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Material World
Industry

Mining and quarrying

The industry every other material industry starts with, and the one whose constraints are geological rather than technical.

Extracting minerals, ores, aggregates and fuels from the ground. It is upstream of essentially everything else, and it is unusual among industries in that its fundamental constraint cannot be engineered around: an ore body is where it is, at the grade it is, and no amount of process improvement puts copper somewhere it is not.

What technology changes is the *cut-off grade* — the concentration at which extraction pays. Average copper ore grades have fallen for a century while production has risen, because flotation, larger equipment and cheaper energy made poorer rock economic. That is the real relationship between technology and reserves, and it is why 'running out' is rarely the right frame.

History

Continuous from prehistory — flint mining predates agriculture — and industrialised by three developments: steam pumping, which allowed mines below the water table; explosives; and, decisively for the twentieth century, froth flotation, which made low-grade disseminated sulfide deposits worth mining and created the modern copper industry.

Open-pit mining on the present scale is a twentieth-century phenomenon and depends on haulage equipment more than on any metallurgical advance.

Economic significance

Roughly a hundred billion tonnes of material moved a year, most of it aggregate and overburden rather than ore. It is capital-intensive, long-horizon and cyclical: a new mine takes ten to twenty years from discovery to production, which is why supply responds to price so slowly and why shortages persist.

Its impacts are concentrated and local — tailings, acid drainage, water use and displacement — where the benefits are diffuse and global, and that asymmetry is the source of most of the conflict around it.

Medium confidence Weak evidence

How we know: checked recently · only one source, so there is nothing to cross-check it against · stated directly by the source.

How this connects

Where a connection has been confirmed by an outside reference, that reference is named beside it.

uses

  • Chalcopyrite — mineral · the principal copper ore, and the reason froth flotation was developed
  • Bauxite — rock · the only aluminium ore worked at scale
  • Dimension stone — material · quarried rather than mined, and the distinction is legal and technical rather than merely a word
  • Froth flotation — process · the process that made low-grade disseminated sulfide deposits economic, and therefore made the modern copper industry
  • Emerald — mineral variety · and its deposits are worked by a mixture of large operations and informal mining, particularly in Colombia
  • Kunzite — mineral variety · as a by-product of pegmatite mining that is mostly after lithium
  • Water — compound · and the industry's water use is mostly a contamination question rather than a consumption one — acid drainage and tailings seepage affect far more water than any operation withdraws

is associated with

  • Industrial Revolution — event · steam pumping allowed mines below the water table, which is what made deep coal possible

Sources

  • Material World
    Our own writing
  • Wikidata
    Wikimedia Foundation · Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (public domain dedication)

Questions this page answers

Where it comes from, and what it becomes

Follow Mining and quarrying back to what it starts as, and forward into what it becomes. Each step is a documented one — a real route material takes, not a chain of inference.

Upstream — what it comes from

  • Mining and quarrying → uses (the only aluminium ore worked at scale) → Bauxite → is sourced from (the residue of prolonged tropical weathering, which strips the silica and alkalis out of an aluminosilicate rock and leaves the aluminium behind — basalt is one common parent among several) → Basalt → is sourced from (partial melting of mantle peridotite is what basalt magma is — the residue left behind stays peridotite, depleted of what went into the melt) → Peridotite → is composed of (the mineral that defines the rock and gives it its name — a peridotite is olivine-dominant by definition) → Olivine
  • Mining and quarrying → uses (quarried rather than mined, and the distinction is legal and technical rather than merely a word) → Dimension stone → is sourced from (the most workable of the common building stones) → Limestone → is sourced from (precipitated from it, mostly by organisms building shells and skeletons out of dissolved calcium and carbonate) → Seawater → is composed of (about 96.5 per cent by mass — seawater is 3.5 per cent dissolved solids and the rest of it is this) → Water
  • Mining and quarrying → uses (the process that made low-grade disseminated sulfide deposits economic, and therefore made the modern copper industry) → Froth flotation → takes as input (the archetypal flotation feed — porphyry copper ore runs well under one per cent copper and leaves as a concentrate of twenty-five or more) → Chalcopyrite
  • Mining and quarrying → uses (and the industry's water use is mostly a contamination question rather than a consumption one — acid drainage and tailings seepage affect far more water than any operation withdraws) → Water → is sourced from (by desalination, where energy is cheap and coastline available — the only route that adds fresh water rather than moving it) → Seawater
  • Mining and quarrying → uses (the principal copper ore, and the reason froth flotation was developed) → Chalcopyrite
  • Mining and quarrying → uses (and its deposits are worked by a mixture of large operations and informal mining, particularly in Colombia) → Emerald

These are the most distinct paths back. Mining and quarrying can be traced through others besides.

Downstream — what it becomes