Mines professor backs US-PNG student exchanges to boost critical minerals expertise

Gorethy Kenneth and Philemon Kassman in Denver, USA

PAPUA New Guinea and the United States should set up university exchange programs to train geochemists and metallurgists for the critical minerals sector, a Colorado School of Mines professor said.

Aaron Goodman, an assistant professor of chemistry and geochemist at Mines, said such exchanges are “a great idea” and already work with other countries. “It’s typically a lot of industry people that are working in the mining industry as geologists in other countries, and they want to come get an advanced degree in something specific, like geochemistry or metallurgy,” he said. “The companies will send them to the US and to the School of Mines, to get that degree, and then take that expertise back home to their country.”

Goodman called those students “fantastic” and said Mines encourages “anybody and everybody to come learn from us.” He also wants US researchers to do field work in PNG. “We want to understand critical mineral deposits around the world… if there’s an opportunity to do field work in Papua New Guinea, that’s absolutely something we want to look into.” He said official channels for exchanges are not set but “I’m all ears.”

The proposal comes as Washington seeks to secure supply chains for copper, nickel, cobalt, and battery metals. PNG has major copper-gold mines at Ok Tedi, Porgera, and Wafi-Golpu, plus nickel-cobalt at Ramu. But PNG universities have limited programs in advanced geochemistry and extractive metallurgy used in modern exploration and processing.

Goodman said PNG should not have to “always send samples to Colorado or US labs and stay dependent.” Techniques like isotopic analysis for mineral tracing and nanoscale geochemistry can be transferred. “That’s one of the biggest goals I have as a researcher is to actually do that, to translate our techniques out into the world so that everybody can use them.”

Mines is already collaborating with industry and government on scaling recovery tech. It was recently funded by the Department of Energy with Element USA to build a rare earth recovery plant in Louisiana using bauxite residue from aluminum mining. “If you collaborate with industry and you work together between academia, industry, and government, that’s where you create the partnerships and you can develop technologies that will have economic value,” Goodman said.

For PNG, exchange programs could build domestic capacity to analyze mine waste, track clean minerals, and support in-country processing — all US policy goals. Goodman said renewable energy should be treated as a global problem. “It would be wonderful if we could treat that like a global problem… copper and the battery metals… are all being used to electrify our society.”