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back to article Evil mining firms? Please. Obeying profit motive is KINDER to the environment

Goldman Sachs has released a note to investors shouting that this is the end of the iron age. But it's not talking about how pointy bits on spears are now replaced by lead in bullets: rather, that the age when owning a mountain of iron ore was a route to easy billions is over. We don't need your I wouldn't normally bring …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    environmental cost

    That's an interesting article and doubtlessly there will still be places in the world where new, easily developed mineral/resources depostis will be be discovered. That does not change that everytime one of those is found and used there is one less of those easily discovered and devoloped resources to be used by future generations.

    You also ignored the environmental cost of developing resources in the underdeveloped world. Actually, here in Canada, our illustrious prime minister stephen harper is turning our environmental regulation and scientific research in that (and all other) area(s) back toward underdeveloped country standards. Fortunately, he's also making sure that education and health care are underfunded so that future genations won't understand why they are so unhealthy.

    No apology for the rant. harper's a vile ass activiley working to make Canada and the rest of the world a worse place than it needs to be.

    16 9 Reply
    1. Marcus Aurelius
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      Re: environmental cost

      It was an interesting read, but what he's saying is that if no "easy" mineral deposits are found then the price will go back up and they can merrily start reopening Cornish and Czech tin mines.

      He's also saying that there are huge resources that probably dwarf anything previously extracted because the real issue was transportation, not ease of extraction, and therefore there is no end of resources for the foreseeable future.

      The only place where this may be different is oil/gas and here technologies such as fracking and improved drilling have so far come to help out. The problem with oil and gas of course is that its products are not going to help the environment unless you want a suntan whilst your cruise ship is floating round the drowned cities of London and New York.

      10 5 Reply

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      2. Omgwtfbbqtime
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        Devil

        Re: environmental cost

        I also read it as don't expect a quick killing on aseteroid mining stocks - it will be a long time before they are price competitive for most materials.

        0 0 Reply

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    2. Tim Worstal
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      Re: environmental cost

      "That does not change that everytime one of those is found and used there is one less of those easily discovered and devoloped resources to be used by future generations."

      Yes, obviously, but if we adhere to that strictly then no generation can ever use anything. For no generation can ever be allowed to use anything that might reduce the ability of a future generation to use what has been used.

      That's a sufficiently strict standard that there's no way we can hold a society to it. It would, obviously, mean that no generation could ever use any mineral at all. Not even those future generations that we're leaving them for, because there will be generations after them.

      If the "running out" date were in 50 years time I might even sign up to such a plan. But even the earliest of such running out dates are thousands of years in the future (and some appear to extend to the heat death of the universe, for aluminium or iron for example) and who in buggery knows what society, technology or price are going to be like then?

      18 2 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
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        Anonymous Coward

        Re: environmental cost

        Hi Tim, I don't disagree with anything you said at all and, of course, it always make sense to extract the most easily available of any resource. My concern is that in so much of the world there is little or no concern for environmental degradation and it appears in the rest of the world the only consideration is to pay the lowest price for that resource, this obviously also makes sense, but sadly guarantees that there will be many, major environmental incidents.

        8 2 Reply
        1. Tim Worstal
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          Re: environmental cost

          Well, that "so little concern" for environmental degradation will bring out a hollow laugh in miners these days.

          I do agree with the basic idea: we don't want to go polluting rivers just as we don't want to build roads over mating natterjack toads. But to give you one example from personal experience. I've a little project in development. Processing the crud left over from a previous mining exercise. Rock just sitting on a hillside. And to process it I've got to go through the entire mine permit process as if I was about to blow apart a mountain with dynamite.

          Seriously, I want to pick up rock from where it is lying on the ground, grind it and separate it (using electricity and water, no chemicals at all) and the whole thing would take a year, employ maybe 5 people and have a total value of perhaps 3 million euros (gross turnover, not profit at all). License time? 2 years and counting so far.

          9 1 Reply

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            1. Sean Timarco Baggaley
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              Re: environmental cost

              Except it's not nasty, toxic "waste": It's granite. (Mr. Worstall explained that the hill he owns is full of tin ore, and that said ore tends to be found in granite.)

