Excellent, thank you. Have you ever seen a graph of copper showing the ore to waste rock ratio? I'd be curious to see that, imagining the waste rock growing rapidly...
I wrote a mining report when I was working with Protect Thacker Pass (to try to prevent a lithium mine). It's a general report (not copper specific) but can perhaps give a sense of scale and scope.
The trends in future of natural resources availability/costs was studied and USA foreign policy based on these studies was formulated early in the decade after the end of WWII. If you wondered why US foreign policy never much changes, it is because the underlying physical realities of natural resource availabilities mentioned in this article are also unchanged.
See a 1960s analysis here:
SCARCE RESOURCES: THE DYNAMIC OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM
"That empire in Southeast Asia is the last major resource area outside the control of any one of the major powers on the globe. . I believe that the condition of the Vietnamese people, and the direction in which their future may be going, are at this stage secondary, not primary."
Senator McGee (Wyoming) US Senate February 17, 1965
An good example of the 3d world rebelling against the sale of resources for a pittance is Niger..by eliminating France as the middle man making all the profit, its uranium deposits are vastly more valuable...
It seems to me that the current low oil price likely reflects a hidden recession throughout the West...How is GDP increasing without oil being in great demand? A Central Bank magic trick, methinks....
Спасибо ! Такие статьи хочется читать и перечитывать .К сожалению, на одного Честного колдуна , сейчас приходится 100 "экспертов - геополитиков" , вредных и бесполезных .
Why isn’t it considered for use now you might ask Marten, in three words: economics, food security.
The sake production method from WWIl Japan to produce alcohol isn't used today to replace *Oil because it's designed for small-scale beverage production, not high-volume fuel. It's inefficient, low-yield, and relies on rice, a food crop with limited availability, unlike modern bioethanol processes using corn or sugarcane. Japan's wartime sake production was a stopgap measure under resource scarcity, not a scalable fuel solution.
*Oil, Crude (Conventional) Oil all has already peaked, and so Oil has been redefined as any hydrocarbon molecule that enters a refinery, I’m not going to list all the various hydrocarbons that now come under the banner as Oil, If you’re not aware check it out.
But keep a look out for ++Coal liquefaction process (CLC) taking off as a sign of *Oil no longer meeting demand.
++Germany developed synthetic fuel processes, the Bergius and Fischer-Tropsch, Coal liquefaction process to produce oil from coal in the early 20th century because it lacked domestic petroleum reserves and sought energy independence, a goal the Third Reich later intensified for military rearmament and wartime needs. Synthetic oil production ramped up significantly with the Nazi regime, with plants built from 1936 to 1943 producing millions of tons of fuel by the peak of World War II to compensate for the interruption of foreign supplies.
Countries currently using CLP: South Africa (Sasol) and China (Shenhua, Yitai, and others)🤔
"Biodiesel" made from soy beans has an EROEI of around 2.5 to 3, less than half that of the worst EROI petroleum/diesel fuel being pumped & refined presently. Estrified soy oil diesel fuel also provides significantly less energy per volume (shorter vehicle ranges!), industrial soya production beats the crap out of farm land and growing beans efficiently requires greater use of phosphorous fertilizers than grain/vege crops, high grade phosphorous minerals for fertilizer are also growing ever scarcer & require still more energy to procure, process, transport. Also, some of those mineral sourced Phosphorous fertilizers have been found to contaminate farm land with very undesirable elements, a good % of US cigarette smoker's cancers actually stem from radioisotope contamination of the cheapest phosphorous fertilizers used on the tobacco.
All food plant based bio fuels are EMERGENCY STOP GAPS at best (or hidden agricultural industry subsidies to billionaires in USA).
Couldn’t agree more KEichelhäher. But we still consume 10 calories of fossil fuel in 1 calorie of food, that’s only possible because we’ve created a civilisation built on the energy contained within FREE FINITE Flammable Fossils of Coal, Oil and Natural Gas. One in particular Oil, is being depleted on a massive scale and with no other energy source in sight that’s as energy dense and portable. When Oil’s been depleted to the point it’s no longer economical to extract (EROEI) the poly and meta-crisis will accelerate forcing humanity into the bottleneck of ecological overshoot and the great simplification resulting in the collapse of industrial civilisation, and by a series of Seneca cliffs humanity eventually plateauing at a 17th century feudal lifestyle, before eventually moving on toward extinction. That is for those that cannot find a way of living off what Earth can naturally provide sustainably.
