[BCFSN] Final Day to Register for the BCFSN 2014 Gathering

Tue Jun 17 21:37:41 EDT 2014

        We've been putting in Huguls at Mirabel Urban FArm and they are
        working wonderfully.

        Drought is an issue we can't ignore. Permaculture zoning is a
        prime directive making

        farming so much more doable and sustainable in a world gone mad
        over resources. Jen and Stephen FB

Exhaustion of cheap mineral resources is terraforming Earth – scientific 
report | Nafeez Ahmed

        Soaring costs of resource extraction require transition to
        post-industrial 'circular economy' to avoid collapse

Nafeez Ahmed

Wednesday 4 June 2014

theguardian.com <http://theguardian.com/>

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/04/mineral-resource-fossil-fuel-depletion-terraform-earth-collapse-civilisation

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A new landmark scientific report drawing on the work of the world's 
leading mineral experts forecasts that industrial civilisation's 
extraction of critical minerals and fossil fuel resources is reaching 
the limits of economic feasibility, and could lead to a collapse of key 
infrastructures unless new ways to manage resources are implemented.

The peer-reviewed study – the 33rd Report to the Club of Rome – is 
authored by Prof Ugo Bardi of the Department of Earth Sciences at the 
University of Florence, where he teaches physical chemistry. It includes 
specialist contributions from fifteen senior scientists and experts 
across the fields of geology, agriculture, energy, physics, economics, 
geography, transport, ecology, industrial ecology, and biology, among 
others.

The Club of Rome <http://www.clubofrome.org/> is a Swiss-based global 
think tank founded in 1968 consisting of current and former heads of 
state, UN bureaucrats, government officials, diplomats, scientists, 
economists and business leaders.

Its latest report, to be released on 12th June 
<http://www.clubofrome.org/?p=7169>, conducts a comprehensive overview 
of the history and evolution of mining, and argues that the increasing 
costs of mineral extraction due to pollution, waste, and depletion of 
low-cost sources will eventually make the present structure of 
industrial civilisation unsustainable.

Much of the report's focus is on the concept of Energy Return on Energy 
Invested (EROEI), which measures the amount of energy needed to extract 
resources. While making clear that "we are not running out of any 
mineral," the report finds that "extraction is becoming more and more 
difficult as the easy ores are depleted. More energy is needed to 
maintain past production rates, and even more is needed to increase 
them." As a consequence, despite large quantities of remaining mineral 
reserves:

    "The production of many mineral commodities appears to be on the
    verge of decline… we may be going through a century-long cycle that
    will lead to the disappearance of mining as we know it."

The last decade has seen the world shift to more expensive and difficult 
to extract fossil fuel resources, in the form of unconventional forms of 
oil and gas, which have much lower levels of EROEI than conventional 
oil. Even with technological breakthroughs in fracking and associated 
drilling techniques, this trend is unlikely to reverse significantly.

A former senior executive in Australia's oil, gas and coal industry, Ian 
Dunlop, describes in the report how fracking can rise production 
"rapidly to a peak, but it then declines rapidly, too, often by 80 to 95 
percent over the first three years." This means that often "several 
thousand wells" are needed for a single shale play to provide "a return 
on investment."

The average EROEI to run "industrial society as we know it" is about 8 
to 10. Shale oil and gas, tar sands, and coal seam gas are all "at, or 
below, that level if their full costs are accounted for… Thus fracking, 
in energy terms, will not provide a source on which to develop 
sustainable global society."

The Club of Rome report also applies the EROEI analysis to extraction of 
coal and uranium. World coal production will peak by 2050 latest, and 
could peak as early as 2020. US coal production has already peaked, and 
future production will be determined largely by China. But rising 
domestic demand from the latter, and from India, could generate higher 
prices and shortages in the near future: "Therefore, there is definitely 
no scope for substituting for oil and gas with coal."

As for global uranium supplies, the report says that current uranium 
production from mines is already insufficient to fuel existing nuclear 
reactors, a gap being filled by recovery of uranium military stockpiles 
and old nuclear warheads. While the production gap could be closed at 
current levels of demand, a worldwide expansion of nuclear power would 
be unsustainable due to "gigantic investments" needed.