              Crushed granite, granted, but washing that down into a nearby stream isn't going to harm it any more than washing the topsoil into said stream does. It's a perfectly natural rock. (And as Mr. Worstall patiently explained, the sea does plenty of rock-crushing all by itself. How do you think sandy beaches happen?)

              Besides, there are other uses for crushed rocks. Construction aggregate, for example, is mostly crushed rock, for example. And you need a lot of aggregate in construction. It's what you mix with cement to make concrete.

              No, my only quibble with Mr. Worstall's article is use of "Mr. Henry". And he's not the only one to make this mistake...

              The manufacturer is Numatic—both British-owned and British made, which is more than can be said for Dyson—while their vacuum cleaners are simply "Henry", "Hetty", "Charles", etc. Their wet and dry vacuum models are "Charles" and "George". "Henry" is their low-end model and doesn't do wet vacuuming, so I'd not recommend using one for hoovering an Asian beach, no matter how long the extension cord is, as Henry would not have such a happy face for long.

              8 0 Reply
              1. Tim Worstal
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                Re: environmental cost

                Fair point, I stand corrected.

                "Their wet and dry vacuum models are "Charles" and "George". "Henry" is their low-end model and doesn't do wet vacuuming, so I'd not recommend using one for hoovering an Asian beach,"

                0 0 Reply
            2. SoaG
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              Re: crushed waste, from the ground rock.

              Sand.

              The word you're looking for is sand.

              6 0 Reply
              1. Tim Worstal
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                Re: crushed waste, from the ground rock.

                Yup, and a vital part of a rock crushing operation's economics is, well, would anyone like to buy my sand?

                Can range in value from less than zero (the sand so fine that it is "mud") to $50 a tonne for nice quartz sand for the kiddie's playgrounds.

                All I ever wanted was scandium but I've had to find out about tin, tungsten, and yes sand, in pursuit.

                3 0 Reply
              2. Tom 35
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                Re: crushed waste, from the ground rock.

                So this pile of rock is just inert rock, and the tin he wants. No other metals or say sulphur compounds that you tend to find around tailings (hint, if there is tin, there will be other metals). And will that "Just water" still be just water when your done with it?

                5 0 Reply
          2. SDoradus
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            Re: environmental cost

            As a tech for a university geology department I collected and analysed the environmental impact of gold mines, and it's funny how people miss the way big mining now has to 'remediate' the land they tear up to the point that the wetland wildlife gets vast areas of prime breeding ground, for example (although the small undercapitalized one-man or family outfits are altogether another matter).

            And it's true that lots of places bear names testifying to ancient industrial importance, like (as you mention) the "Erzgebirge, or Krusny Hory" or perhaps Jarnberaland in Sweden, nicely illustrating the point that progression in tech results in new resources being exploitable. It's a bit like a mining version of Moore's law.

            The funny thing about this series of disputes is that I agree with nearly all the hard facts and soft attitudes you allude to, even to the point of despising the lack of breadth in 'greenie' thought. (Not all greenies are so easily duped, though; the notorious Farley Mowat went to Russia to collect millions of copyright Roubles owing from his books - in the sixties - and wrote a book about the experience. In it he noted how on one flight he looked out his aircraft window and saw the vast blight on the landscape created by centrally-planned exploitation. This made his hosts very uncomfortable. Even Marx appreciated the productive power of capitalism's market rule, but no-one in the USSR realized that there's also a market in consumer appreciation of ecological improvement.)

            And yet you're surely wrong about the long-term prospects for industrial civilization, just as Moore's law is running into trouble. Sooner or later there are hard limits and we will run out of the luck or ingenuity needed to bypass them; for your argument addresses only one of the sides of the squeeze, the supply side, which is improving steadily but is still a long way from matching the exponential increase in demand.

            An exponential demand will always, sooner or later, be capped by a linear increase in supply. It might be at nine billion people. It might be at six hundred million. It might be at a trillion, or when the entire mass of the Earth is converted into people. Mathematically though, it will happen, and by the nature of exponential versus linear, the details hardly matter to the timing of the crunch.

