Traditional mining is like open-heart surgery: it leaves massive scars and disturbs the surrounding environment. Open pit mining has a large areal footprint, but also underground mining requires a lot of space to dispose waste rock, tailings, and build the aboveground infrastructure. Besides land, it also has direct impacts on water, air and biodiversity. Mining not only disturbs the environment but also the peoples previously living on that land.
Building renewable energy infrastructure to replace the current fossil energy system will require a lot of minerals. Many of their deposits are located under the lands of indigenous and pastoral peoples. Digging them up in the traditional way would have severe consequences on ecosystems and communities. Do local communities and biodiversity really need to be sacrificed to save the world?
I think, we can and must avoid this by developing different strategies. First things first, we should minimize the need for mining to start with: We have to question what we really absolutely need for the transition. Many of the critical materials are required for batteries, electrolysers and fuel cells; all technologies for storing energy. Avoiding energy storage by aligning demand with renewable supply (sunflower society), we can avoid having to dig out many of the critical materials. And, we can reengineer the renewable energy equipment for minimal resource requirements. For example, frames for solar panels do need a lot of aluminum, both environmentally and energetically costly, which can be avoided by frameless panels needing a little more of the easier-to-mobilize glass.
However, reducing can only go part of the way; we will still need materials. The technosphere contains large amounts of materials already; some are just lying around (maybe you have an old phone in your drawer?), others are in soon-obsolete fossil infrastructure (e.g. cars, coal powerplants, oil refineries), and again some in luxury items (e.g. yachts, private jets, etc.). Tapping into these existing resources helps to both avoid environmental impacts and build a fairer world. Other materials can be extracted from landfills, mine tailings or past emissions. We will have to take care of our waste anyways, so why not use it for the transition? For example, we will need to remove a lot of carbon from the atmosphere to stabilize the climate, and making mounting systems for solar panels or insulation materials out of it can save lots of resources and generate environmental benefits.
Still, some mining may be inevitable. The necessary renewable infrastructure requires a different composition of materials than currently in use or disposed of in the past. Some of these materials can be found in sufficient quality and quantity only in the ground, for example lithium or neodymium. The question is: How can the absolutely vital materials be extracted with the lowest possible environmental and social consequences?
This brings us back to surgery: avoiding scars and disturbance in neighboring tissue, surgeons developed minimally invasive procedures: a huge success in medicine. Applying this minimally invasive idea to mining, we would need technologies that leave minimal scars in the environment. This could be, for example, an ore-worm: an autonomous, modular, electric, small tunneling machine. It may dig its own access tunnel, leaving only an access hole in the ground and minimal excavated material to be stored somewhere. When reaching the ore body, it crushes, grinds and separates ore concentrate from waste rock, all in-line and underground. It is, so to speak, an online, on-the-spot processing facility. The waste rock could stay in the tunnel; the ore concentrate transported through the access tunnel to further processing and refining outside critical land areas. The ore-worm can perforate the ore body in a way that does not destabilize the formation. And: because it operates autonomously, there is no need for expensive and complex safety equipment for workers protection. Mine water can stay underground. The access path through sensitive land to the mine can be minimal: a powerline to supply electricity, a pipe/conveyor belt for transporting ore concentrate and a road to bring the equipment in and out as well as for maintenance. Further processing can happen outside sensitive areas. Multiple ore-worms can enter through the same access tunnel, increasing mining output without additional damage.
An utopian idea? No, research is going on developing robotic miningmachines, for example in the robominers project. Still, many questions are open: there is need on working out engineering solutions, technological designs, evaluations of environmental and social performances, and ways for financing and investments. Perhaps, other minimal invasive mining procedure can also be conceived, perhaps repurposing knowledge and experience gained in two centuries of coal, oil and gas extraction. To stabilize our climate, the new challenge is to get urgently needed transition materials at minimal environmental and social impacts. Because if we don't have the minerals, we can't make the transition. And that would have unimaginable consequences.
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