The green revolution is going to require much more mining of minerals to make the metals that will drive the green energy revolution. OK. At which point we get this:
Even further into the future, he says scientists could develop chemical solutions that are harmless for the environment and even methods to extract ore that require circulating liquid through the ground rather than disturbing large amounts of earth.
We already do this, it’s called “in-situ leaching” and is a reasonably standard method of uranium mining and we can think of at least one copper experiment being tried. Extraction from brines and geothermal waters is very much the same thing, logically, it’s just that the circulating liquid is the water already there rather than something injected.
So, yes, entirely possible to the point of already being done. At which point we get this:
There, violent militias - with the blessing of the military junta that usurped Aung San Suu Kyi’s government in 2021 - have set up a string of illegal rare earth mines, pock-marking the landscape with bright blue chemical pools, an investigation by the charity Global Witness found.
In a crude and ecologically devastating process, they remove vegetation, drill holes into mountains and inject an acidic solution to effectively liquidate the earth. This is then drained into chemical pools where the liquid evaporates, leaving behind the minerals.
Once the process is finished, the site is abandoned and the militias simply move on, starting all over again in a new location.
Just a few years ago, there were only a handful of these mines. But since then, satellite imagery has revealed hundreds of them - with nearly 3,000 pools recorded across an area the size of Singapore as recently as five months ago.
That is in-situ leaching of ionic adsorption clays. Once thought to be specific to South China and environs such clays are now known to be a common result of the weathering of granite in subtropical climes. There’s even a certain muttering that China Clay pits could be a possibly - do note the possibly - useful source.
At which point, well, is in-situ leaching something we should all be hoping for or not? That it is polluting is undoubtedly true. But that’s not the point at all - it’s how polluting is it?
For as that most basic finding of economics tells us there is no such thing as a solution, there are only trade offs. We can pollute the atmosphere with fossil fuels, pollute the land by mining or shiver in the dark until we all die. Choices do have to be made, d’ye see?