            1 0 Reply
            1. James Micallef Silver badge
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              Re: environmental cost

              "a long way from matching the exponential increase in demand."

              I think you're making up the "exponential increase in demand". Firstly, world population is not increasing exponentially, growth is actually slowing down as countries get richer. Rich countries already have stable or even declining populations, and as the developing world develops, they will also slow their growth. UN estimates over 50-odd years is that world population will eventually cap at around the 12 billion mark, and if eventually some time in the future the whole world is stable and at least as comfortable quality of life as current 'west'*, population might even start to decline.

              Second, individual consumption is also not increasing exponentially. Instead of using more stuff, we do more but use stuff more efficiently so individual use does not increase. There have been past cases where consumption increases exponentially but only for short periods of time, you can't extrapolate continued exponential increase from just a small period of it.

              * We can all dream, can't we?

              0 0 Reply
    3. James Micallef Silver badge
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      Re: environmental cost

      Very interesting article as usual Mr Worstall. Just one question, you alluded to peak oil being a fallacy, explained by other minerals (tin and iron) having new deposits that are easier to access. However as far as I know in the case of hydrocarbons, the newly discovered deposits are deep offshore, shale / tar sands etc which are more expensive than drilling in Texas, Middle East etc. So is it the case that newly discovered deposits are not always cheaper / easier / higher quality than existing ones?

      Also, in the case of minerals, we know that pretty much once they are used they can be recycled and reused all over again even if we ever (unlikely as it is) run out of ore. In the case of hydrocarbons, when we get energy from them by burning, we can't reuse them again. Effectively they are hundreds of millions of years' worth of stored sunlight. Now, I agree completely that we have plenty of energy in the form of uranium, solar etc,however using the argument that minerals are effectively 'infinte' as a way to argue that no peak oil exists does not make sense to me.

      Are there any more convincing arguments that you have against peak oil?

      1 0 Reply
      1. Tim Worstal
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        Re: environmental cost

        I don't, particularly, argue against peak oil. I do argue against the effect of it. Sure, agreed, there's "x" amount of stored sunlight out there. And we're fortunate that technology to extract it seems to be advancing faster that our use of it.

        My reference to it here was about that peak oil argument that it will all take more energy to extract in future. As is being said about those minerals. With minerals it ain't true.

        With oil? Could be true. Willing to consider that it might be. But, to stick with peak oil, not minerals, so what? Once it becomes ineffective to use fossil fuels we will stop doing so.

        Shrug, and?

        That's the bit of "peak oil" that I never have got. So, energy becomes more expensive. So we'll use more expensive energy then, won't we?

        1 0 Reply
        1. James Micallef Silver badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: environmental cost

          Thanks for the follow-up. I tend to agree that 'peak oil' doesn't really matter so much in energy terms, the only thing is that it starts getting wasteful when you need the equivalent energy of 7-8 barrels of oil to extract the equivalent of 10 barrels. Of course, it's still a net gain but still seems wasteful. Not to mention the CO2 release.

          In the end if/when oil/hydrocarbons become more expensive, we'll shift to photovoltaics / nuclear / some future technology.

          "So we'll use more expensive energy then, won't we?"

          Exactly! The last 50-odd years, energy has been dirt cheap anyway, that's why we waste so much of it even while we use loads of it to improve quality of life worldwide. More expensive energy will just mean a bit of a slowdown in global economy (not a bad thing, maybe we can invest more in 'real' stuff and less in financial gimmicks,leading to less boom-bust cycles) but allow developing countries to increase quality of life without continuing to trash the environment.

          0 0 Reply
    4. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: environmental cost

      Again, the fact this it is the old mines that are closing means that the ones that continue operating are modern mines that are built to high environmental standards.

      The extreme example is something like Richards Bay Minerals - which mines titanium found in beach sand (or more accurately in the grains of a mineral called rutlie that is interspersed with beach sand).

      They use the "giant wet hoover" to suck up the sand from the dunes, and after the rutile has been extracted the sand is returned to build a new dune. The net environmental impact is positive because the dunes that are being mined are covered in alien vegetation, whereas the re-constructed dunes are replanted with indigenous vegetation.

