Steven A. Banwart, et al., prepared this volume to provide an overview of Earth’s mineral resources – their origin, discovery and development, and their role as a source of materials that are crucial to everyone’s way of life in our modern society. For some time, pessimistic viewpoints have been expressed about long-term global mineral supplies, as illustrated in a recent Geochemical Perspectives volume by Sverdrup and Ragnarsdóttir (2014). In this article, the authors suggested that many important minerals are becoming scarce and that their production “…has either peaked already or will peak within the next 50 years.” In their opinion “… the world is heading towards a restricted access to the key resources that are used by humanity today and these restrictions will have a profound impact on the world economies and life styles of future generations.”
Laherrère (2010) and Kerr (2011) proposed similarly pessimistic scenarios and the Club of Rome famously supported a publication, The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972) that predicted copper and aluminium would be exhausted in 21 and 31 years, respectively. Yet current reserves of these metals are larger than in 1972, despite four decades of continually increasing yearly production. Is it then reasonable to warn of imminent peak production of important mineral commodities?
Our collective experience (see information about the authors on the back cover) in modern ore deposit research, exploration, discovery and production leads us to believe that Earth has a much larger endowment of mineral resources than is often claimed, and that any peaks in production of a given mineral or metal lie much further in the future. In this volume, we review prospects for long-term global mineral supply with an emphasis on ways that geoscientists in general, in both research institutions and industry, can help meet the mineral demands of society. Most importantly we argue that geoscientists can act as well-informed advocates to society as a whole by developing an understanding of mineral deposits and responsible mining.
Most mineral exploration and discovery has focused on the upper few 100 m of Earth’s crust, whereas a similar density of many deposit types almost certainly is present in the upper few km. Recent technological advances allow low-grade mass mining to depths of 2-3 km to recover many of these deeper deposits, which will reduce the surface footprint and impact of mining. This is a “light at the end of the tunnel” (see cover photograph) for the future supply of a significant part of the world’s mineral resources. Similar radical changes in mineral processing and metal extraction, energy and water efficiency, and innovative social contracts will permit more resources of multiple commodities, both near-surface and at depth, to be mined economically in the future.
We reach the fundamental conclusion that mineral supplies will be maintained at levels that satisfy demand well into the future, and that any peak of production of individual commodities will probably result from declining demand caused by technological or societal developments, rather than exhaustion of the
resource.
The volume comprises five sections that treat different aspects of the subject. All authors contributed to the writing of each section, but to different extents, with one person having final responsibility for content and organisation:
Section 1 – Introduction, presents an overview of the subject and focuses on a thorny issue of crucial importance – the difference between reserves and resources. We then explain why we have chosen the metal copper to illustrate many of the points we wish to make. Steve Kesler was the main author of this section.
Section 2 – Formation of Mineral Deposits, defines an “ore deposit”, presents methods for classifying ore deposits, describes some typical examples, and gives an overview on current thinking on how these deposits formed. All authors contributed to this section.
Section 3 – Mineral Exploration: Discovering and Defining Ore Bodies describes how mineral exploration companies go about finding new ore deposits and evaluating
their potential, plus the reasons that mining for many commodities will increasingly shift underground over the coming decades. Dan Wood and Jeff Hedenquist wrote this section.
Section 4 – Exploiting Mineral Deposits. This section, written by John Thompson, explains how ore deposits are mined and how metals and other valuable mineral products are extracted. This relates to resource availability and to the broader impact, from environment to community and society. All authors contributed their insights.
Section 5 – Determining Reserves and Resources – Metals for Future Generations considers in more depth the long-term outlook for the availability, production
and consumption of copper and other metals, and discusses the transition between metal concentrations in mineable deposits and normal rocks. Steve Kesler and Nicholas Arndt wrote this section.
The need for off-world resources was not considered. See: http://www.i2mconsultants.com/downloads/corp/Memoir101-T0fC2016.pdf
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