I remember when I was a boy my dad showing me a galvanized nail. He told me it had a zinc coating to protect against rust. About half of all the zinc mined today is used for galvanization. Perhaps better known is the alloy brass which is a mixture of copper and zinc. Bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, can include a little zinc in the mix. A large number of specialized industrial alloys contain a small percentage of zinc.
Zinc is an essential nutrient. You need 10-15 milligrams per day. In well-fed areas we get plenty from our diet. Zinc deficiency is a serious problem in malnourished regions.
Zinc makes a good anode and is used in alkaline batteries as well as the older zinc-carbon cells. Batteries are crucially important in the transition to renewable energy. We are going to need all kinds of batteries.
Worldwide about 13 million tonnes of zinc are produced annually. Only three other metals are produced in greater numbers—iron, aluminum, and copper. Zinc mining and smelting are very messy processes and the environmental and public health impacts are big. Lead and cadmium are often found along with zinc and both are considered toxic heavy metals.
Despite the name the rare-earth elements (lanthanoids) aren’t all that rare. Many are more abundant than well-known metals. But they are hard to get at. They aren’t concentrated in big ore bodies. Rather, the rare-earths are disseminated widely, in many rock types, and moreover are very similar to each other chemically. That makes them hard to separate. Many weren’t isolated until late last century.
The Greek word dysprositos means “hard to get at.” The chemist who first identified the metal (Paul Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran in 1886) coined the name.
Seventeen elements are lumped under the REE banner:
Despite the relatively high crustal abundance REEs are not produced on the same scale as copper or lead:
TREO means Total Rare Earth Oxides which is how the global trade is measured (in metric tons).
These days the rare-earths are in the news. They have a lot of applications in the high-tech world we now inhabit. Fortunately we only need small amounts—compared to the massive amounts of copper we need, that is. But demand is going up. Most of the REEs are mined in China. There’s a mine in California (Mountain Pass) that has produced REEs in the past and has re-started operations. There’s a lot of interest in new domestic supplies and new processing plants.
Only 100 tonnes of dysprosium is produced each year. Neodymium magnets used in electric vehicle motors benefit from a small amount of dysprosium thus we will need more and more of the stuff going forward.
The six Apollo missions that landed on the moon brought back a total of 382 kilograms of lunar surface material.
That’s 842 pounds.
There’s a mine in Chile called Escondida. It’s the largest copper mine in the world. It routinely produces more than a 1000 kilotonnes of copper annually.
That’s true in general, even if hyperbolic, as we will certainly need lots of copper and other minerals. In response to the problem we get stuff from NASA saying we will be mining the moon in ten years.
That’s a bit fanciful for me. 842 pounds isn’t a lot of rock! Imagine the number of rocket launches it will take to establish even the tiniest of a semi-permanent habitable human “presence” on the moon let alone some kind of industrial infrastructure. We’ve got better rocket technology today but it is just an improvement over the same rockets that were launched in Apollo’s day. The physics hasn’t changed. There are no fundamental breakthroughs in the industry. And space is still utterly hostile to human life.
No, I think we’ll have to get that stuff right here on earth and in our own back yards.
p.s. Check out this NASA/JPL website “The Lunar Gold Rush” and the infographic supplied there by 911metallurgist if you want to get a sense of how speculative the entire moon-mining venture is.
Copper, like gold, has been used by humans for thousands of years. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin and every schoolkid knows about the Bronze Age.
The Romans originally called it aes Cyprium or “metal of Cyprus” as that island (Kupros in Greek) was famed for its copper mines. The metal ultimately came to be called cuprum and that’s where we get the Cu symbol.
That’s an open pit copper mine in Utah that’s half a mile deep and two and one-half miles across. It is one of the oldest and most productive mines on the planet. It is called Kennecott and it is located in Bingham Canyon near Salt Lake City. Kennecott Utah Copper Corporation is the listed owner and they are wholly owned by Rio Tinto Group, one of the largest metals and mining outfits in the world. Rio Tinto was founded in 1873 and spans the globe with headquarters in both Melbourne and London.
Copper is actually an essential nutrient. You need a milligram or two daily. But we mine for copper in these massive pits because we can’t have a modern society without it. We are connected together by a vast electrical grid. Through this grid flows the blood of a technological civilization—electricity. Without this blood we are doomed. Copper wires are like the arteries in our bodies that channel life-giving blood to our organs and extremities. The electricity the wires provide to our homes and businesses and everywhere else is just as life-sustaining. We live in an electrical world. There is no going back. We aren’t suddenly going to adopt Amish ways.
That means big, messy holes in the ground. Let’s hope we are smart enough to do it right and not make too bad of a mess.
World demand for copper is about 28 million tonnes annually. Chile is the world’s leading producer.