There’s an Amazonian tribe deep in the forest that’s had no contact with the modern world, they were seen from a helicopter, and observed watching it, though what they must of thought who knows. They’re able to survive on just what the forest has to offer, and for their sake may it remain that way.
Fully agree. Plus we deplete the soils with industrialized agriculture so that it's just a statistical fact that we will reach the point where even within this paradigm, using cheap oil and mineral fertilizers, we won't be able to produce anything. And that's not even talking about the lacking nutritional value if said produce.
We would need a return to the land movement, widespread vegetable gardening, organic fertilizing methods utilizing what smaller farm animals provide, regenerative cattle farming... that would make for a much more physically taxing lifestyle with much less amenities but at the same time, people would be more content. How could they be less happy, less healthy, less grounded than they are now.
We do have the means to provide an organizational framework for this. But as I said before, all this would require a radically different mindset, a holistic Weltanschauung, the willingness to let some fall by the wayside if they aren't willing.
I provided a whole hamlet of sixty people with vegetables mostly in my own... Yes, we need cities, yes we need an intellectual elite, yes we need a vision that is more than just going back to the middle ages. But stuffing eighty percent of a population into metropolitan areas where they can be miserable without any real purpose isn't part of it.
Making alcohol to fuel engines from ANY grain (industrial quantities of grain is a NET ENERGY LOSS for several reasons.
Distiller's grain must be grown with nitrogen fertilizers, mechanically planted, harvested, transported using liquid fuels, then requires still more heat energy to ferment & distill)
Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is made from ammonia gas, natural gas is required to make ammonia and to use atmospheric nitrogen, a long with lots of heat & mechanical energy.
Soy beans for diesel is just BARELY efficient enough if phosphorous and potassium fertilizers are locally available & cheap, which they usually are NOT.
Tropically grown sugar cane sourced ethanol can be a net energy gain IF minimal raw material transport is done, but it has large environmental costs and takes land which could be growing rice out of that use.
Biofuels are an emergency stop gap measure at best.
In the USA, our laws requiring "oxygenated" (10% + corn ethanol is added) fuels are really a hidden subsidy to the largest agricultural businesses and biggest corporate farmers).
As countries (BRICS, especially) murmur about buying/selling in currencies other than the US Dollar, this "sovereign wealth fund" shake-down may have a lot to do with propping up the US Dollar, even while that strong dollar hurts US exports.
Thanks, B, clear analysis as always! However, let's add another elephant to the room occupied by your hypothetical high-powered lawyer - all the infrastructure he depends on to do his work. He or she depends on the internet, cloud services, data centers, video streaming services for virtual conferences, and nowadays, probably AI. All of these are energy and materials heavyweights. And then there is the entire political, legal, court, and professional and industry association networking system producing the laws, decisions, data, analysis, and websites that the lawyer and legal staff access. It forms a vast system of non-productive overhead fueling the complexity of our top-heavy hierarchy.
Imagine not just your illustrative Jenga tower, but a tower of cantilevered, counterbalanced overhangs growing wider and heavier as you rise above the base, an inverted pyramid. This is the burden being shouldered by the base, until the base either rebels and shrugs or crumbles under the weight. Either way, the collapse looks likely to be catastrophic. Ha ha, when I was four years old, and my favorite toy was my set of wooden blocks, I loved building just such contraptions. Impossible to disassemble without collapse.
I thought about "green" iron and steel last night. I remembered reading that reducing iron oxide with hydrogen instead of coke doesn't work well with iron ore available in many parts of the world due to the depletion of some of the highest-quality ore deposits. As it turns out, the process requires ore which is >67% iron. Since this is already a requirement for certain other types of steelmaking, many mining companies are already beneficiating (concentrating iron, removing certain impurities and processing the ore into pellets or other forms) their lower-grade ores. It goes without saying that beneficiation increases the amount of energy used to process ore, and this is on top of mining and transportation. It also adds to GHG emissions.
