10 - MATERIALS AND MINING

MATERIALS AND MINING

Introduction

Materials, energy and technology are at the root of everything in our society. Raw materials are extracted and transformed via energy and using a specific technology. Every man-made object or item in our world requires metals and minerals in order to be built in the first place. Not only goods but also services require infrastructure, which is material. A home delivery service needs a road and a car. A smartphone needs several 5G antennas, data centres and internet servers on top of the mobile device, which are actual physical things. The myth of a dematerialised world, where all objects are smart and connected, and we all live off services and digitised objects, ignores the fact that the 'dematerialised' world needs a huge amount of material infrastructure behind it, like data centres, and it also needs a lot of electricity, which doesn't fall from the sky, but comes from power pants, physical devices and cable and equipment infrastructure.

Also, the more digital our world becomes, the more complex it becomes in terms of connectivity and in terms of the specific metals and rare earths and minerals that you need. A smartphone contains 50 different metals and minerals. Your grandmother's old landline phone was much simpler, made mainly of aluminium, plastic and copper.

All the material in our man-made world comes from the earth. It has to be dug out of the ground, somewhere far away from where you live and consume it. This is mining. 99% of humans have never seen a mine in their lives. That's why we have this misconception that goods and services are just assembled, made from materials you buy in a shop... But it all starts with mining, and mining has a lot of issues that I will discuss here. Mining is the unknown part of our civilisation. People know about fossil fuels, but almost no one knows about mining, its impact, its scale and its limitations.

As shown in Figure 1A below, metals mined are processed and used in a variety of applications, such as infrastructure, electronics, consumer goods, the energy sector and transportation. However, mining causes significant air, water and soil pollution, impacting the biosphere and human health. Recycling or reuse is an alternative to mining, but this practice is extremely limited due to cost, complexity, feasability issues, lack of collection and lack of infrastructure.

Figure 1A: Life cycle of metals

Projections on future mining needs

Mining and refining take about 8% of total energy consumption. From 1980 until 2008, the global demand for metal increased by 87%, or almost doubling in 30 years, to exceed six billion tonnes. If the populations of fast-growing emerging economies were to adopt similar technologies and lifestyles as the current industrialised world, the required global in-use metal stocks would be 3 to 9 times higher than they are now — a staggering figure that seems impossible to meet with current metal supply growth.

If we were to consume only 'renewable' energy sources, such as wind, solar and batteries, at our current total level of energy consumption, it would require an increase in the consumption of some key materials by between 20 and 1,000 times, depending on the technology chosen. Figure 1B below shows Simon Michaux's estimation of the quantity of key materials needed to run our modern society with our current total energy consumption on electricity only, if all of it were to come from wind, solar and batteries. This is a world in which fossil fuels have been phased out and all energy is electric and 'renewable'.

Figure 1B: Key materials needs in a world 100% electric and "renewable"

As you can see above on figure 1B, we would need to increase our consumption of most of these key materials by between 20 and 1000 times. Even with only two days' worth of energy stored in batteries, the demand for all these key materials would far exceed current known reserves. This chart shows that electrifying and using 'renewable' technologies would lead to a clear bottleneck in materials and mining. We will need to utilise a variety of sources, including coal- and gas-fired power plants, nuclear power, hydropower and batteries, as well as consuming fossil fuels for non-electrical needs.

Even if we stay on the current course of increasing fossil fuel consumption and increasing "renewable" energy in parallel, in a world of 3% annual growth, we would need an increase of 2 times for copper and iron to 10 times for lithium, graphite and neodymium by 2050.

Data centres for the internet cloud required around 15GW of power globally in 2022, the equivalent of the power consumed by an entire country such as Japan or Argentina. This is expected to triple in the next 10 years due to new AI data centres, which consume much more energy. The demand for electrical devices and electricity consumption is growing and is expected to double by 2050.

Figure 1C: Projection of electrical capacity by 2050 in US and China

Put simply, the projected demand for raw materials is expected to continue its parabolic rise: New data centres for AI that require GPU chips and consume tonnes of energy. Electric cars weighing 1.5 tonnes instead of the current 800kg for ICE vehicules, with lots of metals in the battery. Solar and wind, which are much more material intensive than gas-fired power stations. Most importantly, think of all the developing countries with a growing population that currently has few physical possessions but aspires to a western lifestyle with high material comfort and standard of living. These populations will drive much of the material demand in the coming decades.

Yes, if you are a privileged member of the middle class of industrialised society, you can imagine a future world of frugality, self-sufficiency and reduced overall consumption. But this is a small minority of the world's population, we are less that 10% of the people on earth, and a voluntary reduction in consumption is only possible because the middle class of the industrialised world has access to an abundance of irrelevant things that are not necessary for basic survival and simple happiness. We are privileged by all this abundance of affordable goods and services, and we could afford a little reduction in consumption, in purchasing power. But for the majority of the world's population, growth is a necessity, a need, a life expectation. No one can blame or prevent a materially poor person from wanting a materially rich life, as Europe and North America have experienced for the last 70 years.

We will definitely need more mining and materials in the coming decades.

Key materials

Oil, natural gas and coal are obviously the first key elements to be mentioned. All our prosperity and growth over the last century has been made possible by the use of fossil fuels as primary energy.

Outside the 3 fossil fuels, the other key elements of our society on which our entire civilisation is based:

Plastic is a Petroleum-based material found in every physical object you can buy, from packaging to household appliances to medical devices. A world without plastic is unthinkable.

Fertilisers, made by burning natural gas to extract nitrogen from the air and phosphorus and potassium from mined ore, have enabled modern agriculture and boosted agriculture productivity, making each piece of land extremely productive per unit of time and per unit of surface. It also turned agriculture into tractor and energy intensive on a large scale, aiming to feed the world with cheap and abundant food with as few costly labor force as possible. The supply of gas and LNG is essential for the production of fertiliser, which is essential for food production.

Sand, a tiny grain of silicon rock, has many applications and uses: for windows, glasses, optics. Sand is also used in concrete, which is used in much of our infrastructure, and more recently in oil and gas fracking. Fracking is the process of injecting sand, water and chemicals into some rock formations to extract the oil they contain. Sand is mostly used for making glass, cement/concrete and for fracking oil and gas, but it is also indispensable in smaller quantities for making microchips and solar panels. Riverside and shore sand, which is prized for its square shape, is the material of choice compared to desert sand, which is round and offers less grip. Unfortunately, sand is not extracted from the abundant region of Sahara, where it could be available in almost unlimited quantities. Desert sand grains are too round, unsuitable for grinding in fracking, for bonding in concrete, and not pure enough for glass. Unfortunately, sand is mainly extracted from some riverbeds and some beaches, damaging local ecosystems.

Salt is an unknown key element of our civilisation, apart from its use as food. Salt is sodium chloride. Sodium and chloride are used at the beginning of most chemical processes in many agrochemical applications, but also in industrial chemical treatments. The table salt we consume in our food is a tiny fraction of the vast industrial use of salt. No petrochemical or industrial chemical application would be possible without salt. Fortunately, salt is available in almost unlimited quantities from the oceans.