      0 0 Reply
      1. Tim Worstal
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        Re: environmental cost

        Rutile is indeed a good example of that sorting having already been done for us by rivers. Ilmenite is the hard rock equivalent in many cases. Zirconia tends to be mined in the same manner these days.

        0 0 Reply
    5. The Dude
      Reply Icon
      Unhappy

      Re: environmental cost

      Harper is right about the "scientific research" thing, he is only responding to the BC Supreme Court judgment (2008) where it was determined that federal government scientific research reports were (and are allowed to be) ideologically-motivated lies, libel, and mere comment or opinion.

      As much as I don't like the current ruling regime, they are the best of a bad bunch.

      0 0 Reply
  2. BlueGreen

    Ok, how about some calculations Tim

    Last I heard, movement of iron ore from oz to china alone was 1/3 billion tons. Can you please calculate the fuel used, and therefore pollution emitted, for that? Because I did and I get between 30 million tons and 330 million tons. I'd like an expert's opinion, please (that's you, Tim).

    4 0 Reply
    1. Tim Worstal
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      Re: Ok, how about some calculations Tim

      150 million tonnes of ore a quarter (last quarter 2013 actually). Call it 600 million a year. 2/3 is to China but let's call it all.

      Fuel consumption? Well: "around 8,000 TEU would consume about 225 tons of bunker fuel per day at 24 knots"

      Call that 300,000 tonne for 8,000 TEU (roughly 40 tonnes per container). That's not right for there's no way you run an iron ore ship at that sort of high speed. But for ballpark reasons only we'll take it.

      Call it 4,000 miles Pilbara to China. Knots are different from miles but what the hell: 8 days travel for our iron ore ship (ignore returning empty, fuel use much less).

      So 600 million divided by 300,000 to give number of ship movements. Each ship movement uses 225 tonnes bunker fuel per day times 8 days, 2,000 x 8 x 225 = 3.6 million tonnes fuel?

      C to CO2 is something like 2.5 or so isn't it? So 10 million tonnes CO 2 emissions?

      I find it very easy for zeroes to go walkabout in these sorts of numbers so do check this.

      But as against 5 GT CO2 emissions globally, it's a very small part of the problem.

      Do also note that the cost of that fuel is already included in the calculations of "cheaper". The emissions (because bunker fuel pays no tax) are not. The solution to which is of course that a proper carbon tax should be instituted.

      13 0 Reply
      1. BlueGreen
        Reply Icon

        Re: Ok, how about some calculations Tim

        That's a shedload better, maths wise, than mine, ur post duly upvoted. I dropped in a couple of extra zeroes myself. Ok, here's mine, corrected:

        600, 000,000 tons of ore (your figures, maybe a bit hight), taken in valemax ore carrier (ore is never AFAIK taken in TEUs) (say 400,000 tonne DWT, let's assume it's all cargo, let's ignore return trips)

        = 1,500 voyages

        Let's take the Ore Brasil <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Ore_Brasil>, burns about 95 tons/day, slow steams at ~18mph, distance oz/china I'll take to be about 5,000 miles (higher than your 4,000 but it's not crow-flies by any stretch so that's reasonable), so 5,000/(18 mph * 24 hours) ~11.6 days per voyage, so 11.6 * 95 ~ 1,100 tons fuel burnt per voyage, = 1,500 voyages * 1,100 tones =1,650,000 tons fuel burnt annually.

        Wow, I *really* blew that one.

        1 0 Reply
        1. Tim Worstal
          Reply Icon

          Re: Ok, how about some calculations Tim

          Oh sure, I know that ore goes bulk, not TEU (well, iron ore does, the ores I deal with go in containers, but then we tend to deal with 40 or 80 tonnes a month sort of levels). It's just a quick Google gave me a container ship fuel consumption first which I thought was good enough for a quick and dirty.

          BTW, my definition of "quick and dirty" here is the hope that we end up with the correct number of digits and the first of them correct. Every thing after we've established the order of magnitude and that first digit I take to be detail.

