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Minerals, fluids, metals and mining – what might the future of resourcing a sustainable world look like?

Richard Herrington

Abstract

Climate change and pressures on biodiversity induced by anthropogenic impacts on the planet are at the forefront of the challenges facing society today. Governments worldwide recognise the need to decarbonise human activities and a key part of this is to move energy generation, transportation and industry towards the use of low carbon technologies. It is recognised that these technologies are geo-resource hungry and so to achieve the pledges on greenhouse gas emissions, despite our best efforts to reuse and recycle existing stocks of materials, mining and utilisation of increasing amounts of the planet’s geological resources is unavoidable at least in the medium term in the transition from fossil-fuel based energy systems. Traditional metals like copper are needed more than ever for energy and transport systems and it is likely we will have to mine as much copper between now and 2050 as we have so far mined throughout history. Furthermore, many of the new technologies use materials that we have neve used before and thus there are no current stocks for us to reuse or recycle. It comes down to choice as to where these new materials are recovered. Current traditional mining activities would either seem to be unable to satisfy these needs in the timescale needed or potentially unpalatable to human society where mining has the lowest level of societal acceptance of any of the industrial sectors. New frontiers could potentially supply the materials we need. The deep ocean has vast resources of many of the metals needed although the mining of these is highly controversial. The mining of asteroids has been discussed but the timescale to bring such resources to industry would appear to be generations away. Mining brines is a potentially attractive source of metal recovery where metals and other element of interest are already in soluble form. More than half our current needs of lithium are sourced from salar brines. Magmatic brines have also been shown to have very attractive metal contents which will have the added benefit of providing geothermal energy, but there are enormous challenges to tapping fluids from high-temperature, volcanically active systems. Crustal brines in other geological settings offer enormous opportunities too, particularly since many of these potential targets could have already been exploited for hydrocarbons. New deposit types are still being found as we continue to explore the planet (volcano-sedimentary lithium deposits are a great example of this) and new technologies like electro-kinetics, novel solvents and bio-based technologies open up ways of exploiting previously untapped known resources. Lastly, improved efficiencies in current mining practice and efforts to reprocess the enormous opportunity from the legacy ‘assets’ of mine and industrial wastes may help to fill some of the supply shortages that are looming on the near horizon.