Aluminium and iron are 2 key elements of our infrastructure. Iron ore is the raw material for steel. Aluminium and steel are used in all our infrastructure, equipments and household appliances. Iron ore and aluminium are the most abundant elements in the Earth's crust after oxygen and silicon. Oxygen is bound to other minerals and must be separated by high temperature, and removing the oxygen from the ore is why we use coal and gas to refine the material, an energy consuming process. That's why steel making via coal and aluminium making via electricity are very energy intensive.

Copper is the best, abundant, cheap, malleable and conductive material, making it the metal of choice for electrical wiring. Copper is always needed to make anything electrical, from phones, laptops to cars, every building, data centre, washing machine, solar panel, batteries, etc.

Lithium is the lightest metal on earth, the most energy dense for storing electrical energy in batteries. Lithium-ion batteries were invented in the 1970s, but research and development has really taken off in the last 30 years, improving performance, safety, reliability and energy density, which has enabled the deployment of portable devices and EVs. Lithium mining is a very young and new industry that is expanding rapidly at a growth rate of 20% per year.

The 4 mining limits

We need more materials from mining in the future, but can we get it all out of the ground? What are mining's limits and barriers to growth?

There are 4 types of limits to mining:

1- Biophysical limits: Over time, you have to dig deeper, which takes more time and energy, so the physical output decreases over time. Also, in any mining project, the site with the best concentration (ore grade) is used first for economic reasons, leaving only sites with a lower concentration rate over time.

2- The production system: You need a sufficient supply of electricity to be brought to the site in order to mine, crush, concentrate and refine the ore you extract. You also need a sufficient supply of water for these activities. Every mining site consumes a lot of fresh water, regardless of the material or technology used. Other operational limitations include labour, which is becoming increasingly scarce in these days of home offices, social media influencers and easy money finance jobs. You also need solid logistics, roads and access to the site with good connecting infrastructure to get the imported chemicals to the site, and national roads or a port nearby for export.

3- Economic: In addition to operational profitability, mining sites are subject to external economic and geopolitical influences such as embargoes, bans, border tariffs, etc., which make mining very risky in some jurisdictions. For example, Bolivia, Chile have strong government saying. Russia is under sanctions and bans. Several African mines are owned by corrupt local governments or controlled by Chinese public entities who bribe the local politicians for win-win interest.

4- Social and legal: Restrictive regulations such as ESG standards are becoming more stringent in several countries. Permitting and approvals are subject to extensive conditions, which can delay or stop projects. Chemical waste management also varies depending on the jurisdiction and its level of ecological awareness. Local communities often oppose local mining activities, that's the typical NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) attitude of most local populations. Overall, social and legal restrictions make mining more expensive, complex, time-consuming and bureaucratic, or simply illegal.

Let's take a closer look at some of these restrictions.

Ore grade: the "low-hanging fruit" theory

If you had an apple tree in front of you and you wanted to eat one of its fruits, which apple would you pick? The one you could easily reach by raising your arm, or would you use a ladder to reach an apple high up there hidden between the branches? Surely you would grab the easiest one first. That's what happens in any resource extraction, whether it's oil fields, metal mining, fishing or picking mushrooms in the forest. This is the 'low-hanging fruit' theory: Humans extract the easiest, cheapest, highest-density stuff from the earth first, leaving only low-density, hard-to-access, expensive resources in the ground over time.

The low-hanging fruit theory

As we have consumed more and more resources in each decade of the last century, with exponential growth, the remaining resources of today are much more difficult to extract, less abundant in terms of concentration, and economically more expensive to extract than in previous decades.

Let's take a look at a typical mining industry: Copper. This industry has been around for centuries, is very mature in terms of supply/demand balance and in technology, and is expected to grow tremendously by 2 times in the coming 2 decades.

Ore grade, or concentration rate, is the percentage of the stuff you want (in our case pure copper) in the rock you are mining. A 1% ore grade means that you have to shovel 100kg of rock to extract 1kg of pure copper.

The graphs below in Figure 2A show the evolution of copper ore grades over the last century and the last 20 years.

Figure 2A: Copper ore grade worldwide over the last century (upper graph)
and over the last 20 years (lower graph)

A hundred years ago we had an ore grade of 4%. Today it is around 0.6%, seven times less. This means that we have to crush seven times more rock than 100 years ago to get the same amount of copper. The main reason for this is the low-hanging fruit theory I mentioned earlier: the best places on earth have already been exploited. For the industry, this means that you need bigger excavators to dig even more rock, you need to use more energy to dig, crush, concentrate and refine, and this increases the cost of copper production while reducing the output per mine or per square metre.

Look at the graphs below. Figure 2B shows the copper production and energy usage in Chile over the last 20 years, while Figure 2C shows the total global copper production in the world over the last 25 years.

Figure 2B: Copper production and energy consumption in Chile

Figure 2C: World copper production the last 25 years

The first chart in figure 2B is really interesting: While production in chile has increased by only 15% in 15 years, the energy used to produce copper has almost doubled in the same period! In addition to the declining ore grade, which makes the refining process exponentially more energy intensive, the other reason is that the open pit mines are getting bigger and deeper, so it takes more time to get to the bottom and drive back up, which means more diesel used to haul the rocks back up.

The second graph in figure 2C shows that total copper production increased by 66% between 2000 and 2020. It is forecast to grow by 100% (or double) between 2020 and 2040. That means lots of new mines opening, more and bigger excavators, more water and energy consumption, more environmental damage. It will be a challenge at all levels to get this material out of the ground to electrify the world as much and as fast as expected.

In order to double production between 2020 and 2040, we will have to open new mines. The 'low-hanging fruit' theory also applies to new mines: The best mines with abundant copper ore and located close to the surface have already been discovered. New mines are now located deep underground and contain less copper overall, as shown in Figure 2D below.

Figure 2D: Major copper discoveries since 1900

As can be seen in Figure 2D above, new copper discoveries are smaller in terms of the total amount of the copper resource and are located much deeper below the Earth's surface. This makes it more expensive to open and operate new mines. Like any material in high demand over the next few decades, the price of copper will trend higher due to scarcity, the financial cost of mining, and the high energy consumption involved in digging the ore out of the ground.

The Mponeng gold mine

The Mponeng gold mine in South Africa is the deepest mine in the world, reaching a depth of 3.9 kilometres (2.4 miles). It takes two to three hours to reach the bottom. The rock temperature there is 60°C (140°F). Ice is used to cool the soil and air is ventilated to enable operations to proceed. The mine has been active for over 100 years and has produced around 15% of the world's gold thanks to an ore grade of eight grams per metric tonne, which is far above the world average of two grams per tonne. For each size 1 meter x 1 meter block of rock dug out of the mine, only 8 grams of gold are recovered, which is considered a very good ore grade. It's no wonder that gold is considered a proof of work and a store of value, as this is the definition of dissipating energy for extremely few results.

Complexification, supply chain and (de)globalisation

The world and the systems we use have become increasingly complex over time. From the simple small airplane with 1 passenger and 1 engine to today's 500 passenger jumbo jet turboprop with auto-pilot and in-flight entertainment. From the first family car in the 1920s, compact, simple, robust, slow, to modern cars with air conditioning, touch screens and cruise control. From the wood-fired oven to microwaves. From the landline telephone to the all-purpose smartphone, from the producer-to-consumer electricity grid to the bi-directional smart grid, ... there are thousands of examples showing that the world is becoming more complex. This has been made possible by the globalisation of trades and technologies. But it creates more risks of supply chain disruptions in the near future if there is any geopolitical conflict or resource depletion.