          Which brings me onto two bugbears of mine. The first being that this is usually good enough for any economic purpose (obvs not for finance, but for thinking about economies etc) simply because it's all such a vast and chaotic system that we're just being spurious in looking for greater accuracy. If you're trying to actually manage something perhaps greater detail might be useful, but in just trying to get an idea of theory, of what's important and what isn't, I take that quick and dirty to be good enough.

          And my real rant is reserved for all too many people who share this joyous job of writing about the world. All too many on the broadsheets just don't have basic numbers in their heads. The EU economy is around $15 trillion a year, US $16 or 17 trillion, UK some £1.5 trillion. There's 30 million jobs in the UK, 10% of which get destroyed each year, 10% of which get newly created (jobs churn). And so on and so on. Yes, Exxon is the same size as a country: but the country is Luxembourg which has 400,000 people, or perhaps 200,000 workers, in it, and Exxon employs about 200,000 people. Not a great surprise that they've got about the same value added or GDP really.

          I admit that I have to look up the relationship between a Watt and a Joule, every single time (and to work out what a calorie is I need to read it all several times): that marks me out as ignorant to all around here, good engineering types that you are. But I am essentially numerate in my field, the economy etc. And it really is one of my bugbears that all too many who write about the same sort of subjects that I do aren't numerate in that manner, just don't have that basic mental arithmetic.

          Perhaps I shouldn't whine though: while the quality of economic commentary would be much better if they all did I'd get fewer gigs if they all did.

          13 0 Reply
          1. Anonymous Coward
            Reply Icon
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Ok, how about some calculations Tim

            Tim, late comment but I think you are doing extremely well and I can back that by having a solid engineering background (multiple areas) and having a degree in economics focused on econometrics, int'l development, and int'l finance and investment. So, do go on. [And given back of envelope calculations on the engineering side, you're golden!]

            0 0 Reply
      2. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Ok, how about some calculations Tim

        The Brasil Maru is an actual ore carrier, not a container ship. It has a capacity of over 300 000t and travels at around 15kt at around 24MW. Assuming a consumption for the engine of around 170g/KWH, that is about 4t/h, or in very rough terms 4 miles/t. That gives a figure of 1000t on the laden trip. Let's say 1300t for a round trip. There isn't much in the way of auxiliary power on an ore ship.

        We have a little under 2000 ship movements per year giving a reasonably accurate ballpark figure of 2.2-2.4 million tonnes. That's lower than your 3.6 million, but then who in their right mind moves iron ore on a container ship at 24kt?

        What gets me is how tiny the engines are on these huge ships, and how little power they use to move stuff around. It takes less than a gallon of fuel to ship a tonne of ore from Australia to China.

        5 0 Reply
        1. Sean Timarco Baggaley
          Reply Icon

          Re: Ok, how about some calculations Tim

          "What gets me is how tiny the engines are on these huge ships, and how little power they use to move stuff around."

          If memory serves, this is because the power you need to move a ship through water increases linearly with volume, rather than exponentially. Brunel's Great Eastern was sold to investors on this basis, and it's why there's still a continuing trend for ever larger ships. Bigger ships are more efficient.

          3 0 Reply
          1. Anonymous Coward
            Reply Icon
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Ok, how about some calculations Tim

            The power curve is quite complicated - it increases much less than linearly with volume for similar hull forms. For big ships hull speed, which is important for small boats, becomes irrelevant, but as an example a narrowboat has a roughly similar profile to an ore carrier (and indeed a lot of the original ones were optimised as coal carriers) and needed about 15hp to propel 25 tonnes at 4kt. That's 0.6HP per tonne, while an ore carrier is around 0.1HP/t for around 15kt.

            Big ships are fuel efficient, as are big aircraft relatively speaking, but it is amazing even so just how fuel efficient they are. An electric bicycle needs very roughly 250W to propel itself and a human being at 15kt - let's call the total around 100kg, or 2.5HP/tonne, so an ore carrier is about 25 times as efficient as an electric bicycle. By contrast even a moped, at 11HP/t, seems hugely profligate.

