The book "From Cradle to Cradle" talks about this.

I suspect it will not be possible to bring renewable energy systems on stream fast enough to halt the collapse of mine production rates.

From the little research I have done on this on the energy situation in UK, US, French, Japan I am relatively sure they are now past the point of no return.

Current net energy exporters may be able to build themselves a renewable energy infrastructure if they their energy resources are not seized/destroyed by war.

With ore grades dropping in many minerals over the last few decades we have been using greater and greater quantities of energy per unit resource. The Energy required to mine and process an ore rises exponentially with falling ore grade.

If we take Gold production for example the historic production rate has grown exponentially following the energy curve. But now it may fall by the double exponential because both the easy to get at high grade ore is depleting and the available net energy will be collapsing.

I guess those of us who survive this transition will learn to live happier less material lives like Nate Hagens reindeer :)

Sorry to be so pessimistic. On the bright side we can make lots of money using our acknowledge of the resource sector. We may not live to spend it or enjoy it but it will be fun while it lasts :)

Personally I do not see much of a future in recycling even though I believe that in only a few years we will recycling almost everything. Simply because production will be falling exponentially.

There is a very real risk of a "disorderly" descent. I do not believe modern "capitalist" systems in the US/UK etc. will be sufficiently resilient to prevail.

I hope mining dose adapt to using new tools and techniques but I suspect much will simply be abandoned.

P.S. sorry for the lack of reference did not have time to include them.

My own view is that things will have to be standardized, that is, one or two versions of computers or home entertainment stuff, clothing, etc.. And, further, that parts be interchangable. For example, the parts in the mini-car are interchangeable with the 1 ton truck. Finally, that these things be produced for looong production runs - like, maybe, ten years until changes are made.

I know this undercuts the idea of introducing more energy efficient models as tech advances. But my guess is that it is more energy efficient to not have to replace an item for a moderate advance.

Todd

However, to be most effective, that will require that products be designed, from the beginning, so that they can be disassembled and reclaimed, and the contents reused. While there is a lot of logic in that approach, sometimes it is hard to get that into the heads of folk who are only designing for maximum efficiency in use, and a manufacturing process that keeps the price down far enough that you can sell the product.

Recycling sounds so green. It can be if it saves or creates more resources than it uses, but there are countless examples where this is ignored. Losing money recycling, is losing resources. A town government nearby where I live decided to be environmentally friendly by recycling plastics. Everyone though this was a wonderful idea, so collection of plastic containers began. It turned out that it cost much more to do this than they gained, but they kept on doing it because it was politically correct, when in reality it was like cutting down three trees to save one. They only looked at the benefit and not the cost.

As long as recycling is profitable, it is sound and of course should be done. I just don't see it as any great solution to resource acquisition since even when it is sound, it is marginal. It reminds me of corn ethanol where the return is at best 30% as compared to the current return for oil of near 500%; it may work marginally, but it is not going to come near replacing what we have today.

A quick googling turns up available ore in the following concentratiosn:

Al and Fe 65% to 75%
Ni 30% to 60%
Cu 30% to 45%

Platinum is basically available as a trace material in other ores.

According to this EPA site, the energy inputs required for production from recycled aluminum is 95% less, and betwen 60-74% less for recycled steel. (I don't know what level of ore purity they are basing these figures upon, but probably not the lowest ones.) This probably holds true for most other metals as well.

I suspect that there will be considerable quantities of minerals that will remain in the ground and never be mined, because the energy inputs will just be too high and too costly. There will come a point where just recycling what we already have will make more sense (if we are not there already).

There aren't that many major advances that I am aware of, though I am not really up to date in what is going on in many of the labs around the world. And again it is a matter of comparison, since as I have mentioned in the past, giving a knowledgeable coal miner a pick, and he can work the fractures in the coal to be much more efficient in energy use that a machine. And on the other hand the efficient use of explosives to break, and efficiently cast material is difficult to surpass in those operations where it can be really effective. But that does not include mining narrow veins where the blast fragments much more of the host rock on either side of the vein and incurs the cost of processing too much waste material. The use of geometrically modified blast-holes in those applications may well be a path into the future.

There is a balance in production vs downtime in increasing equipment size that may well now be being defined, particularly as larger becomes defined as much more expensive, in purchase and running cost. On-board monitoring in real time can extend life through better preventative maintenance which is more practiced today than it has been in the past. But there is a lot that can be done, and many opportunities - just a lack of manpower and will, at the present.

For the future, and speaking mainly of metal mining, I can speculate. Open pit metal mines get less and less attractive with time, owing to the increasing proportion of waste that must be mined on either side of the orebody. It is anticipated that many, with time, will be replaced by a more expensive underground mining technique called block caving, whereby the remaining deep orebody caves towards central drawpoints owing to its own weight and weakness, and the waste on either side remains in place. Energy price increases should accelerate this transition. Some open pit rock quarries near major cities are, I understand, already being replaced by more expensive underground mining operations, largely because hauling in the rock from distant quarries would be still more expensive in terms of energy.