On top of this, hydrogen production has a long way to go before it becomes cost-competitive with gas and coal. And using H2 to make steel will require substantial upgrades or replacements of existing equipment.
Re-arranging deck chairs is all we're doing now. Civilization as we perceive it is in permanent decline. Deux et machina is our only way out. Not happening.
Eric P Dollard claims that Free Energy is real and could be utilized but he argues that our current insatiable energy hunger would destroy the planet in short order by converting electrical energy into heat on a scale never seen before.
At the root of the problem therefore lies our uprooted existence, our inability to understand ourselves as materially and metaphysicallly integrated parts of an organic whole. I think this is by design.
Fusion power plants run to generate steam used to run turbines and generate electricity from mechanical generators as presently planned will be an even WORSE heat source per kilowatt hour electrical output.
Some fusion reactions which produce charged particles COULD produce electricity more directly without the extremely wasteful penalties of some heat engine intermediary driving a mechanical electrical generation system- But are even tougher to implement (or fuel!) than the easiest (deuterium+tritium) fusion scheme, which we STILL can't do as a net energy source.
Great piece as usual. Welcome to the cul-de-sacs of The Long Emergency folks. Where there is no exit, only more people arriving that bring nothing with them but hunger and high energy expectations... and don't comprehend what's happening. Put enough rats in a barrel and eventually they will start eating one another.
Excellent, thank you. Have you ever seen a graph of copper showing the ore to waste rock ratio? I'd be curious to see that, imagining the waste rock growing rapidly...
I'm curious about copper mining and its environmental impacts as well. Just starting to explore issues at this site:
https://internationalcopper.org/
I wrote a mining report when I was working with Protect Thacker Pass (to try to prevent a lithium mine). It's a general report (not copper specific) but can perhaps give a sense of scale and scope.
https://www.protectthackerpass.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/HowMiningHurtsCommunities_Spreads.pdf
The trends in future of natural resources availability/costs was studied and USA foreign policy based on these studies was formulated early in the decade after the end of WWII. If you wondered why US foreign policy never much changes, it is because the underlying physical realities of natural resource availabilities mentioned in this article are also unchanged.
See a 1960s analysis here:
SCARCE RESOURCES: THE DYNAMIC OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM
-Heather Dean, 1965
https://www.nefp.online/_files/ugd/63d11a_136d0855070647ba803e05cea0bc4c83.pdf
Quote from front cover:
"That empire in Southeast Asia is the last major resource area outside the control of any one of the major powers on the globe. . I believe that the condition of the Vietnamese people, and the direction in which their future may be going, are at this stage secondary, not primary."
Senator McGee (Wyoming) US Senate February 17, 1965
An good example of the 3d world rebelling against the sale of resources for a pittance is Niger..by eliminating France as the middle man making all the profit, its uranium deposits are vastly more valuable...
It seems to me that the current low oil price likely reflects a hidden recession throughout the West...How is GDP increasing without oil being in great demand? A Central Bank magic trick, methinks....
Спасибо ! Такие статьи хочется читать и перечитывать .К сожалению, на одного Честного колдуна , сейчас приходится 100 "экспертов - геополитиков" , вредных и бесполезных .
You can move a car and fly with "Alcohol !!! At the end War2 Japan was flying with Alcohol !!!Just saying
Why isn’t it considered for use now you might ask Marten, in three words: economics, food security.
The sake production method from WWIl Japan to produce alcohol isn't used today to replace *Oil because it's designed for small-scale beverage production, not high-volume fuel. It's inefficient, low-yield, and relies on rice, a food crop with limited availability, unlike modern bioethanol processes using corn or sugarcane. Japan's wartime sake production was a stopgap measure under resource scarcity, not a scalable fuel solution.
*Oil, Crude (Conventional) Oil all has already peaked, and so Oil has been redefined as any hydrocarbon molecule that enters a refinery, I’m not going to list all the various hydrocarbons that now come under the banner as Oil, If you’re not aware check it out.
But keep a look out for ++Coal liquefaction process (CLC) taking off as a sign of *Oil no longer meeting demand.