The Latin word for gold, aurum, is the source of the symbol Au. This most famous of all metals has been known since pre-history. People have coveted gold for as long as they had the notion to covet. I know the Bible has some notions about coveting.
This is what gold mining looks like today. The image is from a massive open pit gold mine in Australia called, fittingly, The Super Pit.
I had the opportunity to visit an open pit gold mine many years ago. It was the McLaughlin Mine near Clear Lake, California. Homestake Mining operated McLaughlin from 1985-2002 and produced about 3.5 million ounces of gold. The property is now part of the University of California system and the reclaimed land is a natural preserve. What I remember most was the gigantic scale of everything. The haul trucks were particularly impressive. They had the biggest tires I’d ever seen! The crushers, where the ore was processed, were enormous and took huge amounts of power.
Gold is a superb material for electronics and has other valuable industrial applications. But most gold—almost half of the world’s production—goes into making jewelry. What’s left becomes the bullion in bank vaults and investment portfolios.
That’s a lot of digging, a lot of energy expenditure, and a lot of big messes for stuff that is mostly useless. We impart a lot of value to gold, and we have a lot of expectations about it. It’s supposed to always be valuable, no matter what else is going on in the world. That’s it’s magic. There are folks who think we should go back to the gold standard of yesteryear. Gold is that powerful—it will fix our economy!
In the meantime the 3000 or so metric tons (tonnes) of gold that are dug up every year around the world leave a large environmental footprint. Open pit mining has a poor track record when it comes to land stewardship. I’m not so sure precious metals are all that precious.
The late Donald J. Borror was a professor of zoology and entomology at Ohio State University who penned a little book for biology students entitled Dictionary of Word Roots and Combining Forms. The subtitle is the remarkably descriptive Compiled from the Greek, Latin and other languages with special reference to biological terms and scientific names.
It’s one of my essential references.
According to Borror beryll– is Greek for “sea-green jewel.” Here’s a picture of aquamarine, a form of the mineral beryl:
Another form of beryl is emerald, a precious stone known since antiquity. Beryl (beryllium aluminum silicate, Be3Al2Si6O18) is, like all beryllium compounds, toxic. You can wear your emeralds without fear of being poisoned as the mineral is an insoluble, very hard, and stable cyclo-silicate. But if you are digging the stuff up and processing it (including cutting and polishing) you have to be careful.
The pure element is not found in nature. It is a column II metal (alkaline earths) like Magnesium (Mg, #12) and Calcium (Ca, #40) and is thus highly reactive. Both Ca and Mg are abundant in the earth’s crust but only in compounds. Be is much rarer despite its worldwide distribution. And we know that Ca and Mg are essential nutrients for humans. Be and its compounds, especially the salts, can be deadly in small amounts and at low concentrations.
Beryllium is used in countless alloys and finds many applications in the aerospace industry. It makes both copper and aluminum stronger and less prone to sparking and thus is desirable for specialized tools. It is transparent to X-rays and is used extensively in those devices. But care must be taken in refining, manufacturing, and handling due to the ready absorption by the body of dust and fumes.
Only a few hundred metric tons of beryllium ore (mostly beryl) are mined annually, most of that in the United States.
It’s a long drive to Fort McMurray in Alberta. Fort McMurray is a boom town in the middle of the Athabasca oil sands. There were barely a thousand souls there in the 1950s but by the 1970s there were several thousand. The population doubled from 15,000 to 30,000 between 1976 and 1981. It doubled again to 60,000 by 2011. The 2021 municipal census says there are now 72,917 residents.
Google Maps says I should take US-97 as far as the Columbia River and then head east on I-84. From there it is north on I-90 to Spokane. Figure 600 miles for that leg of the trip.
From Spokane it is US-95 to the Canadian border where it becomes BC-95. From there you take AB-3 and AB-22 to Calgary and then AB-2 to Edmonton. That’s another 600 miles or so.
It’s a mere 450 km (whoops, I mean 280 miles!) north on AB-63 to Fort McMurray. The whole thing is not quite 1500 miles. That’s at least 24 hours of driving.
Do I want to drive to the Athabasca oil sands? Well, no. I’d like to go there, but I don’t want to drive. But other than airplanes and helicopters the only way to get to remote, northern Alberta is via automobile. Perhaps I can take a train to Calgary or Edmonton and get a ride from there!
I’m drawn to the Athabasca, in part, because of the oil sands. It’s one of the largest construction projects in the world. I feel like I have to see it. I can’t run my fingers across a plastic keyboard and not think about what it takes for that to be possible. It takes oil to make the plastics, for one. Extracting, processing, refining, shipping, and distributing all have to happen before consuming!
The oil sands project may be really big, but it is dwarfed by the vastness of the surrounding wilderness. I would very much like to see northern Alberta and Saskatchewan. And to continue northward to the Great Slave Lake and through the boreal forests and tundra of the Northwest Territories to Great Bear Lake and the MacKenzie River. It looks like magnificent country.