            This is of course why the patterns of world trade continue to be sea-dominated. A huge container port is far less annoying to the surrounding population than an airport, but handles many times more traffic.

            Mines far away from the coast end up with transport means like enormously long trains travelling at a slow constant speed to get reasonable efficiency, shale oil exploitation requires trucks with tyres five metres in diameter. Since these technologies have only really developed since WW2, it isn't surprising that a lot of formerly marginal resources can now be exploited.

            5 0 Reply
            1. veti Silver badge
              Reply Icon

              Re: Ok, how about some calculations Tim

              These calculations are exactly the kind of thing that the 'Free Market' is, in theory, really good at making.

              Yes, sure there's a cost to transport. But the point is, it's a cost, someone somewhere has to pay it, and it gets factored into the price of the delivered product. If the delivered product is still cheaper than locally produced stuff, that tells you that either (1) it really is more efficient, even with transport, or (2) the cost is being externalised somehow.

              As a lifelong greenie, I have devoted my campaigning energies to trying to eliminate cases of (2). Once we've got rid of those, then we can figure out how to use resources with optimal efficiency. And then we can put these pointless and sterile arguments behind us.

              10 2 Reply
  3. thx1138v2

    Peak Coal

    In the May18, 1902 edition of the Philadelphia - North American there was an article titled "STARTLING PREDICTION OF THE WORLD'S GREATEST LIVING SCIENTIST IN AN ARTICLE WRITTEN FOR THE SUNDAY NORTH AMERICAN". The scientists of the day were concerned about running out of coal to power the industrial revolution - peak coal, if you will. They suggested conservation, windmills, biomass, and solar power solutions. 110+ years later it sounds very familiar, doesn't it. Thomas Edison said not to worry about it because the Amazon contained enough forests to power the world with wood for 50,000 years.

    Only one man, Rear Admiral R. B. Bradford, head of scientific research for the U.S. Navy, got it right. He said man's ingenuity would solve the problem and so it did with the petroleum fuels.

    "On the other hand, to say what the power of the future will be is pure speculation and prophecy. I am no seventh son of a seventh son, and do not care to go into the prophesying business. But fifty years before the discovery of the steam engine or the discovery of coal, who would have dared to predict the present [1902] mechanical development of civilization?"

    No one can predict today what processes will be available 50 years from now. The point is to focus on new technologies. They will solve the problems we see today be it energy, minerals, or transportation. Safer and cleaner Thorium nuclear reactors are under development and there's no telling what the proof of the Higgs boson might lead to - antigravity? Those are current developments and not only is science progressing rapidly but the _rate_ of scientific discoveries is ever increasing.

    IMO, it's asinine to focus a nation's resources on developing technologies that have proved to be economically infeasible for over 100 years.

    17 1 Reply
  4. Mage Silver badge

    Hillarious

    Wonderful Tim.

    2 0 Reply
  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    There are other places in the world where there are mountains of pure iron ore, Brazil and Vale is mining that at similar prices to OZ. There is Guinea, but Ebola and a corrupt government is slowing that one down. Then there is the Chinese government which will subsidise some of their local mines to partly control the market.

    0 0 Reply
  6. Tim Worstal

    A couple of people have emailed me directly.....

    ....And I'm afraid I can't answer you directly as you've failed to give me an email to do so on. the system doesn't tell me your address....you've got to put it into the body of the mail for me to know where to write back to.

    But re asteroid mining there's at least one piece here in the archives on exactly that. Top right search box "worstall asteroid" should get you to it.

    0 0 Reply
  7. PJD

    Ore vs working conditions and technology

    Having grown up in Newman, one of the older Pilbara iron ore towns, I can safely say the reason Fortescue is staying profitable has nothing to do with the quality of the ore (Mount Newman Mining is still sitting on some of the highest quality deposits in the world), it's because a) they have newer mining infrastructure (which reduces costs and can be slow, hard, and expensive to retrofit older mines with), and b) they've reduced labour costs with a combination of technological development and poorer pay packages for workers (less workers and paying them less).