Figure 3A: Complexity of atoms used in our product evolution

There is no sovereignty in the world, only interdependencies. For example, an MRI machine, which is used by hospitals and doctors to scan the body, contains 250 parts from 15 different countries and 50 different suppliers. When a country replaces coal-fired power plants with solar panels, it swaps coal and turbines dependency for Chinese and silicon wafer dependency. In a globalised world, we are always interdependent with many other countries and many suppliers for everything we do or consume in our daily lives. No single city or country can be independent or sovereign, or source everything locally, from house-building materials to grid infrastructure, electronic devices or hospital equipment.

Let's take a simple example: Indium is a rare earth, a metal that is added in small quantities to the screen of mobile phones and tablets to enable touch screen technology. Before 2008 (the launch of the iPhone), this metal was not used or was not critical. Now indium is in every device and it is unthinkable to go back to the Nokia or Blackberry phones of the early 2000s. Indium is one more metal to add to the total of 50 metals in a smartphone. It adds complexity to the supply chain of regular products consumed daily by the world's population because indium production is located in very few regions of the world (in this case China) and the technology and knowledge is not widely available. This puts the world at risk of geopolitical conflict with China in the future because China controls the supply chain of a metal that is vital to our daily lives.

I'll give you another example. Look at the 2 pictures below.

A litography machine from ASML

This is a high NA (High Numerical Aperture) lithography machine manufactured by ASML, the world leader in this technology. These machines operate with a precision of a nanometre, using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light on a silicon wafer to print high-end semiconductors, which are used in all high-end electronic devices and computers. Without them, microchips cannot be made, meaning that cars, mobile phones, computers, data centres for the internet cloud and AI, washing machines, traffic lights and solar panels cannot be made either.

These lithography machines are the most advanced tools in human history. One of these machines costs $400 million, is as big as a double-decker bus, and is extremely complex and high-tech. It is capable of producing transistors measuring less than 5 nanometres in size using laser technology. The laser precision is such that, if sent from the moon, it would hit a coin on Earth. The mirrors inside are so precise that if they were the size of the Earth, they would only have a few millimetres of irregularity.

Every high-end smartphone, laptop, data centre GPU or piece of military electronic equipment in the world contains a chip or semiconductor that was made using one of these lithography machines. Building the key chips of the modern digital world requires a global highly complex supply chain and the entire world economic coordination.

ASML has 800 suppliers who provide parts for the lithography machines. ASML's supply chain is extremely complex, with each supplier having a top-end specification and requirement list. This makes switching a supplier from one country to another improbable and would cost years in training and qualifications and billions in capital investment. If one part of the machine is missing, the machine will not work. These lithography machines produce semiconductors used in all electronic devices, including laptops, cars and aeroplanes, as well as all electronic infrastructure equipment. ASML's complex supply chain extends to Tier 2 suppliers, who then supply chip consumers such as car and aircraft manufacturers. If a key lithography machine supplier disappears, like the manufacturer of mirrors inside, chips cannot be produced, and therefore cars cannot be produced either. This illustrates how supply chains are interlocked and how a single failure of a component or supplier can have a ripple effect on a cascade of finished products.

The same goes for electric vehicles or aircrafts. An Airbus or Boeing aircraft has more than 1000 suppliers. It is a very complex supply chain. Figure 3B below shows the Tier 1 supply chain for a Boeing 737. It takes the whole world to build an aircraft. These suppliers have been selected and qualified over years, so to change from one to another would take years of knowledge transfer, skills ramp-up and specific tooling. You cannot change the supply chain like you can choose which bakery to buy your bread from. Industrial parts are complex, have a detailed technical specification that very few companies can guarantee, and supply chains have been built up over years or decades to become what they are today.

Figure 3B: The Boeing 737 tier-1 supply chain

Here is a random example of the path taken by a particular material: Iron ore is mined in Australia, shipped to China for refining, sent to Italy to make a specific steel alloy. The part is then sent to the Czech Republic for surface treatment, then to France for machining and final forming. The part is then sent to Germany for assembly into a fuselage section before the section returns to France for final assembly. We are talking supplier of supplier of supplier, sometimes down to tier 10 suppliers, and the parts are travelling around the world. It is estimated that a pair of jeans travels 30,000 km from the cotton or synthetic fibre to the retail store. Our entire supply chain is very complex and tends to get more complex as technologies evolve.

A smartphone or laptop requires the involvement of hundreds of companies and workers from a variety of countries, each with highly specialised knowledge, skills and tools. Even if a few countries manage to stabilise or increase their working population over the next 50 years, manufacturing smartphones and laptops on a large scale will be extremely challenging by the second half of the century due to the diverse and highly skilled supply chain involved, given that 75% of the current population lives in countries with fertility rates below the replacement rate.

Even very simple items require a global supply chain and complex machinery to assemble. A car tire today is made up of 25 components: different rubbers, carbon, chalk, steel, polyester, zinc, chemicals, and so on.

Something as simple as a pen has a very long and complex supply chain. It might not looked like it, but a pencil is a complex product that depends on a global supply chain. See below on Figure 3C.

Figure 3C: The supply chain of a pencil

Now imagine the complexity of a computer chip, a mobile phone, an EV, a 5G antenna, a 5-storey modern building, processed food, etc. .... Even a slight deglobalisation is a major disruption in the supply chain of all the everyday goods we consume.

The supply chain and the variety of materials we need in our modern lives is extremely complex in terms of technology, the amount of skills, machines and raw material required and the limited number of locations in which the value-added work is carried out. Due to economies of scale and the theory of comparative advantage, production sites tend to specialise and grow in size, so that for a given industrial task there are only a handful of sites and companies capable of performing that task on a large scale for the hundreds of customers downstream. Examples: Uranium refining, freshwater treatment chemicals, cobalt mining in the Congo, rare earths refining in China, etc. .... many industrial activities have a kind of monopoly, and most of the upstream chain of a final product comes from one of these specialised industrial sites. Industrial sites have become so specialised that some of them have become critical and irreplaceable in the supply chain of a product. This poses a risk to sovereignty and independence.

Anyone who argues that we need battery manufacturing plants in Europe or solar panel manufacturing plants in Europe for the purpose of energy independence and sovereignty, in order to bypass the monopoly of oil-producing countries, is misinformed and misses the point, ignoring the supply chain of raw materials.

All EV batteries need graphite in the anode and 95% of graphite is produced in China. All solar panels need silicon wafers, and there is no European-based supplier of silicon wafers. As a result, the use of these technologies implies an unavoidable dependency on the producers of these raw materials, so we would be adding dependency and supply chain risks rather than reducing our dependency on fossil fuels. And those specialised upstream raw material suppliers are absolutely dependent on fossil fuels to operate. We are simply adding more dependency and risk to our supply chain.

Figure 3D below shows the supply chain for semiconductors, the basic electronic component used in every electronic device.

