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Mining is essential

The term 'essential' is very over-used. Everything is essential and thus nothing really is. The word has been robbed of its urgency and its ability to hasten action. So you might think it unwise for me to write a book with 'essential' in the title.

But I have done so, firstly, because it's a statement of fact; secondly, because not enough of us understand why mining is essential; and, thirdly, because mining is so essential that a sustainable future would be impossible without it.

This book seeks to explain why.

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A few years ago, I gave a presentation to a group of science and engineering students at a global 'top five' London university entitled 'Why Mining Is Essential'. Despite initial scepticism on the part of the audience, by the end I had won at least some of them over. Many students came to talk with me afterwards, and what became clear was a lack of understanding of, and perhaps a lack of appreciation for, the mining sector. At the time, this lack of understanding surprised me. Unfortunately, the growth of movements calling for outright bans on mineral extraction, and demands that mining and oil and gas companies should be banned from university campuses, makes me realize that perhaps the lack of understanding that leads to such calls has been present for some time. This concerned me: if there's so little knowledge about mining among a group made up of intelligent and enquiring minds like this, it's reasonable to assume the knowledge gap is at least as large in the broader community.

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Imagine for a moment that you are one of those young, intelligent, idealistic university students. You care about sustainability, you want to protect the environment, you have an interest in social justice and you are an avid consumer of all that social media provides.

Imagine further that one day you are alerted, via a message on your smartphone, to an environmental protest which is to take place in central London, outside the annual general meeting of a large mining company. As some of your friends tell you that mining companies are inherently bad, in fact almost as bad as those even-more-evil oil and gas companies, you decide to go along.

You fortify yourself with a warming cup of tea, put your phone on the charger while you take a quick shower and get ready to go. Then you get the lift down from the apartment where you live and head towards the Underground. You arrive at the station to discover the trains are delayed, so you quickly use your phone to book an Uber, or some other app-based car service, and it arrives a few minutes later. You hop in and journey towards the AGM to join your mates decrying those who extract stuff from under the ground.

Well, you should use the time stuck in London's traffic to make a quick reassessment of your plans for the day, because nothing you have done, nothing you are currently doing and nothing you will do would be possible without mining. Nothing.

Let me give you a quick overview of why I say that, and why I say it so emphatically.

The modern apartment building you live in is held up by steel, manufactured from iron ore, metallurgical coal and various other metals and minerals. The windows of your apartment building are made from glass, which is basically sand, some limestone and soda ash. The electricity you take for granted to keep the lights on, power your appliances and charge up all your devices, including your smartphone, gets to and through your apartment on copper cables and wires, miles and miles of copper. The water you used for your cup of tea and to have a shower runs around your building in copper pipes. Your shower will be hot, almost certainly, because of your gas-fired boiler. Your boiler is made from steel, copper and various other metals. The gas gets to you along pipes which are variously made from steel, copper or high-strength plastics.

All of these things are the product of mining (other than the plastic pipes, which are a product of the oil and gas industry).

Your smartphone, the source of all your communication, all your information, indeed an indispensable part of your existence, is made entirely from minerals. The case is aluminium, which starts out as bauxite; the innards are all sorts of different metals but all of them from under the ground; the touchscreen is glass and a combination of rare earth elements. The battery contains lithium, nickel and probably cobalt. There will also be, relatively speaking, quite a bit of copper. The only parts that aren't metal are plastic, which, as we noted above, comes from oil. As oil is a mineral, the 'made entirely from minerals' statement stands.

But the reliance upon metals for your communication goes well beyond the device itself. The social media messages you send and receive on your smartphone, including the one you received about the protest against the mining company, are sent via enormous IT server farms, or 'data centres', operated by the major technology companies. These server farms use astonishing amounts of electricity. They also require yet more copper for the thousands of miles of cables and wiring, steel for the buildings and all manner of other metals for the servers themselves, the controls, the power systems and the cooling systems. The huge, complex infrastructure required to make social media and 'cloud computing' possible depends upon an enormous quantity of metals and minerals.

And all of this is the product of mining.

The Underground, which you were intending to take, is built from vast quantities of steel and copper, with the infrastructure around it, and for that matter all the infrastructure of the city, made from even more massive quantities of concrete, brick, steel, copper, glass and all manner of other things, all of which came from either mining or quarrying. Quarrying, by the way, is just mining but less complicated. It's how we dig up things like aggregate (you may know it as gravel), sand, clay and rock.

The Uber car which you ended up taking is made from steel or aluminium, magnesium, nickel and copper. If it's an electric or a hybrid vehicle, then its battery is made from lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, graphite and copper. Depending upon what sort of car it is, it might have platinum and other platinum group metals in it as well. If the car is on-trend, it will probably have an unnecessarily enormous and distracting touchscreen which uses up even more hard-to-mine and even harder-to-process rare earth metals, just like your phone.

If it's an electric car, it will have got to you because it was charged up at a charging point, with electricity that travelled to the charging point and then into the car on even more miles of copper cables. That electricity will have been generated either with coal, gas, uranium or renewable energy such as solar or wind. Don't get too excited at the thought that the electricity came from renewable sources. Those wind turbines are made from massive quantities of steel, concrete, copper and a whole lot of obscure metals for their magnets and their control systems. Unless it was built here, the car itself will have got to the UK in the first place on a ship made entirely of steel.

All of these things are the product of mining.

Everything in the car that isn't metal, including the seat coverings, will be some sort of plastic, vinyl or artificial fibre, all of which start as oil. The only exception will be if the car has leather seats.

Is a pattern emerging? You will be able to join the demonstration only because of the products of mining, with some assistance from the products of oil and gas. The only thing you've done on this day that isn't directly connected to mining is use a teabag to make the cup of tea you had before leaving your apartment. And that teabag wouldn't have arrived at your house without planting, harvesting and manufacturing machinery, together with transport infrastructure, all made possible by the products of mining. So, actually, everything you've done this day is directly connected to mining.

You simply cannot get away from a dependence upon mining. Something to reflect on as you head to that AGM.

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My example above of our youthful, idealistic student isn't intended to be a cynical dig at students. As a part-time academic, I value their enthusiasm, their spirit of enquiry and their passion for causes they hold dear. They aren't alone in not knowing as much as they could about the source of just about everything except their food. To illustrate this point, let me share a brief anecdote from a real encounter with someone who was definitely not a young student.

My work travels once took me to Peru, a country that requires a visa. So I visited the Peruvian embassy's consular section to provide my fingerprints and collect my passport with the necessary visa inside. While waiting to be attended to, I was sitting next to an older man whose looks were, shall we say, a bit on the wild side. He soon struck up a conversation, and enquired why I was travelling to Peru. I told him I was going out there to visit a mining company. This news got him quite animated.

'Mines,' he exclaimed, 'they make a terrible mess, leave big scars on the landscape. Don't like them.' As I hope is evident by now, I was ready for this reaction, so I decided I would respond.

'Do you own a smartphone?' I asked...