September 14, 2026
Germanium in the Americas
Every site in the Americas connected to germanium, sorted into what has been measured, what has only been reported, and what is inferred from geology.
Germanium is almost never mined on its own. It is a trace element recovered as a by-product, so it rarely gets its own resource statement and it is often present at a site without anyone having measured it. The public record therefore holds three different kinds of evidence, and they are not comparable. Mixed together they produce a list that looks authoritative and is not, so they are kept apart throughout this page.
The three kinds of evidence
A site can sit in more than one of them.
Why the list is 26 sites and not 1,387. Germanium has been measured at 1,387 sites, and 1,228 of them peak below 5 ppm, which is what ordinary rock contains anywhere. Another 133 peak between 5 and 19 ppm. A 20 ppm floor separates the 26 worth examining from a long tail of background readings. That floor is a choice made here, not an industry standard, and it is the first assumption to challenge.
What the data shows
The one to start with
Hutson Zinc Mine, Livingston County, Kentucky
232 ppm germanium, measured across 39 samples, with three tailings ponds mapped by the USGS. It is the only site that combines all three requirements: a germanium grade somebody actually measured, a mapped physical pile, and a recovery route already in commercial use.
It was a zinc mine, which matters as much as the grade. Germanium is produced commercially as a by-product of zinc, where it sits inside sphalerite and comes out of the existing circuit. A high germanium value in a rock that is not zinc still needs a recovery route invented for it. A high value in zinc tailings has one already in commercial use.
The mine is closed, the ponds are not on a Superfund list, and whether they were reclaimed is not recorded. Land management is unclassified in the federal data, so ownership is the first thing to establish.
Three other Kentucky sites sit in the same fluorspar district: Old Jim Mine at 1,050 ppm, Columbia Mine at 232, and Babb-Guill at 47. This is Mississippi Valley type mineralization in Livingston and Crittenden counties, a known germanium host. Four separate sites showing the same thing is stronger evidence than one high sample at one mine.
The Montana cluster is the other group worth attention: seven sites between 115 and 239 ppm, most in the Philipsburg manganese and silver district. Those grades come from outcrop and waste rock rather than drill core, and none has a mapped pile.
Which waste piles are worth a look
The inferred tier is 174 piles, which is too many to act on. Three filters reduce it to a workable set: keep only a primary germanium association, drop anything on a Superfund site, and require a measured volume.
That leaves 19 piles at 7 sites, holding 166 million cubic meters, and one site accounts for almost all of it.
Montana Tunnels, Jefferson County, Montana
163 million cubic meters across two features, a 114 million cubic meter mine dump and a 49 million cubic meter tailings pond. Both carry a primary germanium association, and neither is on a Superfund list. By volume it is 98 percent of the non-Superfund shortlist.
The same caution applies here as to the whole inferred tier: nobody has measured germanium at Montana Tunnels. The association comes from the deposit type implied by its other commodities, at medium confidence. It is large, it is mapped and measured, and it carries no Superfund listing, which makes it a good place to take a sample. It is not a known germanium resource.
The rest of the shortlist is small and clusters where the measured grades already are. Austinville Zinc and Lead in Virginia contributes five mine dumps totaling about 2.2 million cubic meters. Three Kentucky sites, Mexico Kentucky Mill Property, Lafayette Fluorspar and Lucile Mine, add ten small tailings features totaling about 0.6 million cubic meters, in the same fluorspar district as Hutson and Old Jim. Two North Carolina dumps complete it.
The largest piles are the least usable. Anaconda Smelter holds 324 million cubic meters and Berkley Pit another 44 million, and both are Superfund. Bisbee in Arizona adds 218 million cubic meters and is not Superfund, but its germanium association is only secondary. Sorting this tier by size alone puts all three at the top: two are unusable and one has the weakest germanium evidence.
Explore every site
The 248 sites in the Americas, which is everything above plus the ones the sections did not single out. Points are colored by evidence tier. Click a point, or a row in the list beside it, to move the map there. Include the rest of the world adds the 16 sites outside the Americas that carry a germanium tag, which is where Kipushi, Tsumeb, Umicore Olen and six Chinese operations sit. That is 16 out of 537,387 records across 200 countries, and it is a count of what has been tagged rather than a picture of world supply. Yunnan Chihong, the largest germanium producer in the world, is not in the database at all.