Figure 3D: The semiconductor supply chain

A finished semiconductor has already travelled around the world before it is incorporated into a device. From the raw silicon material to the very specific manufacturing process, the skills and know-how required, the specific lithography tools needed, the high-precision production lines, you cannot replace one company or one country with another in the supply chain. The manufacturing process is a series of highly specialised activities where each step and each task can only be performed by a handful of qualified suppliers. The notion of independence and sovereignty, wished by some politicians, ignores the reality of a complex supply chain and is absolutely impossible in practice.

The increasing complexity of our systems makes us more vulnerable and less resilient to a future of environmental constraints or geopolitical turmoil. We have traded away local production and supplier diversity in favour of monopolistic suppliers that have exceeded critical size and become irreplaceable, in order to keep production costs low. We have traded away resilience to potentially critical events such as geopolitical turmoil, wars, trade wars, ecological limits, for the benefits of productivity, efficiency and price competitiveness. We all benefit from the capitalist system now, but it has made our economies very vulnerable to a drastic turn in world events.

Fresh water, tailings and energy consumption

Mining has 3 major drawbacks: It consumes tonnes of energy, it also consumes fresh water, and it releases huge quantities of tailings, the toxic waste by-product of material processing, released as a liquid on the ground or as particles in the air. Some towns in Chile located close to a copper mine have cancer and respiratory disease rates 10 times higher than the national average. Indonesia has experienced a boom in nickel production over the last two decades, a mineral that is widely used in steel and electric batteries. In towns located around mining and smelting sites, respiratory disease rates have increased 25-fold over the last 20 years. Air pollution is noticeably and measurably bad within up to 50 km of mining sites.

As mines are slowly depleting, the increase in energy consumption has been much faster than the increase in production. That's an economic risk. The other two risks are of an ESG nature, related to local communities and natural environmentalists opposed to new mines and to the expansion of existing ones: the classic and understandable NIMBY attitude of the local population: Not In My BackYard.

Europe is really engaged in this conversation and reluctant on mining in general, based on morality and environmental concerns, and has always been very reluctant to open up new mines in Europe. This is hypocritical and really unfair in a way, because Europe is pushing for a 'green' transition with more batteries, solar and wind, and thus outsourcing the 'dirty' mining to places like East Asia or Africa. Europe simply wants to pollute elsewhere so that it can use technologies that don't pollute in Europe. Totally unfair and rarely mentioned in public debate.

Water consumption is a real problem because most of the mining sites are in remote areas, far from population, so you have to bring water to those sites or pump massive amounts from underground, depleting the fresh water reserves of the surrounding population.

A conventional copper processing plant uses about 500 litres of water per dry tonne of ore. So a standard 50,000 tonne per day copper mine uses around 30 million litres of fresh water per day. That's enough to fill an 80,000-seat stadium, such as Brazil's Maracanã, in about seven weeks.

As we see more drought, water scarcity and rising temperatures around the world, how can we increase mining production as water becomes scarcer? It will be very challenging and we will face conflicts of use and tough decisions ahead.

The biggest environmental problem is the toxic waste left over from mining and processing. We're talking acids, heavy metals, radioactive elements, arsenic, lead, mercury, pyrite, sulphide minerals, bauxite and other substances you don't want in your rivers and your soil, but also particle released in the air affecting the health of the surrounding population. Most modern mines since the 1980s have had containment in place, but history has shown that some mines do not always follow safety procedures and accidents can happen, such as the collapse of an iron ore mine dam in Brazil into the Rio Dove in 2015, contaminating hundreds of kilometres of riverbed for decades. No one wants to be exposed to such risks. But for the "green" transition and electrification of things, we need a 2 to 10 times increase in mining. Where will the new mines be located? At some point, the consuming countries will have to take responsibility and locate the mines on their land. No country wants to be the world's dumping ground forever.

Tailings (toxic waste) of a mine

An example of the tailings scale: Chuquicamata is one of the oldest and largest copper mines in the world. The tailings dam, which contains the toxic waste from the mining process, is the size of Manhattan. To get to net-zero by 2050, we would need to open a new mine like Chuquicamata every four months until 2050. Where will we put all this waste? Are we sure the waste will be contained for decades to come?

"Green energy" is not green at all. It looks "green" to the blind and misinformed consumer, but it pollutes somewhere else, on a massive scale.

Material footprint

Let's take a closer look at the material footprint of the fossil fuel economy.

Coal: Over 8 billion tonnes are mined annually, primarily for use in generating electricity and in steelmaking, equating to 22 million tonnes per day.

Oil: At 85 million barrels per day, that equates to around 4.5 billion tonnes of oil per year, or 12 million tonnes per day.

Natural gas: The equivalent of 4 trillion cubic metres per year is extracted, with additional extraction for liquefaction and transportation, equating to 11 million cubes measuring 10 metres by 10 metres by 10 metres per day.

In total, over 40 million tonnes of fossil fuels are extracted daily, not including the additional infrastructure (e.g. pipelines, refineries, drilling platforms and shipping) required to maintain this level of extraction. All of it is burned. It all disappears into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), nitrogen oxides (NO and NO₂), and particles of pollution.

Now let's compare that to the material footprint of the 'energy transition' and the ongoing electrification of things.

The total annual material requirement for the clean energy transition, estimated by the IEA and other studies, is around 25 to 30 million tonnes per year for lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, graphite, manganese and rare earths combined. With an ore grade of 0.5% for nickel and copper, 1.5% for lithium, 3% for graphite and 0.2% for rare earths, we need to extract around 3 billion tonnes of critical minerals per year, or 8 million tonnes per day — about a fifth of the daily fossil fuel extraction rate. Also missing from this calculation is the huge amount of regular materials needed for renewable energy, such as glass and aluminium for solar panels, and concrete and steel for wind turbines. For example, about 800 tonnes of concrete and 160 tonnes of steel are needed to build a wind turbine, and about 15 kg of glass and 500 g of aluminium are needed for a single 1.7-square-metre solar panel. Also missing are all the chemical products, such as sulphuric acid, water and solvents, needed to purify and process the rock into the final pure critical material.

The message here is that 'renewable' energies are not at all neutral in terms of material consumption, but extremely demanding, on a par with fossil fuel energy in terms of the tonnes needed, albeit with a more complex and diverse range of materials required. 'Renewable' energies are not renewable; they are rebuildable, and each time we rebuild them every 25 years, we consume a lot of raw materials from the ground.

When countries with high living standards or entire industries, such as the car industry, claim to have reduced their CO₂ emissions, the reality is that those emissions are simply being emitted elsewhere, either in another country or further up the supply chain. They have also turned simple fossil fuel-burning machines into complex, heavy, material-intensive machines. There is such a thing as a green economy, renewable energy or a climate-neutral technology. As shown in Figure 4A below, there is simply no miracle: if a country has a high standard of living, it consumes far more resources than the planet can sustainably provide, and it produces far more toxic waste than the planet can absorb and regenerate.

Figure 4A: How many Earths we need?