++Germany developed synthetic fuel processes, the Bergius and Fischer-Tropsch, Coal liquefaction process to produce oil from coal in the early 20th century because it lacked domestic petroleum reserves and sought energy independence, a goal the Third Reich later intensified for military rearmament and wartime needs. Synthetic oil production ramped up significantly with the Nazi regime, with plants built from 1936 to 1943 producing millions of tons of fuel by the peak of World War II to compensate for the interruption of foreign supplies.
Countries currently using CLP: South Africa (Sasol) and China (Shenhua, Yitai, and others)🤔
Imagine putting those horrific seed oils in diesel engines instead of in people.
There are 10 calories of fossil fuel in 1 calorie of food, think about that KEichelhäher🤔
OK?
@ᛯEichelhäherᛯ
"Biodiesel" made from soy beans has an EROEI of around 2.5 to 3, less than half that of the worst EROI petroleum/diesel fuel being pumped & refined presently. Estrified soy oil diesel fuel also provides significantly less energy per volume (shorter vehicle ranges!), industrial soya production beats the crap out of farm land and growing beans efficiently requires greater use of phosphorous fertilizers than grain/vege crops, high grade phosphorous minerals for fertilizer are also growing ever scarcer & require still more energy to procure, process, transport. Also, some of those mineral sourced Phosphorous fertilizers have been found to contaminate farm land with very undesirable elements, a good % of US cigarette smoker's cancers actually stem from radioisotope contamination of the cheapest phosphorous fertilizers used on the tobacco.
All food plant based bio fuels are EMERGENCY STOP GAPS at best (or hidden agricultural industry subsidies to billionaires in USA).
https://afdc.energy.gov/files/pdfs/3229.pdf
Couldn’t agree more KEichelhäher. But we still consume 10 calories of fossil fuel in 1 calorie of food, that’s only possible because we’ve created a civilisation built on the energy contained within FREE FINITE Flammable Fossils of Coal, Oil and Natural Gas. One in particular Oil, is being depleted on a massive scale and with no other energy source in sight that’s as energy dense and portable. When Oil’s been depleted to the point it’s no longer economical to extract (EROEI) the poly and meta-crisis will accelerate forcing humanity into the bottleneck of ecological overshoot and the great simplification resulting in the collapse of industrial civilisation, and by a series of Seneca cliffs humanity eventually plateauing at a 17th century feudal lifestyle, before eventually moving on toward extinction. That is for those that cannot find a way of living off what Earth can naturally provide sustainably.
There’s an Amazonian tribe deep in the forest that’s had no contact with the modern world, they were seen from a helicopter, and observed watching it, though what they must of thought who knows. They’re able to survive on just what the forest has to offer, and for their sake may it remain that way.
https://youtu.be/KtQG9EiDr9k?si=WMH-4bRJJvCZ7Ccb 🤔
Fully agree. Plus we deplete the soils with industrialized agriculture so that it's just a statistical fact that we will reach the point where even within this paradigm, using cheap oil and mineral fertilizers, we won't be able to produce anything. And that's not even talking about the lacking nutritional value if said produce.
We would need a return to the land movement, widespread vegetable gardening, organic fertilizing methods utilizing what smaller farm animals provide, regenerative cattle farming... that would make for a much more physically taxing lifestyle with much less amenities but at the same time, people would be more content. How could they be less happy, less healthy, less grounded than they are now.
We do have the means to provide an organizational framework for this. But as I said before, all this would require a radically different mindset, a holistic Weltanschauung, the willingness to let some fall by the wayside if they aren't willing.
I provided a whole hamlet of sixty people with vegetables mostly in my own... Yes, we need cities, yes we need an intellectual elite, yes we need a vision that is more than just going back to the middle ages. But stuffing eighty percent of a population into metropolitan areas where they can be miserable without any real purpose isn't part of it.
@Marten
Making alcohol to fuel engines from ANY grain (industrial quantities of grain is a NET ENERGY LOSS for several reasons.
Distiller's grain must be grown with nitrogen fertilizers, mechanically planted, harvested, transported using liquid fuels, then requires still more heat energy to ferment & distill)
Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is made from ammonia gas, natural gas is required to make ammonia and to use atmospheric nitrogen, a long with lots of heat & mechanical energy.
Soy beans for diesel is just BARELY efficient enough if phosphorous and potassium fertilizers are locally available & cheap, which they usually are NOT.