The table below shows six columns to keep it readable. Click any row to open the rest: sample distance and count, tonnage, footprint, Superfund status, and the ore minerals the USGS reports at that mine. The search box, the filters and the column headers all drive the map, the list and the table together, so whatever you narrow to is what you see in all three.
To rebuild the shortlist from the section above: turn off Measured and Reported, then tick Primary association and Exclude Superfund, then sort by Volume. That gives the 19 piles, with Montana Tunnels at the top. To look at measured grades instead, hit Reset, turn off Reported and Inferred, and sort by Peak ppm.
Basemap © OpenFreeMap, data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL). Site coordinates: US Geological Survey, public domain.
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Widen the grade floor, turn a tier back on, or clear the search.
Limits of this data
Whether anything is being processed today
Four germanium recovery operations sit in the Americas. Teck's Trail smelter in British Columbia is the largest germanium producer in North America and the only one currently running at scale; Teck states that "germanium-bearing concentrates are processed at our integrated lead/zinc refinery in Trail". The others are Clarksville in Tennessee, Empire State Mines in New York and Red Dog in Alaska. Clarksville is corroborated twice over, by a USGS record for a zinc smelter at that location and by an EPA Toxics Release Inventory entry for Nyrstar Clarksville. A fourth record, Germanium Corp of America in Oneida County, New York, comes from the same EPA register. Worldwide the list adds Umicore Olen in Belgium, Nyrstar Hobart in Australia, Kipushi in the Congo and Tsumeb in Namibia.
Seven Americas sites carry a producing or plant status and not one carries a production date. Across every site the data records as producing, the most recent production year is 2009, and only two germanium sites carry a production year at all, the later of them 1979. The status field records what was true when the record was written, so whether any of these is running today has to be checked in company filings.
Note the provenance. Clarksville, Empire State and Red Dog are curated records that carry no source link, unlike most of this page, which traces to a named federal dataset. Teck Trail is a federal record, but the germanium attribution on it comes from the operator rather than from the record. All four are corroborated by independent entries here, and corroboration is not a citation.
Tonnage is one step further from the measurement than volume is
Volume is measured. The USGS published a calculated volume for 774 of 775 features, from repeat elevation surveys flown between 2016 and 2025. 746 features across the whole inventory carry a usable volume, and 173 of the 174 germanium features do, totaling 917 million cubic meters.
Tonnage is volume multiplied by a material density from USGS Open-File Report 03-143. That is a published figure, but it is a family-level density rather than one measured at these sites. Eight slag piles carry no tonnage at all, because no sourced density for smelter slag is held, and multiplying by an unsourced number would just be a guess.
Twenty-nine volumes are withheld rather than served: fourteen are negative, which is an artifact of differencing two elevation surveys, and fourteen imply a mean depth over 100 meters, which is not physically plausible for a surface pile. One feature has no volume at all.
Most of the inferred piles carry a Superfund liability
133 of the 174 inferred piles are on Superfund sites, and 106 of the 174 are in Oklahoma, which is the Tar Creek district. That concentration is not a germanium finding. It reflects where the mine waste inventory has mapped features so far, and it means most of this tier carries environmental liability before any metal question is reached.
The data can only find germanium where somebody tagged it
Teck's Trail smelter in British Columbia is the largest germanium producer in North America. Orebis holds the facility, from the USGS Mineral Resources Data System, and its commodity list reads zinc refiner, cadmium, sulfur. Germanium does not appear in it. Every query run against germanium therefore missed it, and it is on this page because the operator publishes the fact and a Colorado School of Mines review names it, not because the database knew.
That is the shape of the limit. A federal record describes what a site was registered for, which for a by-product metal is rarely the by-product. Four of the operations listed here came from curated or published sources rather than from a commodity field, and there is no way to know from inside the database how many more exist.
The world view shows the same hole more starkly. Switching it on adds 16 sites out of 537,387 records across 200 countries. Yunnan Chihong, which produces more germanium than anyone, does not appear at all, nor does JSC Germanium in Krasnoyarsk. Treat that toggle as a list of what has been tagged, not as a map of world supply.
