the Romanian election as well. So we’re seeing these mining organisations are just part of a much bigger geopolitical play.” – Tom Garnett again
Leading from the front
“In this day and age it’s quite easy for industrial leadership to be a bit of a windsock to the political direction of the day. Having the foresight to think long term and weather the short-term storm is becoming rarer and rarer these days.” – Fortescue CEO, Dino Otranto
“Dismantling the club is shorthand for saying, could we do better than hiring friends and family? Could we do better than hiring people that only look like me and think like me? I don’t believe the solution lives in creating your own club. So, women move over here and they create their own club and they start to build that up. I don’t believe that is particularly productive because what it does is it creates this condition where people look at other groups as other.” – Torex Gold CEO, Jody Kuzenko
“It’s incumbent upon us as leaders in the industry to shift the narrative on matters like exploration and capital projects so when you put out a feasibility study and the return is only 15% or 16%, train the market and say, look, there’s more resources behind what we have built this infrastructure for and the return will come over time. That’s the nature of this industry. But that’s not what happens. What happens is people try to shorten project timelines. They cut capex with an axe not a scalpel. They take shortcuts on sustaining capital. And you end up with this Frankenstein of an NI 43-101, that is not a realistic pathway for what you are going to build. And then two years or three years down the road you need more money and more time and the market gets disappointed.” – Kuzenko again
“One of the great sadnesses that we had was that one of our top [mining] students from one of the universities in South Africa wrote me an email saying, I’ve just graduated and I’m now going to be a fund manager.” – JB Management (UK) LLP CEO, Justin Baring
“I’d like to see the industry keeping to its promises. When it says it’s going to build a mine for a certain amount of money it achieves that goal.” – JB Management (UK) LLP CEO, Justin Baring
“A few decades ago many mining projects came in on schedule and under budget. If a company promised a mine by 2025 for $1 billion investors had reason to believe it. Today that trust has eroded. Only about one in six mining projects is completed as planned. The vast majority blow past budgets or deadlines, or both.” – Worley vice president, resources, Darryn Quayle
Power plays
“What I’ve seen over my career is every process or every mine that I've ever been a part of has only ever been enabled by a low cost of electricity, and it’s largely been connected to a coal mine or a hydro dam. Now we’re on the cusp of a mass decentralisation of low cost energy which I’m very hopeful as a processing person can unlock orebodies and bring wealth distribution to many more people who haven’t had access to it in the past.” – Fortescue CEO, Dino Otranto
“We are in what the industry likes to call a nuclear renaissance. And it really feels like it. We said this a decade or 15 years ago but this feels very different. This feels very real. Demand for base load power, to complement renewables, security of supply and then the journey to net zero are three vectors that are really supporting this nuclear renaissance.” – Cameco global managing director, Dominic Kieran
“It takes us 10 years to build a nuclear reactor in the West. China would be half of that.” – Dominic Kieran again
“If it is a power race that delivers AI, China’s way out in the lead.” – BlackRock global head of thematic and sector investing, Evy Hambro
ESG and responsible sourcing
“We’ve got 15 different criteria that we look at in an ESG due diligence process, ranging from climate, water, air quality, biodiversity to labour, health and safety, communities, affected communities and governance. It’s very, very comprehensive. We have walked away many, many times because there’s been a lack of community support or lack of social license, or we see issues on the environmental side that are just too great to get over.” – Wheaton Precious Metals International, president and chief sustainability officer, Patrick Drouin
“To put it in perspective, we are a $400 million market-cap company [and] we have more than 20 people full time in the ESG space. Even when there’s welcome efforts to consolidate standards led by the ICMM you still need a lot of people and it’s the key to financing. There’s no project financing, and there is no project financing, I think, in the next decades if you don't do your homework and you don’t document it.” – Lifezone Metals CFO, Ingo Hofmaier
“The proliferation of standards isn’t helpful to anybody. As civil society we often point to the IRMA standard as the gold standard because it’s a standard that has been developed alongside civil society, alongside communities and has existed in the operations for a while.” – Global Witness head of policy and EU relations, transition minerals, Emily Iona Stewart
“I do agree IRMA is a great standard but it’s very onerous on mining companies. It’s almost untenable for most of our partners. I know that’s a gold standard but companies have to operate at some point and that standard is just very difficult to achieve.” – Wheaton Precious Metals International, president and chief sustainability officer, Patrick Drouin
“Nickel in the batteries is the most polluting or most CO-intensive input material. The systems are in place. In most Western countries you can trace the nickel. You can actually trace the CO2 intensity. The unfortunate fact is that competition in the car industry is enormously fierce in China and therefore also globally, especially in EVs, and the end customer is not willing to differentiate. And even the car manufacturers currently are basically looking for a reliable and cheap source, rather than a clean source. That’s unfortunately a fact.” – Lifezone Metals CFO, Ingo Hofmaier
