The New Bronze Age - The epic scale of our copper dependence

SpacePete · Aug 19, 2014

Fascinating article on the epic scale of copper mining and how fundamentally essential it is for modern society:

[h]The New Bronze Age[/h]

Worries about oil and gas hog the airwaves. But copper is also essential to keep the world running: It threads through your house, your computer, your eco-correct hybrid car. And it's getting just as difficult, expensive, and environmentally menacing as oil to extract. We have entered the era of tough ore.

...Rio Tinto is planning to build a second mine onor rather, underthe site.

The plan calls for five blocks of ore, each more than half a mile square and a third of a mile tall, to be carved out of the solid rock underneath the pit. In theory, the void created could swallow midtown Manhattan from 33rd Street to 57th Street; 500 feet of empty air would hang above the spire of the Empire State Building. The project would completely transform the mine's operations. Ore from an open pit is dug from above, like sugar spooned from a bowl. Ore from an underground mine is dug from below, like sugar spooned out from the bottom of a pile, except that the sugar is a city-size slab of solid rock.

...In the United States, planning is under way for Resolution, a mine 7,000 feet beneath Arizona, and for Pebble, likely a combination pit and underground mine, in Alaska. Each of these is a potential world-class operation, producing copper on the Bingham Canyon scale.

...Copper mining, even by modern best-practices guidelines, is a hugely costly endeavor from an environmental standpoint. The mines themselves are vast. Processing the ore consumes enormous quantities of fuel (often coal) and water. The waste rock producedknown as tailingsis suffused with toxic substances, including sulfuric acid, arsenic, lead, and cadmium. These substances are intrinsic to the ore, not a byproduct of processing. They cannot be avoided, and they render the tailings dangerous for tens of thousands of years.

...At Bingham Canyon, the latest expansion of the pit involves removing a wedge of rock a mile wide, 1,000 feet thick, and 3,500 feet tall from the pit's south wall. That rock is not ore; it's worthless junk, called overburden. The ore being targeted is buried beneath it. It will take an estimated seven years and more than $660 million in capital outlays before that ore is finally exposed. "Literally and figuratively, we've got a whole mountain to move,"

...The world is not running out of copper. But it is becoming harder to find and produce, ... "There's no more easy fruit." We've entered the era of tough ore.

...Gass and I watched as huge white tendrils of cloud broke loose and spiraled thousands of feet down toward its bottom. I said it looked like the mine was inhaling the storm. Gass said that it was: The pit is so big, it creates its own weather patterns.

AMONG METALS, ONLY SILVER conducts electricity more efficiently than copper, but it is too rare and expensive to be used on an industrial scale. Copper is also ductile, malleable, and highly corrosion-resistant. This makes it exceptional for wiring and plumbing. Several important fertilizers are copper-based; so are several important pesticides. Copper is not particularly strong, and it is dense. But what it does, nothing does quite so well. And what it does, no modern economy can do without.

This creates a conundrum. Most of oil's qualities are not unique to it. A coal-fired or nuclear-power plant (or a hydroelectric dam, or a wind farm) produce exactly the same quality of electricity as an oil-fired plant. Automobiles can run just as well on corn ethanol, biodiesel, or energy stored in batteries as on gasoline. There are few such equivalencies for copper.

...Other than in high-voltage transmission lines, where aluminum's light weight and low cost win out over its poor conductivity, where there is electricity, there is copper: in every home, every computer, every streetlight.

McGowan-Jackson added a modern irony. "If you think about electric cars and wind turbines," he told me, "they're all part of this demand for copper. I mean, I drive a Prius. It's full of copper! The more you move toward a lower-footprint future, the more demand there is for our product."

...is eminently recyclable, but it is also exceptionally durable. Once a copper itemthe wiring of an office building, for example is installed, it tends to stay out of the material stream for years. In the scrap industry's terminology, it has a long resonance. Demand for copper, however, continues to grow, and so it largely has to be met with new materialwith ore coming out of the ground.

...Stanley estimates that 60 percent of firms' development budgets is now spent on things other than the actual excavation of ore. Rohan McGowan-Jackson, of Rio Tinto, gave me an even higher number: Up to 70 percent, he said, goes to "port, processing, water, power, land, relocation of peopleall the stuff that is peripheral to actually getting into the deposit and getting it mined." Stanley believes that within a decade, mining firms will function essentially as private economic-development agencies, with mining merely providing the profit motive and the funds. In the struggle to access tough ore, construction of the mines themselves is, ironically, becoming secondary. "The front line is infrastructure," he told me, "and the second front is technology."

IN THE END, THE math is not that hard. The world's population is growing, and growing richer. Demand for copper is rising. The pressure to dig deeper, on an ever-greater scale, ever further afield, is immense. It will be for decades.

http://www.psmag.com/navigation/nat...onze-age-entering-the-era-of-tough-ore-60868/
Click to expand...

Sonic · Oct 22, 2014

Great read! I swear I read something about this elsewhere, seems like something from FB maybe? But I know I've read this somewhere before: the void created could swallow midtown Manhattan from 33rd Street to 57th Street; 500 feet of empty air would hang above the spire of the Empire State Building.

I know there's only a 3% difference in copper and silver electric conductivity, but I wish I could replace all the electrical copper with silver in my house I wonder since electric cars get power from electricity if that 3% would make a difference in the acceleration? They say with gas engines there's a small delay when you put your foot on the gas but with electric powered cars it's instantaneous. Silver could give it that 3% boost.

SweetBread · Oct 22, 2014

As an electrician i'd rather be scrapping silver than copper, still good money in scrap copper though.

Ghost Story · Oct 22, 2014

guy I knew as a young fella died cutting a live cable up top the mountain to get the copper true story.

Log in or Sign up

The New Bronze Age - The epic scale of our copper dependence

SpacePete Well-Known Member Silver Stacker

Sonic New Member

SweetBread Member

Ghost Story Active Member

Share This Page

Log in or Sign up

The New Bronze Age - The epic scale of our copper dependence

SpacePete Well-Known Member Silver Stacker

Sonic New Member

SweetBread Member

Ghost Story Active Member

Share This Page

Useful Searches