Report contributor Michael Dittmar, a nuclear physicist at CERN, the 
European Organisation for Nuclear Research, argues that despite large 
quantities of uranium in the Earth's crust, only a "limited numbers of 
deposits" are "concentrated enough to be profitably mined." Mining less 
concentrated deposits would require "far more energy than the mined 
uranium could ultimately produce." The rising costs of uranium mining, 
among other costs, has meant that nuclear power investment is tapering off.

Proposals to extract uranium from seawater are currently "useless" 
because "the energy needed to extract and process uranium from seawater 
would be about the same as the energy that could be obtained by the same 
uranium using the current nuclear technology." Therefore within this 
decade, the report forecasts an "unavoidable" production decline from 
existing uranium mines.

US Geological Survey data analysed by the report shows that chromium, 
molybdenum, tungsten, nickel, platinum-palladium, copper, zinc, cadmium, 
titanium, and tin will face peak production followed by declines within 
this century. This is because declared reserves are often "more 
hypothetical than measured", meaning the "assumption of mineral 
bonanzas… are far removed from reality."

In particular, the report highlights the fate of copper, lithium, nickel 
and zinc. Physicist Prof Rui Namorado Rosa projects an "imminent 
slowdown of copper availability" in the report. Although production has 
grown exponentially, the grade of the minerals mined is steadily 
declining, lifting mining costs. 'Peak copper' is likely to hit by 2040, 
but could even occur within the next decade.

Production of lithium production, presently used for batteries electric 
cars, would also be strained under a large-scale electrification of 
transport infrastructure and vehicles, according to contributor Emilia 
Suomalainen, an industrial ecologist of the University of Lausanne, 
Switzerland. Sustainable lithium production requires 80-100% recycling – 
currently this stands at less than 1%.

Nickel and zinc, which are used to combat iron and steel corrosion and 
for electricity storage in batteries, also could face production peaks 
in just "a few decades" – though nickel might be extended some 80 years 
– according to engineer and metals specialist Philippe Bihoux:

    "The easily exploited part of the reserves has been already removed,
    and so it will be increasingly difficult and expensive to invest in
    and exploit nickel and zinc mines."

While substitution could help in many cases, it would also be costly and 
uncertain, requiring considerable investment.

Perhaps the most alarming trend in mineral depletion concerns 
phosphorous, which is critical to fertilise soil and sustain 
agriculture. While phosphorous reserves are not running out, physical, 
energy and economic factors mean only a small percentage of it can be 
mined. Crop yield on 40 percent of the world's arable land is already 
limited by economical phosphorus availability.

In the Club of Rome study, physicist Patrick Dery says that several 
major regions of rock phosphate production – such as the island of Nauru 
and the US, which is the world's second largest producer – are post-peak 
and now declining, with global phosphorous supplies potentially becoming 
insufficient to meet agricultural demand within 30-40 years. The problem 
can potentially be solved as phosphorous can be recycled.

A parallel trend documented in the report by Food and Agricultural 
Organisation (FAO) agronomist Toufic El Asmar is an accelerating decline 
in land productivity due to industrial agricultural methods, which are 
degrading the soil by as much as 50% in some areas.

Prof Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on 
Climate Change (IPCC), said that the report is "an effective piece of 
work" to assess the planet's mineral wealth "within the framework of 
sustainability." Its findings offer a "valuable basis for discussions on 
mineral policy."

But the window for meaningful policy action is closing rapidly. "The 
main alarm bell is the trend in the prices of mineral commodities," Prof 
Bardi told me.

    "Prices have gone up by a factor 3-5 and have remained at these
    level for the past 5-6 years. They are not going to go down again,
    because they are caused by irreversible increases in production
    costs. These prices are already causing the decline of the less
    efficient economies (say, Italy, Greece, Spain, etc.). We are not at
    the inversion point yet, but close - less than a decade?"

*For part 2 of this story see here 
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/04/scientists-limits-to-growth-vindicated-investment-transition-circular-economy>.*

/Dr. Nafeez Ahmed <http://www.nafeezahmed.com/> is an international 
security journalist and academic. He is the author of A User's Guide to 
the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It 
<http://crisisofcivilization.com/>, and the forthcoming science fiction 
thriller, ZERO POINT <http://zro.pt/>. Follow him on Facebook 
<http://www.facebook.com/DrNafeezAhmed> and Twitter @nafeezahmed 
<http://www.twitter.com/nafeezahmed>./

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