    2 0 Reply
  8. thames

    Infrastructure is a Big Problem in Mining

    A lot of minerals are located in places with little or no infrastructure unless there is already a mining industry located nearby. The reason for this is a combination of geology and geography. You need the right sort of rocks to bear ores, and they need to be exposed near the surface so you can get at them cheaply. The sorts of terrain with this combination (pre-cambrian shields and mountains) tend to be in remote areas because people tended to settle elsewhere where they could find fertile soils. There are exceptions to this pattern of course, and the UK just happens to be one of those oddball cases.

    Modern mining needs roads, railways, electricity (at competitive prices), and telecommunications, together with a supply of labour and someplace for them to live. The mining industry faces the same sort of competitive pressures that any other industrial activity faces. There are plenty of well known mineral deposits which could be profitably developed if only they were a little closer to the sea coast or existing rail lines. And that's leaving aside issues of chronic war or simply chronic bad government.

    To give a simple example, there are huge deposits of chromite (the ore from which chromium is derived) in Canada. These deposits are much better and cheaper to mine than the ones in South Africa (which currently produces three quarters of the world's total). However, there are currently no roads or rail lines or electric power supply which run in their vicinity. In order to pay for bulding the new infrastructure any potential mines would need to produce so much ore that the market would be flooded, collapsing the price and undermining the economics. That chromite ore will have to sit there until either a critical mass of other minerals (e.g. copper) are found which can share the cost, or unless the government steps in and finances the development in the hope of kick-starting a larger mining industry in the region (and collecting the potential royalties).

    Alternatively, prices of chromite may rise enough to pay for the infrastructure on its own, but metal prices are falling, not rising.

    3 0 Reply
    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: People are a Big Problem in Mining

      The reason the new Pilbara operation is practical is that they built an almost totally robotic mine, operated form 1500km away, even the trains to haul it to the coast are automated.

      Instead of moving the ore to the smelters, the next step is to simply move the smelters to the ore. If the smelter is also automated it makes more sense for it to be in the middle of Australia than in the middle of Sheffield. It's obviously cheaper to move 1ton of finished iron or steel than 5tons of ore or 20tons of rock. Then you move the automated factories to be next to the steel works.

      It makes a lot more economic and environmental sense to have a train appearing out of the middle of the outback bearing Holdens than crushed rock.

      4 0 Reply
  9. Terry Barnes

    Erm

    "If the environmentalists are right, in that new mines will inevitably be more expensive to develop than the old mines with the easy stuff in it, then when mines close because of falling prices it must be the new mines that close, right? "

    That's quite a straw man. Older mines will have less un-mined material left and ageing capital kit. A newer mine will have the latest tech and, presumably, a worthwhile amount of material to be mined.

    Development cost is not operational cost.

    6 1 Reply
  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Zinc

    I saw several headlines recently about zinc mines running low and prices rising - to the point that coins with zinc content could soon be worth more than their face value.

    For example, see

    http://www.independent.ie/business/world/zinc-prices-soar-to-a-threeyear-high-as-mines-become-exhausted-30587173.html

    Is this something to worry about Mr Worstall? Or is there loads of zinc down there and new mines will just come on stream over coming years to exploit a newly-valuable metal?

    0 0 Reply
    1. Tim Worstal
      Reply Icon

      Re: Zinc

      Your zinc numbers are here:

      http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/zinc/

      Current mining 13.5 million tonnes a year. Current reserves 250 million tonnes. Looks a bit squeaky at only 20 year's worth left.

      Resources: 1.9 billion tonnes. 150 years....not something that should be worried about too much.....and that's "identified" resources, who knows how much there is if we go hunting?

      As to it becoming too expensive for coins, well, that does happen. Happened to silver in the 60s in most countries, to copper in most in the 90s ("copper" coins are now plated steel). I've actually bought truck loads of nickel silver (ie, I think at least, Ni and Zn) coins to process for the metals value.

      but the reason it happens isn't so much the rise in the price of metals as the fall in the value of money: governments not ecology at fault here. That nickel silver stuff was in the wake of Russia having 3.000 % inflation for a couple of years for example.

      3 0 Reply

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