Tropically grown sugar cane sourced ethanol can be a net energy gain IF minimal raw material transport is done, but it has large environmental costs and takes land which could be growing rice out of that use.
Biofuels are an emergency stop gap measure at best.
In the USA, our laws requiring "oxygenated" (10% + corn ethanol is added) fuels are really a hidden subsidy to the largest agricultural businesses and biggest corporate farmers).
Great analysis.
As countries (BRICS, especially) murmur about buying/selling in currencies other than the US Dollar, this "sovereign wealth fund" shake-down may have a lot to do with propping up the US Dollar, even while that strong dollar hurts US exports.
Thanks, B, clear analysis as always! However, let's add another elephant to the room occupied by your hypothetical high-powered lawyer - all the infrastructure he depends on to do his work. He or she depends on the internet, cloud services, data centers, video streaming services for virtual conferences, and nowadays, probably AI. All of these are energy and materials heavyweights. And then there is the entire political, legal, court, and professional and industry association networking system producing the laws, decisions, data, analysis, and websites that the lawyer and legal staff access. It forms a vast system of non-productive overhead fueling the complexity of our top-heavy hierarchy.
Imagine not just your illustrative Jenga tower, but a tower of cantilevered, counterbalanced overhangs growing wider and heavier as you rise above the base, an inverted pyramid. This is the burden being shouldered by the base, until the base either rebels and shrugs or crumbles under the weight. Either way, the collapse looks likely to be catastrophic. Ha ha, when I was four years old, and my favorite toy was my set of wooden blocks, I loved building just such contraptions. Impossible to disassemble without collapse.
@Robin Schaufler
"The first thing we do, we cut off all the law firm's electricity"?
I thought about "green" iron and steel last night. I remembered reading that reducing iron oxide with hydrogen instead of coke doesn't work well with iron ore available in many parts of the world due to the depletion of some of the highest-quality ore deposits. As it turns out, the process requires ore which is >67% iron. Since this is already a requirement for certain other types of steelmaking, many mining companies are already beneficiating (concentrating iron, removing certain impurities and processing the ore into pellets or other forms) their lower-grade ores. It goes without saying that beneficiation increases the amount of energy used to process ore, and this is on top of mining and transportation. It also adds to GHG emissions.
On top of this, hydrogen production has a long way to go before it becomes cost-competitive with gas and coal. And using H2 to make steel will require substantial upgrades or replacements of existing equipment.
As usual, RMI paints an optimistic scenario.
https://rmi.org/green-iron-corridors-a-new-way-to-transform-the-steel-business/
The iron and steel industry has its work cut out for it.
https://ieefa.org/sites/default/files/2022-06/IEEFA_IRON_ORE_REPORT_JUNE2022%20%281%29.pdf
https://theconversation.com/chinas-green-steel-push-could-crush-australias-dirty-iron-ore-exports-219299
It will be interesting to see how well, or even if, the green hydrogen industry gets off the ground.
Re-arranging deck chairs is all we're doing now. Civilization as we perceive it is in permanent decline. Deux et machina is our only way out. Not happening.
Thanks B. Deindustrializing Europe is the relief-valve.
;-(
Eric P Dollard claims that Free Energy is real and could be utilized but he argues that our current insatiable energy hunger would destroy the planet in short order by converting electrical energy into heat on a scale never seen before.
At the root of the problem therefore lies our uprooted existence, our inability to understand ourselves as materially and metaphysicallly integrated parts of an organic whole. I think this is by design.
@ᛯEichelhäherᛯ
Fusion power plants run to generate steam used to run turbines and generate electricity from mechanical generators as presently planned will be an even WORSE heat source per kilowatt hour electrical output.
Some fusion reactions which produce charged particles COULD produce electricity more directly without the extremely wasteful penalties of some heat engine intermediary driving a mechanical electrical generation system- But are even tougher to implement (or fuel!) than the easiest (deuterium+tritium) fusion scheme, which we STILL can't do as a net energy source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion
Great piece as usual. Welcome to the cul-de-sacs of The Long Emergency folks. Where there is no exit, only more people arriving that bring nothing with them but hunger and high energy expectations... and don't comprehend what's happening. Put enough rats in a barrel and eventually they will start eating one another.