Two US facilities are also deliberately absent. Umicore at Quapaw, Oklahoma makes germanium wafers, optics and tetrachloride, and 5N Plus at St. George, Utah grows single-crystal germanium for satellite solar cells. Both matter to the supply chain and neither holds a germanium resource, so listing them beside deposits and waste piles would misrepresent what they are.
Latin America: the gap is measurement, not coverage
Orebis holds 23,636 sites across Latin America, including 4,831 in Mexico, 4,151 in Chile, 4,082 in Argentina, 3,157 in Peru and 2,297 in Brazil. Coverage is not the problem.
Those records name germanium at essentially the same rate as the US records do: 3 of 23,636 Latin American sites, against 41 of 280,399 in the US. That is 0.0127 percent versus 0.0146 percent. Nothing here says there is less germanium in Latin America. The three that name it are Cerro Negro in Argentina, Los Pijiguaos in Venezuela and Sierra Pajares Azu in Mexico, and two more sit in Quebec.
Three occurrences is far too few to carry a conclusion in either direction. It is consistent with the US rate and it would also be consistent with a rate several times higher or lower.
What is genuinely missing is the geochemistry. All 4,620 germanium measurements come from a US Geological Survey sampling program, and no equivalent exists for Latin America. No site south of the US border can enter the measured tier at all, whatever is in the ground. Closing that needs the Brazilian, Peruvian, Chilean and Mexican geological surveys, and it is separate work.
One caveat on the map: both USGS records for Sierra Pajares Azu give its state as Michoacán while placing it at 26.9°N, roughly 780 km north in Nuevo León. The coordinate is plotted as published; the state field and the coordinate disagree at source.
What recovery would cost
No published payment terms for germanium concentrate are held, and none is estimated here.
The USGS records which ore minerals are present at each mine, and sphalerite appears at almost all of these. That published record is what makes the zinc route the right first assumption rather than a hopeful one. It is not an assay. Nobody has measured how much germanium sits inside that sphalerite at any of these sites, and the mineralogy is recorded per mine rather than per pile. One laboratory result would close that gap.
Recommended next steps
In order, with the cost of each stated first.
- Establish who owns the Hutson ponds. A title and records search, no field work. Land management is unclassified and the mine is closed, so ownership decides whether the rest is worth doing.
- Check the producing-status sites against company filings. Desk work. Gordonsville-Elmwood and the Central Tennessee zinc district are the ones that matter, because an operating zinc circuit is the cheapest place germanium recovery can be added.
- Assay one sphalerite concentrate. The reported ore mineralogy places sphalerite at almost every pile, which is the right host for germanium. It does not establish how much germanium is in it. One assay converts the strongest inference on this page into a measurement.
- Sample Hutson, and one Montana site for comparison. Field collection plus assay, and the first real cost on this list. Hutson tests whether the Kentucky grades hold up under a drill; the Montana comparison tests whether the manganese and silver sites behave like the zinc ones, which nothing in the public record can answer.
Where these numbers come from
Every grade, volume, footprint, status and mineral on this page was queried from the Orebis database, from public and openly licensed sources. The pile volumes, footprints and ore mineralogy come from the USGS National Mine Waste Inventory. Two things did not come from the database: the germanium attribution on Teck Trail, which comes from the operator's published product information, and the four named recovery operations, which are curated entries. Both are flagged where they appear.
- Measurements: USGS Earth Mapping Resources Initiative geochemistry. 4,620 germanium values across 1,387 sites, none of them a below-detection reading.
- Site records, commodities and status: USGS Mineral Resources Data System.
- Waste features, volumes and mineralogy: USGS National Mine Waste Inventory. 764 mapped features covering 585.18 square kilometers, 746 with a usable calculated volume, and reported ore minerals for 733 of them. The mineralogy is recorded by the USGS at the site level, not per pile, so it describes the mine rather than the individual heap.
- Active operations checked against: Mine Safety and Health Administration register, 91,839 operations across 120 commodities. Germanium appears in none of them, because it is never the commodity a mine is registered for.
One figure to set aside. Ramaco Resources reports 44 and 54 ppm at the Brook Mine in Wyoming in its 2025 SEC filing. That number is gallium oxide and germanium oxide combined, on an ash basis, not germanium in coal, so it is not comparable to anything above and is excluded.