Huge phosphate rock deposit discovered in Norway
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
The massive numbers they are talking about are extrapolating drill results down to 4500m, which is pretty crazy. But let’s say the orebody does extend to depth at regular grades, that would be the deepest mine in the world, and there are a lot cheaper options.
(I’m a hard rock mining engineer)
I did feas work on a project in Tunisia a decade ago that was quite substantial but economics marginal and couldn’t get it over the line due to then prices of phosphorous and the ability of morroco to just ramp up production (actually should probably dust it off). There are lots of resources like this that would become economical faster. Supply/demand and all that.
That said the initial ore body may be great and 50 years from now who is to say
I'm curious if this could turn out to be enough for 20 years, or a drop in the ocean.
Assuming it's enough for 20 years, and we estimate batteries will continue to get more efficient, does the 20 years in todays technology end up being 50 years?
Battery tech needs little phosphorous now, in terms of overall percentage and even with overly optimistic battery estimates I don’t think it will get to any more than 10% of demand. It’s mostly about fertiliser/agriculture.
Odds are they found a massive body of apatite. If so, huge amounts of phosphates.
Surely this assumption is based on data of some sort? Assuming what’s in front of you is also 4km away seems a risky bet.
JORC is Australian standard, however Anglo-Australian mining transnationals with the TSX as home base are the biggest mining concerns on the planet ATM.
Here is a third party discussion of the JORC definitions of 'Resource' Vs 'Reserve'
https://www.mmg.com/our-business/mineral-resources-and-ore-r...
* Mineral Resources can be classified as Measured, Indicated and Inferred, according to the level of geological knowledge and confidence.
* Ore Reserves can be classified as Proved or Probable on the basis of the Mineral Resource classification and consideration of all JORC modifying factors.
'Resources' can be wishful thinking until they're actually Measured (to a degree of confidence).
Any chance you could explain the distinction to a layman? To me they seem to mean roughly the same thing.
for brief distinction and line of further study.
Reserves are the economically mineable portions of those resources.
There are a bunch of levels to each, with varying levels of confidence.
I can drill two holes, 500m apart and by pure chance intersect nothing but lithium at same spacing between 10m-20m. I could theoretically say , you know what I think between these two drill holes it’s all lithium. It’s 500m spacing and according to grades I think we have 500ktons of inferred lithium resource here.
But for instance let’s say I did some more drilling and was confident I found a resource that indicates it has 1million tonnes of lithium in it. However, it’s located in the middle of Sahara desert, where there are no roads, water sources, or infrastructure of any type.
Just because it’s there doesn’t mean it’s economical to mine it (right now). So even though it is a resource it’s not a reserve.
To define something as a resource there is a lot of room for interpretation. Lots of statistical inference, and a bit of art meets science. From public company perspective you can announce you have calling a promising resource, but if you get it wrong, there’s a lot of leeway.
Calling something a reserve is a big deal. Not only are you extremely confident of the size, shape of the resource, but you have evaluated its economic viability to get it out of the ground and have determined that it’s net positive. You lie about this, and you are in trouble.
> A huge phosphate rock deposit discovered in Norway contains enough minerals to meet the global demand for batteries and solar panels for the next 100 years, according to the mining company that controls it.
90% of mined phosphates are used for fertilizer and pollution of waterways with it is a growing problem, but the mining company PR firm is telling us about electric cars and solar panels.
This is similar to discovering a massive new oil field, and telling the world that it'll help with electric cars because they all have plastic components.
Pollution is a huge problem, but climate change is literally an existential problem. I'd trade a bit of the former for less of the latter.
100% agree. If there's a choice between a small amount of pollution vs a large payoff to cut carbon emissions, it's definitely a good idea. For instance, any pollution that comes from the production of solar panels and batteries is probably something we should accept, because the payoff is a large cut in emissions.
But we're not talking about pollution directly in the cause of cutting emissions here. We're talking about separate pollution which is avoidable and has nothing to do with cutting emissions.
The point is, if we use all of this phosphate to make better batteries it would be great and have a good impact on emissions, but most of it will be spread on the ground and let run into rivers because that is the main industrial use of phosphates
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...
Visually present all the exploration and mining in the world and add to it visualisations of the resource costs of extraction and the downstream uses of that material in a manner that ties into global climate factors.