For really deep underground mining, human miners may be largely replaced by machinery teleoperated by "miners" (more like video game players) sitting in an air conditioned office on the surface. The machines needn't be smart, or large, or diesel, just remotely operable with cameras. This could allow mining under deep temperature and humidity conditions that would kill a human operator in an hour, if a rock-burst (common in very deep mines) didn't kill him first. Ideally the machines would be somewhat expendable (no rescues needed). For obvious reasons, military and police applications will probably precede any use in mining.

As an analog to highly efficent human hand sorting, and as a partial alternative to fine grinding, many mining companies are already experimenting with or using a remote sensor of, e.g. radioactivity, or the gleam of metallic ore, coupled to a rod that will push the high-grade piece off of a conveyor belt into a concentrate bucket. High tech replaces high cost human hand-pickers or high energy grinding of raw ore.

As mentioned in another post, acid heap leaching of very low grade oxide and carbonate ores (formed by near surface weathering of sulfide ores) has long been practiced, as an energy-saving, relatively non-polluting alternative to milling and smelting. Recent advances, just being put into practice in copper mines, allow a similar process to be used with unweathered deep sulfide ores (albeit at high temperatures and pressures in an autoclave). The need for smelters should decrease as a result.

Of course, none of this will ever come to pass if energy scarcity causes the economy to cave, with associated price crashes for metals. It also won't happen if, as mentioned in the original post, the mines themselves can't get the energy they need, or obtain the huge sums of money needed to implement the new technology (mining is more capital intensive even than oil, as many oil companies that bought metal mines discovered to their chagrin following the 1970's).

Hi,

IMHO we should be aiming at:

Reduce unnecessary consumption e.g. Chinese dancing plastic robots.

Reuse

Repair - goods should be made so that they can eaily be repaired not replaced.

Recycle.

The story of stuff shows how a deliberate choice to build in obsolescence has been made. See http://www.storyofstuff.com/

regards

Where will energy come from to power the US economy, much less to create a new infrastructure to more efficiently operate the economy, whether that infrastructure is a new fleet of more efficient vehicles, more efficient mining technologies, or alternative energy systems.

oil is only 30% of our energy. we don't need a whole lot of new infrastructure if we switch to EVs or PHEVs, much less taking the bus and catching a ride. we'll get new infrastructure because replacing the things we use will become practical at higher energy prices.

Government success and failures do probably to a large degree depend on local cultural factors. We have toyed to much with socialism in Sweden and it is very hard to replace inefficient tax financed parts of the economy with marked based ones even when they create more jobs and better service. But we have had successes with handling large scale problems and I am optimistical about our governments role for handling climate change and resource problems. A lot of the research and investments needed are being done and some are lessons learned from previous oil crisises.

Zero mining implies either total recycling to meet a constant demand, or else severe demand destruction. The word "sustainability" obscures this - it is a much abused term. Recall that zero mining means recycling of all asphalt paving, bricks, and concrete, as well as of all metals and medicinal trace elements (e.g., bismuth and lithium). Probably an impossible to achieve goal, even in the case of severe demand destruction, because digging up an old landfill for metals is also mining.

Re: Olympic Dam. I've never been there and don't know much about it, but it's unclear to me how underground room and pillar mining would be made more energy efficient by open-pitting the operation. Are you talking about replacing expensive electricity with cheaper diesel? That only works as long as diesel is much cheaper, and I suspect that they already use trackless mining (diesel trucks) underground. The need for water should increase.

Room and pillar mining (a technique more commonly used in coal mining) is relatively cheap for an underground technique, and efficient in that only higher grade ore is removed. It is inefficent in that a large proportion of the high-grade ore (typically about 40%) must be left in place to hold up the back, or roof. So perhaps they are open pitting the operation to increase their metal recovery from 60% to close to 100% at a time of very high metal prices, rather than out of any energy or water consideration. Open-pitting also allows them to replace highly trained and expensive underground miners, accustomed to working in dangerous, radioactive conditions, with fewer shovel operators and truck drivers who require far less training. I suspect that finding qualified underground miners in Australia right now is even more difficult than finding an operable ball mill.

Heap leaching of metals from coarse-broken sulfide ores already depends on bacteria that chew into the sulfides for their sustenance. You have to keep them well supplied with nutrients (mainly oxygen and moisture, in this case). These same bacteria are a common source of acid mine drainage at closed mines. Doing such extraction in situ has been much discussed, but acids and oxygen simply do not flow well through solid rock. At least the heap leaching technique saves the energy involved in fine grinding the coarsely broken ore, using organic reagents to attract sulfide particles in the mill, and smelting and refining the sulfide concentrate. You end up with metals dissolved in aqueous solution, from which they are recovered at relatively low energy cost (commonly, by simple electrolysis, with the pure metal precipitating at the cathode).

I suspect, along with you, that much could be done to improve the technique.