Wetlands are only a small portion of terrestrial land area, perhaps 4-9%. But in the Athabasca Oil Sands Region a little over half (54%) are fens, bogs, swamps, marshes, and shallow water areas. Wetlands, in other words.
Wetlands are unusually bio-diverse. They also sequester 20% of the world’s carbon.
The Athabasca Oil Sands are one of the largest, if not the largest, deposits of crude oil on the planet. Three million barrels per day are produced and mostly exported. Canada supplies the bulk of the oil our country imports. The USA consumes about twenty million barrels daily. The largest oil tankers in the world (ULCC, ultra large crude carrier) can carry about two million barrels.
There are 142,000 square kilometers of Oil Sands, mostly in Alberta. That’s about 54,000 square miles or roughly the size of North Carolina. The current mining footprint is under 1500 square kilometers (less than 600 square miles). That’s what they call the oil recovery—mining. Of course it takes a lot of people and infrastructure to support a large-scale mining operation and those impacts aren’t as easy to measure.
The way we live demands a lot of energy. Most of that energy comes from long-buried fossil carbon. And despite our recent enthusiasm for renewable sources we will still require hydrocarbon fuels and other petroleum products in very large quantities. That demand will continue to grow, especially in developing nations, and we will have to “mine” oil somewhere.
Athabasca is a word from Cree, one of many languages in the Algonquian family that are native to North America.
The confluence of the Peace and Athabasca Rivers in northern Alberta forms one of the largest freshwater deltas in the world. These rivers converge on Lake Athabasca which spreads into Saskatchewan. South of the Lake are the Athabasca Sand Dunes. There’s a town called Athabasca in Alberta, it’s in Athabasca county, and there you’ll find Athabasca University. Jasper National Park has Mount Athabasca, Athabasca Pass, and Athabasca Glacier.
Those are just a few of the things called Athabasca. The word could mean something grand like “the meeting place of many waters” or merely “where there are reeds.” It’s an old, aboriginal word that’s been translated, transliterated, and anglicized and its earliest meaning is lost to us.
Here’s the first piece of my late mother-in-law’s triptychAthabasca, called simply Athabasca I:
The artist, E.B. Rothwell, included Athabasca in her Spiritus Loci (“spirit of the place”) series. She could trace her ancestry to French fur trappers and an indigenous great-great-grandmother named Marie Caribou. Caribou is an Algonquian word as are moose, raccoon, chipmunk, skunk, moccasin, hickory, toboggan, succotash, squash and many more.
That same area of Canada is also home to the Athabasca oil sands. Petroleum extraction started in 1967 and continues, controversially, to this day. Canada is the world’s fourth-largest producer and exporter of crude oil. Most of that comes from oil sands. The biggest customer is the U.S.
In 1957 a paper* by oceanographer Roger Revelle and physical chemist Hans Suess discussed the connection between mass fossil fuel consumption and atmospheric carbon dioxide, offering this sobering thought:
“Thus human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years.”
Think of the time scales Athabasca evokes. You can count the decades, even a few centuries, of my mother-in-law and her ancestors. Those centuries add up to millenia when you think of the native peoples and their tongues. But the fossil carbon of the oil sands requires a real mind-stretch. Geologists say that stuff is from the Middle Cretaceous period—115 million years ago!
It’s easy to think of the spirits that inhabit a place, but it’s hard to imagine what came before. Those carbon atoms that make up the tar sands at one time inhabited a living thing. Probably marine algae, not a dinosaur, and not what we imagine as a sentient being, but alive nonetheless? Do they leave behind ghosts when we dig them up and burn them?
Niobium is another one of those elements of the modern world. High-strength steels—like the kinds used to make car frames—need a small percentage of niobium in the alloy. It is also used in superalloys which is the stuff they use to make gas turbines and rocket engines.
If you look at the periodic table, you can see that niobium is in the same family (column) as Vanadium (#23) and Tantalum (#73). Both are used in a variety of alloys. These are hard, shiny, corrosion-resistant, high-melting point metals and they contribute those characteristics to steels and other mixtures.
You can get different colors. A thin film of oxidized niobium is anodized (electrically deposited) on the coin. The thickness determines the amount of light diffracted and the resulting interference patterns, thus the color. Varying the voltage of the anode (hence “anodizing”) in the circuit varies the thickness of the layer.
Cool coin, eh?
Worldwide production of niobium is about 80,000 tonnes. Most of it comes from Brazil. If you want to imagine 80,000 tonnes that’s about how much one average-sized oil tanker (AFRAMAX class, empty) weighs. And just for comparison the world produces annually about 70,000,000 tonnes of aluminum!
Mark C. O'Connor 