Figure 4A above shows that people from countries with high living standards, such as Dubai, South Korea and the USA, either have no choice or are unwilling to return to the minimalist, environmentally respectful lifestyle of people from countries such as India and Ecuador. However, people from India and Ecuador mostly aspire to Western standards of living and lifestyles, such as those in South Korea, the USA or Dubai. This means that, overall, the mining and material footprint per person will continue to increase and the impact on the biosphere and ecosystems will continue to worsen.

China's dominance on material refining

China is the perfect example of how to identify a country's strengths and weaknesses, plan a geopolitical strategy accordingly, and use this knowledge to gain leverage in trade, economic and diplomatic negotiations.

Since beginning its rapid industrialisation and urbanisation in 1990, China has been dependent on oil and gas imports, its biggest weakness. It has therefore diversified its supply sources to avoid giving any country a geopolitical upper hand. China imports most of its oil from Russia, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and most of its gas from Qatar, Russia, Australia and the USA, among other countries. A well diversified source with various origin countries. Conversely, China has an abundance of coal, which it uses extensively to power its industrial base and as a primary source of industrial heating and electricity production.

What has made China a great strategic manufactruring and commercial leader is its willingness, quite early in the 2000s, to do what other developed countries refused to do: Mining and refining metals and materials. Due to environmental concerns, poor working conditions and the pollution caused by toxic tailings and waste, Europe and the USA decided to outsource mining and processing, which are considered to have low added value in the supply chain, to China. China gladly accepted the world lead in mining and especially refining because it knew it could leverage this in trade and geopolitical discussions. This was also because all fossil fuel alternatives require a lot of materials. China has turned its refining and chemical expertise into the next step in the electrification supply chain, producing electric motors, electric vehicles (EVs), batteries, solar panels and wind turbines. It is now the dominant player, mastering innovation and technology in all areas linked to electrification. China now holds more than 70% of the refining capacity of many metals and materials, such as nickel, lithium, iron ore, copper, cobalt, graphite and rare earths, as well as holding a 50% share of the global steel, wind turbine and EV markets. China dominates the global manufacturing sector thanks to its control of upstream material processing. Whatever minerals China is short of, it invests heavily in South America and Africa to take control of foreign mines for downstream processing in China.

Figure 5A below shows that, since 2000, China has continued to increase its manufacturing output and exports, mostly to the detriment of the USA, which has gladly imported cheap raw materials and deflation from China.

Figure 5A: Balance of trades of manufactured goods

As shown in Figure 5B below, China now produces around 35% of the world's manufacturing output, outperforming the next nine manufacturing countries combined. This dominance of manufacturing activities certainly poses a threat to the world, to globalisation, to trade negotiations and to the world stability in case of China's potential future decline.

Figure 5B: China's share of world manufactured output

China has become a manufacturing superpower over the past three decades from 1990 to 2020 thanks to government subsidies, low labour costs (which was the case in the 1990s but no longer as low as they were in the 2020s), more lax environmental policies and regulations, and its abundance of coal and willingness to use it as an energy source. However, the main reason for its success in manufacturing and industry is that it has mastered the supply chain of raw materials and processing in terms of knowledge, sourcing, market share and competitive advantage. As shown in Figure 5C below, most of the world's key metal refining is happening in China, and China's dominance in mineral and metal refining is expected to remain or strengthen in the coming decade.

Figure 5C: China dominates critical mineral refining

If we take batteries as an example of a downstream application with high material consumption, while China does not mine most of the raw materials on its own soil, it owns some mining assets abroad. However, it definitely owns over 60% of the world's refining capacity, as shown in Figure 5D below. This means that if you want to build a battery factory for EVs or grid-scale applications outside of China, or an EV factory, you will have to buy the refined material or the finished product from China. The same is true of the solar panel and silicon wafer industries, as well as the rare earth and magnet industries, which are key components in electric motors, drones, EVs and military applications. China is unavoidable and indispensable in the material refining supply chain.

Figure 5D: China's dominance in the battery supply chain

As a result, China is becoming a world leader in the car manufacturing industry. While Japan, Europe and the USA dominated the manufacturing of internal combustion engine (ICE) cars for decades, China's competitive advantage and supply chain edge in electric vehicles (EVs) has propelled the country to become the number one for exporting passengers cars in 2024, surpassing Japan. Figure 5E below shows the drastic rise in China's exports of passenger cars, with its entire fleet consisting of EVs or hybrid vehicles.

Figure 5E: Passengers car exports from China

The West's intention to decarbonise and electrify our energy applications will increase our dependency on China, given that China dominates the supply chain for electrification (solar, wind, batteries, heat pumps and electrolysers), as shown in Figure 5F below.

Figure 5F: China dominates the supply chain of electrification

Electrifying our economies or attempting to reduce our fossil fuel consumption for environmental purposes means two things: First, we hand over our sovereignty and dependency to China and its vast manufacturing base, leaving us at the mercy of trade war escalation, supply shortages or diplomatic disputes. Secondly, we relocate dirty and polluting activities, including hard labour in extreme conditions, respiratory diseases and soil and air pollution, to other countries willing to undertake mining and refining activities. Electric technologies create the illusion of a 'clean' world, but they simply relocate the pollution while still consuming coal, gas and oil indirectly: coal and gas for electricity and industrial heating, and oil for transport and shipping around the world at each stage of the supply chain.

Three compelling stories

Here are three examples of mining industries and their compelling and terrible implications. These are not targeted choices, but rather random examples to illustrate, in order of appearance, the environmental damage caused by the mining industry, the dependency of materials and minerals on all kinds of energy, and the way in which mining cycles can decimate populations.

My first story is about the rapid growth of nickel mining in Indonesia. Nickel is primarily used in steel production and some in electric batteries.

Indonesia's nickel production has grown fivefold in only ten years, from 2015 to 2025 — an incredible pace. Since 2023, Indonesian nickel has accounted for half of the world's total production, and this figure is expected to reach 60% by 2027.

See the pictures below of a mining site and processing plant in Indonesia.

A nickel mining site in 2023 in Morowali, Central Sulawesi, Indonesia

An enormous amount of rainforest has been deforested in a very short time to make room for mining, smelting and processing sites. Of the 920,000 hectares of nickel mining concessions in Indonesia, around two-thirds are covered by forest.

As well as deforestation, the expansion of mining operations poses other environmental hazards, such as the pollution of water streams and fishing grounds. This pollution occurs because less conventional methods are being used to transform nickel ore into battery-grade nickel, such as high-pressure acid leaching, which produces toxic waste.

The fishing village of Fatufia in Bahodopi, Morowali, Indonesia in 2023

The above photo shows a fishing village in the Bahodopi district near Morowali in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. The villagers used to live almost exclusively from fishing and were surrounded by rainforest. However, the landscape has changed dramatically in only 10 years due to deforestation. This has led to a loss of biodiversity and pollution of the air and soil. The inhabitants now complain about declining fish yields, as their seawater has been polluted by factory waste. They now rely on the mining industry for income.

The same situation is happening on Halmahera, an island in Indonesia's North Maluku province. Before nickel mining began, the island's villagers relied on fishing and farming crops such as cloves, cocoa and coconuts. Local fishermen report significant drops in their catch, as well as an ocean polluted by oil and industrial effluent. Deforestation upstream turns rivers, which are a source of drinking water, brown with mud. This also threatens some indigenous peoples, affecting their land rights and traditional ways of life.

