Abstract
Almost 150 years after that William Stanley Jevons published his paper “The Coal Question” (Jevons, 1866) the debate on mineral depletion has been ongoing between two main schools of thought: one that sees depletion as an important problem for the near future and another that sees technology and human ingenuity as the most important factors in making depletion a problem for the remote future. Today, however, we have created intellectual tools that permit us to frame the problem on the basis of physical factors, in particular on the basis of thermodynamics. The present paper examines the problem of mineral depletion from a broad viewpoint, with a specific view on the role of energy in the mining and production processes. The conclusion is that energy is a fundamental factor in determining how long we can expect the supply of mineral resources to last at the present prices and production levels. The rapid depletion of our main energy resources, fossil fuels, is creating a serious supply problem that is already being felt in terms of high prices of all mineral commodities. Technology can mitigate the problem, but not solve it. In a non remote future, the world's industrial system will have to undergo fundamental changes in order to adapt to a reduced supply of mineral commodities.
Highlights
The question of how long the supply of mineral resources can last started being asked in mid nineteenth century (Jevons, 1866)
These two effects combine in generating the problem: how long can we keep on producing at reasonable costs the large amounts of mineral commodities that the industrial economy requires?
This is the case of fossil fuels which are mined for their ability of producing energy when returned to carbon dioxide dispersed in the atmosphere
Summary
Reviewed by: Bin Chen, Beijing Normal University, China Enrico Sciubba, University Roma Sapienza, Italy Federico Maria Pulselli, University of Siena, Italy. Almost 150 years after that Jevons (1866) published his paper “The Coal Question” a debate on mineral depletion has been ongoing between two main schools of thought: one that sees depletion as an important problem for the near future and another that sees technology and human ingenuity as making depletion only a problem for the remote future. The present paper examines the problem of mineral depletion from a broad viewpoint, with a specific view on the role of energy in the mining and production processes.The conclusion is that energy is a fundamental factor in determining how long we can expect the supply of mineral resources to last at the present prices and production levels. The rapid depletion of our main energy resources, fossil fuels, is creating a serious supply problem that is already being felt in terms of high prices of all mineral commodities.
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