Stories tagged with "minerals"

Mining the Technosphere: Solutions for Industrial Ecosystems

Posted by Rembrandt on August 16, 2009 - 10:15am
Topic: Supply/Production
Tags: ecosystems, empa, industrial ecosystems, material flows, materials, metals, minerals, mining, recycling, technosphere [list all tags]

This is a slide video of the presentation given by Rolf Widmer and David Rochat at the Oil Drum/ASPO Conference at Alcatraz, Italy in June 2009. Rolf and David work at EMPA and SOFIES on more efficient material management for industrial society. Their talk is about the flows, availability, and recycling of minerals in industrial ecosystems, called Mining the Technosphere: a Solution for the Industrial Ecosystem (Presentation PDF no.1 no.2, 1.8 MB each).
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Minerals scarcity: A call for managed austerity and the elements of hope

Posted by Ugo Bardi on May 4, 2009 - 9:50am in The Oil Drum: Europe
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: minerals, resource depletion [list all tags]

This is a guest post by André Diederen. Diederen is a senior research scientist at TNO, Holland, where he has been working since 1997 on defence related matters. His background is mechanical engineering (1987). Because a ruling paradigm in defence related matters is the precautionary principle and since this sector applies various non-abundant metals, he took a closer look at the availability of metals. The implications of metals scarcity reach far beyond the "niche" of defence related materials and might affect our entire industrial civilization.

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Mining the Oceans: Can We Extract Minerals from Seawater?

Posted by Ugo Bardi on September 22, 2008 - 5:15pm in The Oil Drum: Europe
Topic: Supply/Production
Tags: minerals, mining, nuclear energy, original, seawater, uranium [list all tags]



Figure: Japanese researchers testing uranium extraction from seawater using a braided adsorbent fiber (JAEA 2006). Is this the way of mining of the future?

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The Universal Mining Machine

Posted by Ugo Bardi on January 24, 2008 - 10:49am in The Oil Drum: Europe
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: energy, minerals [list all tags]



The coal mine of Garzweiler, Germany, in a Google Earth image. The satellite has caught two giant mining machines at work. Measured with the google ruler, each "arm" of the machines measures about 120 m (ca. 400 ft). These are not universal mining machines, but give some idea of the scale of modern mining operations. The Garzweiler mine is said to hold more than a billion tons of coal reserves.

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Peak Minerals

Posted by Chris Vernon on October 15, 2007 - 1:00pm in The Oil Drum: Europe
Topic: Supply/Production
Tags: aspo, m. king hubbert, minerals, peak, reserves, usgs [list all tags]

This is a guest post from Ugo Bardi and Marco Pagani. Ugo Bardi teaches chemistry at the University of Florence, Italy. He is the president of the Italian section of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO) (www.aspoitalia.net). Marco Pagani is a physicist presently teaching and physics in secondary schools. He is a member of ASPO-Italy, a social and environmental activist, and the blogger of ecoalfabeta. (ecoalfabeta.blogosfere.it)
    Abstract: We examined the world production of 57 minerals reported in the database of the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Of these, we found 11 cases where production has clearly peaked and is now declining. Several more may be peaking or be close to peaking. Fitting the production curve with a logistic function we see that, in most cases, the ultimate amount extrapolated from the fitting corresponds well to the amount obtained summing the cumulative production so far and the reserves estimated by the USGS. These results are a clear indication that the Hubbert model is valid for the worldwide production of minerals and not just for regional cases. It strongly supports the concept that “Peak oil” is just one of several cases of worldwide peaking and decline of a depletable resource. Many more mineral resources may peak worldwide and start their decline in the near future.
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Jubak: More Peak Everything! (and an open thread)

Posted by Prof. Goose on April 18, 2006 - 6:16pm
Topic: Supply/Production
Tags: everything, metals, minerals, oil, peak oil [list all tags]

Jubak uses a nice discussion of peak oil to explain "peak metals" in this article:
Call the theory Peak Metal. The price of gold and other metals, and related stocks, will keep rising as finding new sources gets harder and more expensive.[...]But I find the mechanisms that Peak Oil theory has developed to explain the direction of oil prices and the operation of the oil market immediately applicable to the metals sector.
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