Deforestation decreases the soil's ability to retain water during heavy rainfall, generating more frequent and violent floods in surrounding villages. In the photo below, nickel mining workers ride towards a nickel smelting and processing plant in Weda, Halmahera, Indonesia. The deforestation of the area hosting the smelting and processing plants largely caused the flood event, resulting in a truly tragic situation.

Miners ride to work in Halmahera, Indonesia, during a flood.

Today, thousands of people on Halmahera work in the nickel mining industry, and industrial activities have replaced forests and farmland. This strips the environment of its natural defences and pollutes the air and water. According to Climate Rights International, at least 5,331 hectares of tropical forest have been cut within nickel mining concessions on Halmahera, an island in Indonesia's North Maluku province that now accounts for 17% of global nickel production.

Furthermore, air pollution from nickel smelting and coal-based energy production has surged, with one local health centre recording a 25-fold increase in respiratory diseases between 2020 and 2023. The potential carbon emissions from expanding mining operations are significant when you consider that the smelting process is highly energy intensive, and the vast majority of Indonesian smelters are coal-powered. This comes on top of the loss of the earth's capacity to naturally absorb CO₂ via the missing photosynthesis of trees due to deforestation.

In summary, within 10 years, the lives of the inhabitants have been ruined: their original source of income has been destroyed, the air, soil and rivers have been polluted, the risk of lung diseases and floods has increased, and decent fishing or harvesting jobs in harmony with nature have been turned into difficult, constraining, poorly paid work in the industry, which they know is destroying their ecosystem at a fast pace. They have no say in what is happening because the big mining industry is richer and has more political influence than any local authority in those Indonesian villages. What a shame! In the process, New Caledonia, a French island located east of Australia which relied heavily on nickel mining for revenue, has been put out of business by low-cost 'dirty' Indonesian nickel mining within 10 years. This has created an economic disaster in New Caledonia, resulting in mass poverty, social unrest, and a severe drop in local public funds and basic infrastructure.

The energy transition is fuelling a growing global demand for minerals and metals, and therefore an unprecedented mining boom. The World Bank expects the energy transition to increase demand for metals and minerals very rapidly. For example, demand for nickel, cobalt, lithium and manganese is expected to increase by more than 500% by 2050 compared to 2020. This comes at a drastic local environmental cost.

My second true mining story illustrates the complexity of the supply chain, the high energy consumption, and the interdependency of all activities.

Escondida is one of the world's largest copper mines, located in the Chilean Andes, about 100km from the Pacific coast. On the mine site in the mountains there is no source of fresh water, which is essential for processing the material. So the water is pumped from the sea through a pipeline. But the water has to be cleaned of salt for use in the mine, so there is a desalination plant on the coast, which is extremely energy-intensive, to filter the water and pump it up 100km to the mine site in the mountain. So much energy is needed that there is a dedicated coal-fired power station near the desalination plant, whose sole purpose is to power the desalination plant and pump the water up to the mine. This power plant needs coal as fuel, and coal is regularly imported by ship, mainly from Australia, from another coal mine.

Water desalination plant for the Escondida copper mine in Chile

This example is astonishing because it shows the high energy consumption of a mine, in addition to the electricity and diesel used on site, a huge amount is needed to supply fresh water.

It is also astonishing because in order for this mine in Chile to operate, we need the continuous supply from another mine in Australia. Or to put it another way: Copper is at the center of any electronic or electrical device, and to get the copper raw material needed for the 'green' transition, you need coal to power the water supply system, you need oil in the form of diesel and kerosene to power the trucks, excavators and ships that carry the coal, and you need natural gas to make the steel for the trucks, excavators, ships, power plant and pipeline. This shows how interconnected and interdependent all our industries are. To me, this is a shocking example of how a silo vision of the future is misleading and how any technology requires the use of many other technologies. There is no material substitution, only material addition.

Let's take another example, another true story, to illustrate the 'low hanging fruit' theory and why future generations will only have access to low quality and expensive mines:

Nauru is a small country and a 20km² island located in the South West Pacific ocean. Nauru was one of the richest countries in the world in terms of GDP per capita in the 1960s to 1980s because of all the phosphate mining that took place. Much of the island has been covered for centuries by bird dropping poop, which are rich in natural phosphorus, which is used as a fertiliser in modern agriculture. When we discovered this mining-rich area, the economy suddenly boomed and the local people had a massive increase in their standard of living, cars were imported for the first time and roads were built, while the majority of the inhabitants lived off the mining and became very wealthy.

The island of Nauru and its once phosphorus-rich soil

After 3 decades of mining, there were no resources left to mine, so the activity stopped, the economy of the country fell off a cliff, and suddenly there was no money to buy car fuel, medicine, repair parts, etc. The population quickly fell back into poverty, suffering and dwindling in numbers as many chose to flee the island to maintain a good quality of life, rather than return to the close to nature and simplistic way of life of the 1950s. The quality of life on the island after 2000 is probably worse than it was after the Second World War before the mining activities started, all things considered.

This example of Nauru shows that all ore-rich areas are mined first, and that the economy of a given area can rapidly decline as economic activity declines. Resources that took thousands of centuries to create are extracted and consumed in half a century. With the accelerating demand for materials and the declining ore grade of minerals in mines around the world, and the declining EROI of oil, what will we do when all the easily accessible and cheap copper, oil, iron ore and aluminium is out of the ground? We will only have less abundant, less dense, more expensive and more difficult to access resources.

These raw materials have been the pillars of our civilisation for centuries. The next generations will face a depleted world with no alternative but to regenerate the pool of resources or escape.

You can see that mining is not going to get any easier in the future. Is recycling and circular economy a solution to avoid mining in the first place and reuse existing material? Let's have a look.

The circular economy

The narrative of 'energy transition' and electrifying things and becoming net-zero carbon is built mainly on the back of wind, solar, batteries, hydropower and nuclear. If you do the math on how many resources you would need to power our current civilisation 24/7/365 with these technologies only, taking fossil fuels out of the equation, you would need a 10 to 200 fold increase in iron, copper, lithium, nickel, aluminium production, and that is in the order of 2 to 10 times more than what is geologically extractable from the earth's crust. There are simply not enough mines in the world to extract all these materials. So the idea of recycling all end-of-life materials is mandatory in any green transition scenario. Enter the circular economy: The idea that all products can be recycled indefinitely by separating raw materials and reusing them in new products.

The current system is a linear economy: A material is mined from the earth, purified and used for specific high-tech applications such as a laptop, aircraft or car. At the end of the product's life, the item is discarded, crushed, either incinerated or dumped in landfills, man-made piles of rubbish.

The idea of a circular economy is to disassemble these end-of-life products and extract all the raw materials they are made of so that we can reuse them in new products. A circular lifeline with no waste, no new mining of raw materials.

The circular economy is a sound idea in theory, but there are several problems:

The human system is expanding through growth, so the amount of waste generated at any given time is always less than the amount of new (mined or recycled) material needed.

Technology changes so that the composition of the waste product does not match the new generation of new products. For example, the lead-acid batteries of the past do not contain the lithium needed for today's lithium-ion batteries.

Products are made for the best value and are not designed to be recycled, so it is extremely expensive and difficult to separate the raw materials. In reality, we recover a minority of materials and landfill the majority. In a mobile phone, only the screen and battery are designed to be replaced. If any other component fails, the manufacturer would rather make a brand new phone than replace the defective part.

When we recycle a product, we actually recycle one or two elements, not all the elements of the product. The reason we do not recycle all elements is because they are present in too small a quantity in the end-of-life product, or the material is not expensive or valuable enough to make it economically viable to extract it from a waste product. Most of the waste products are simply dumped, so there is a huge gap between all the elements we need for a product and the elements we get from recycling.

As we move away from fossil fuel technologies such as the internal combustion engine, the machines become more complex and require many more of new materials such as silicon, cobalt, lithium, rare earths, and so on. These elements were not needed in fossil fuel technologies and are not available in the recycling world. Take a look at the material footprint of different energy sources and "green" technologies in Figures 6A and 6B below.

Figure 6A: Material footprint of different energy sources

Figure 6B: Material footprint of green technologies

What you can see in Figures 6A and 6B above is that moving away from coal and gas-fired power stations may be good for carbon emissions, but it is extremely demanding on land surface and on raw materials. Look at the blue bars on Figure 6A and remember that cement and concrete alone account for almost 10% of the world's total carbon emissions.

Not only does electrification demand a large quantity of materials (in kg), it also requires a diverse range of minerals and metals in high purity, which are complex and difficult to obtain. Electrification will make supply chains more complex and dependent on China, which controls around 70% of the world's material processing and refining capacity. This makes our everyday products more vulnerable to shortages and geopolitical risks in the supply chain.

Modern technologies demand a more complex supply chain and a greater purity of raw materials. Replacing a diesel engine in a car with an electric motor means more wires and electronics, as well as a battery made of several minerals to replace a simple petrol tank. It also means touch screens and centralised electronic devices such as the braking system and road adhesion control. The same level of complexity is seen in every domain: Energy production, hospitals, energy storage, public transport, agriculture, AI, data centres and smartphones, etc. Your smartphone might weigh only 500 grams in your hand, but because about 40 different atoms are required to manufacture all the tiny components, the amount of raw ore dug out of the ground is about a factor 1,000 times more, meaning that around 500 kg of rock were mined, crushed, and refined to make a 500-gram end product. Demand for mining and materials is expected to grow exponentially with the adoption of robots, AI, data centres, 'renewable' energy and electrification, as shown in Figure 6C below.

Figure 6C: New mines needed only to cover battery production until 2030

As shown in Figure 6D below, the demand for raw materials and feedstock, including food, wood, fossil fuels, metals and minerals, has been growing steadily since the 1950s. Technologies such as the internet, smartphones, software, cloud computing, AI and the automation of industries are not changing the trend of the last 70 years, but are actually exacerbating it. New technologies make supply chains more complex and increase material and water consumption and energy demand in order to produce more affordable goods and services and improve living standards for humanity. The idea that a new technology could make the world 'green', clean and non-polluting is absolutely irrational and utopian.

Figure 6D: Total material extraction and use continue to rise steadily

The solution of recycling and the circular economy naturally follows.

Recycling requires collection, manual processing and is mostly done on a smaller scale than mining, which makes the economics of recycling always more expensive than large-scale mining, so recycling can never find a foothold in a free market and cannot compete with mining. Yes, it can be a profitable business to recover the $10 of gold used on the electronic components inside a computer with some cheap (child) labour in some Asian or African countries, but gold is the exception, and we just throw away all the other 40 components, except maybe the battery.

Only 8% of all materials are recycled worldwide. The rest end up in landfill sites or are disposed of in nature. The best recycled materials are gold at 85% and silver at 50% because of its high value, copper at 30% because the metal is usually pure and not mixed with other metals in wiring cables, steel at 50% and aluminium at 40% because of abundance and easy collection. Even copper, which is the best candidate for a circular economy as it is used in its purest form for all electrical wires and cables, has only 30% of its global consumption coming from recycling. However, many other metals are barely recycled or not recycled at all, either because they are present in small quantities in end-of-life products or because they have a low monetary value. Furthermore, many materials are not recycled at all, including concrete and cement from buildings and infrastructure, and asphalt from roads, as well as plastics, which are recycled at a rate of only about 10%.

There are 2 main technical problems with recycling: The dispersion of multiple atoms into an alloy, mixing them together from pure raw material to a mixture of different combined atoms, and the micro quantities used in technical devices, so that eventually a lot of metals are not recycled because it is simply not economical to do so.

Titanium oxide is used to whiten paintings, coatings, toothpaste, etc. We are not going to scrap the paint off old cars and ships and buildings just to recycle the small amount of titanium in it, it would not be economical and would be far from covering the need in volume, so old paint is just dump into the environment.

There is only about 5 euros worth of raw material in a mobile phone and 10 euros of gold in a laptop, because the quantities used are minimal. Extracting and recycling these materials would cost much more than the actual value of the raw material you could get, so the devices end up being dumped and not recycled.

A laptop contains 350g of plastic, 6g of lithium, 80g of copper and 0.1g of gold, among other materials. Only the $10 of gold is economically viable to recycle, and only in poor countries with cheap energy and cheap labour. All the other elements are simply too small to be worth collecting, crushing, melting, separating and refining. See Figure 6E below for the recycling rate of various metals.

Figure 6E: Recycling rate of metals

Another reason why metals and minerals will never be 100% recycled is that the cost of recycling is uncompetitive compared to mining new materials. The process of recycling involves collecting materials, transporting them to a recycling factory, crushing them and separating the atoms chemically. The feedstock or input flow of a recycling factory is usually more expensive than new mining. It comes in various forms in quite different proportions due to the diversity of end-of-life products and cannot be scaled up like mining, so recycling does not benefit from economies of scale. When you consider that there are 50 different atoms in a 300-gram mobile phone, laptop or car, it is clear that a recycling factory cannot match the production output of a mining and processing facility, which provides a steady and constant supply of material on which to optimise industrial processes. This essentially ensures that the cost of recycling remains higher than mining new materials indefinitely.

For example, to replace all internal combustion engines of the world with electric motors, we would need about 3 times more copper. Recycling alone would leave us far short of what we actually need. The ideology and belief that all our resources can come from recycling because mining is dirty is misguided and typical of Europe ideologies devoid of any sense of actual reality. We in Europe like to lecture the world about how great we are, how sustainable and ethical we are. But when you look at the practicality of this ideology, it is just a big lie. Europe does not mine, it imports all its materials from the rest of the world. Not mining in Europe is only possible because we mine somewhere else for european consumption.

In most cases, recycling cannot meet the high specifications of high-tech products. An aluminium part in an aircraft is actually an aluminium alloy made from aluminium, magnesium, silicon, copper and chromium to achieve specific strength properties and corrosion resistance. The purity and accuracy required for this alloy mix is very high. The reality is that only the aluminium component might comes from recycling. And at the end of that part's life, it will be reused in a lesser product, such as used for roads and buildings construction, mixed with other things.

The circular economy defies the laws of thermodynamics and entropy: Energy tends to dissipate and disorder. Structured compositions tend to mix and become chaotic into less dense energy content. You need a massive energy input to up-cycle, and most recycling is actually down-cycling: 2nd life products are of lower quality, lower purity, lower application.

Will we run out of materials soon?

Like peak oil, people are concerned about whether the world will face a permanent shortage of copper, aluminium, steel or any other metal or mineral in the coming decades.

Geologically speaking, the answer is no. There are enough materials in the Earth's crust to meet humanity's needs for at least a century. The only limits are the quantity of energy required to extract them from the ground and the market price of the commodities. For example, if we extract a given material from a mine with an ore grade of 3% and this mine runs out, there are other potential mines with ore grades of 1% that are currently idle because they are not economically competitive. This means that in the mine at 1% ore grade, we would need to spend much more energy crushing, processing and refining this source rock to obtain the same quantity of the final material as in the original mine with an ore grade of 3%. This means that if the market price of the material triples, all the mines with an ore grade of 1% suddenly become economically viable. This increase in price would trigger the opening of new mines and increase total production output and total reserves.

Geologically and physically, there is enough of each material in the Earth's crust to sustain human needs for several centuries. We won't run out of any material. The classical Malthusian fear has always been popular, but has never been realised. Take copper, for example: The average ore grade was 3% in 1950; now it is 0.7%. Nevertheless, we still produce around ten times more copper today than in 1950. Technological advances, economies of scale, improved modern processing and the increased price of copper from 0.20$ in 1950 to about 5$ per pound today have enabled us to reduce the cost of extraction per unit of weight. We extract enough copper to meet our current needs and reserves will be there for the growing needs of electrification. Temporary supply shortages trigger higher prices, which in turn trigger investment in mine expansion or new mines, thus increasing production. Although the quantity of energy required to extract 1 kg of copper has doubled in 20 years, we extract and produce 60% more copper today than 20 years ago because energy (fossil fuels) is abundant and cheap. There is no physical shortage. If the energy supply increases and the market price of the material rises, we can continue to extract and produce any quantity of any material.

As with oil and gas, what will change over time is which countries are the major producers and which countries have the largest reserves. This will affect the geopolitical balance of power. This is especially true for key materials that are abundant but located in very limited regions of the world, such as cobalt, rare earths and uranium. These key materials are the subject of political negotiation and geopolitical power conflicts.

Relying too heavily on the exploitation of natural resources can be detrimental to a country's prosperity. The 'resource curse', also known as 'Dutch disease', occurs when a country heavily exploits a single natural resource, causing its economy, jobs and public revenues to become overly dependent on it. This inevitably leads to an economic downturn when the resource is in lower demand worldwide or is depleted, causing the entire economy and the country's prosperity to collapse.

Among reasons that trigger the resource curse: A sudden slowdown in demand or depletion of the resource. The abundance of money inflow that can lead to corruption at a governmental and public level, and misallocation of resource revenues. The local currency gains in valuation due to export sales of the resource, making the export of other industries, especially complex products, uncompetitive and unprofitable, and leading to deindustrialisation. This starts a vicious circle in which an even bigger share of the economy becomes linked to a given resource.

Examples of the resource curse leading to an economic breakdown include the Spanish silver rush in South America in the 16th and 17th centuries, Venezuela's oil industry from the 1920s to the 1970s, and the natural gas industry in the Netherlands in the 1960s and 1970s.

Good examples of resource management include Norway, which has turned its natural gas profits into a sovereign fund; Saudi Arabia, which is currently trying to diversify its economy away from oil; and the gold rush in Ghana in the 1990s.

Conclusion

A fully circular economy sounds good on paper, but it will never materialize.

Recycling is far from efficient due to the complexity of the materials we use in our daily modern lives, or due to the small quantity it each product. Only about 15% of all materials are recycled. 100% is not achievable because materials degrade, break down or are simply not collected, or are so mixed up together that the cost and energy required to separate all the elements would be far greater than mining new materials.

Even if all materials could be recycled and reused without loss, energy is still required for the recycling process and for the re-manufacturing of items. Energy is not recycled: we use it, convert heat into motion or chemical reactions, and some heat is lost to the atmosphere. These are the laws of thermodynamics. Energy is at the heart of any economy or activity. Energy is used once, there is no recycling of energy used. Since 80% of all primary energy is fossil fuel based, even in a fully circular economy we would still be using fossil fuel based energy. And even if all the energy we needed came from solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and hydropower, these energy sources still require fossil fuels to be mined, processed, manufactured, assembled and transported on a large scale.

Additonally, as long as there is growth on the planet, currently around 3% per year globally, new technologies will require new materials. If I produce 100 tonnes of something in a year, use it until the end of its life after 20 years, but then after 20 years the world has grown overall by 50% and needs 150 tonnes of new production, even if I could reuse all the scrap of the end of life materials I have, I am still short 50 tonnes that I need to mine newly again.

The growing need for materials is a driver of energy demand, due to electrification, complexity, digitalisation and the addition of 'renewable' technologies. Materials and resources are really only limited by how much energy we are willing to expend to get them. We could dig up some rocks under 4000 metres of water with a concentration of 0.001% of a particular material if we really wanted to, but the price of the energy used to extract that material would be huge. If the market price of a particular material found deep under the sea is $1 million per gram, then we will see deep-sea mining because it is technically feasible. If any metal or mineral becomes economically viable to be mined, it will happen and it will be mined.

With the demand for materials expected to grow everywhere in the world, especially in developping economies, combined with the declining quality of ore and the unavailability of already consumed "low hanging fruit" dense and easily accessible areas, we will have to use more and more energy to get the materials we need, even in a post-growth or modern service based industrialised economy. That's why we're using more and more of the dense and cheap source of energy that is fossil fuels. Energy is the lifeblood of the economy. We will need more fossil fuel energy in the future just to maintain a constant level of production.

Since 1970, we have tripled our global material extraction and doubled our population thanks to very efficient technologies and advances. With better technology comes better efficiency. This either leads to more output, which means more material extraction and energy consumption, or it leads to cheaper output, and the money saved goes elsewhere to make and buy other things that also extract materials and burn energy. In the end, the technology is simply used as a giant heat engine that extracts and burns and feeds itself. That's the Jevons Paradox, and one reason why we continue to extract more and more materials from the Earth and use more and more energy.

The move away from fossil fuels, whether by design or by geological depletion, is leading us to electrification and more complex devices that require more material input. Mining is something of a taboo subject: Everyone wants the new technology and the materials, but no one wants the mining that goes with it. Especially in Europe, people have a NIMBY attitude towards mining: Not In My BackYard.

It is at least questionable whether we will be able to mine all these raw materials, or whether we should want to, given the environmental impact of mining. Is degrowth, a more minimalist world with less consumption, the only solution? We will look at this idea in a dedicated chapter.

Next chapter: 11 – THE GOVERNMENTS DEBT TRAP

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- THE LAST DECADE -
December 2025

Why we are all doomed and there is nothing we can do about it.

Why do we have so few kids, and what are the consequences for society.

The uncomfortable and inconvenient truth about the soon coming end of prosperity in our industrial civilisation.

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