1. Huge oil and gas resources
2. Huge hydropower resources. 96 per cent of all electric power generation comes from hydropower.
3. Gigantic phosphate deposits.
4. Sensibility to avoid resource curse and invest excess money.
5. Fjords designed by Slartibartfast
What matters more in my opinion is what you can expect to taste most of the time. If you go to the supermarket or an average restaurant in a medium sized city for example.
As a pedantic Frenchman immigrant living in Norway, I would say that Norway isn’t the best about food but also not that bad. They have good stuff and terrible stuff like most countries and once you know what to eat you can live happy.
If there's something quite fun to do in Norway and Denmark in just about any type of weather, it's shore fishing and eating fish.
Then some live laugh love travel girls and guy come to "list cuisines".
What a stupid list. I could as well just have pull something out of my arse by vacation photos posted here by HN contributors. If you think that list is in anyway meaningful or sophisticated I have a whole highway to sell you
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/05/17/norway-the-once-and... https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/norways-sovereign-...
(Update: This is not to detract from his achievement, but to harp on the fact that Georgism is one of the most useful, underrated tools in the economic toolboxt)
Political campaign contributions is the perfect euphemism for corruption.
Corporations aren't allowed to make direct campaign contributions in Norway; political campaigns are paid for by the public.
(I've been an expat for over two decades, please correct me if anything has significantly changed - of course the companies still have political influence through choices of where to invest etc, but at least it's nowhere as blatant).
One might say it would be a waste of taxpayer money to do the same in Australia, but in the end we would be far better off by cutting off the direct corporate influence.
We might not have gotten an EV tax instead of incentives if we had politicians not directly receiving money from big petrol.
And we might just be able to raise corporate mining taxes to a far better level, clearly state that if you don't like it then just pack up and leave - and let someone else who is willing come profit instead.
I picked a random city from wikipedia, not attached to Berlin.
A certified 4 dimensional big brain achronal chess move us puny mortals are incapable of comprehending.
sunrise 04:03
sunset 22:39
It's the non-summer months that kill you.
I obviously don't think that, hence what I wrote. I think they were in many cases fought for and the strong got the best land for the most part. There was no collective decision making. And I'm hinting that maybe the current situation doesn't make much sense for team humans.
That's an incredibly simplistic way to see History. Lands are not ranked from best to worse. How a modern population ended up where is a long and complicated process of migration and moved back and forth several times. Great lands have been scorched and abandoned and changing technology, trade and population patterns change drastically what is great land from one generation to another.
Not to mention until very, very recently, Norway was very poor land. The people who ended up being there for the oil boom in the 70s were not, by any means, some very strong people who fought their way into prime land.
[1]: https://www.norgeshistorie.no/industrialisering-og-demokrati...
I'm pretty sure the Sámi would disagree on that one.
The current Sami people may have been first in the northern parts of Norway. The actual time line is difficult to establish (politically charged). What we can say is that the current Sami people were first in the northern parts of Norway compared to the "germanic" group living in the south.
Most discussions end up in agreeing that there were two main groups in Norway. One started from the south of Norway and spread north, while the Sami people started from the north and spread south. Finding out who occupied a certain area first is very difficult, and have a tendency to be based more on politics and patriotism, than scientific facts. (on both sides)
Both groups have been in Norway for thousands of years, so there is actually not much point in debating who was first in Norway. What they can agree on is to make sure that the rights of all are protected. That was not the case historically, where the Sami people were not treated well.
What Norway deserves huge credit for is the way they manage their natural resources, and how they designed their sovereign wealth fund.
> "Oil production generally takes place in an economic enclave, meaning it has few direct effects on the rest of the economy."
Venezuela is just one of many examples.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/venezuela-guyana-territorial-disp...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/guyana-oil-discovery-money-14c23a...
Well sure.
But then they also have Lutefisk [1] and one of the world's most annoying population of mosquitoes.
You can't have it all good.
Sure, you get used to being full of red spots, you stop scratching them, but occasionally you run some part of your skin against something and all hell breaks loose.
Then you come back to sanity and realize freedom has many shapes, and being able to dress as you like in summer is definitely one of them.
Along with not immediately blowing the petro money on a national level, Norway taxes petroleum products more heavily for local consumption than even its high tax neighbors - for a long time, gasoline was cheaper in Germany than in Norway, and Germany has high fuel taxes like pretty much every other European country (EU and non).
I mean cost of living is higher in cities but so is income. Usually. Sometimes.
if the crust is 3 × 10¹⁹ tonnes then phosphate is about 10¹⁷ tonnes of it, and phosphate rock a slightly larger amount
this article says the humans use 50 million tonnes of phosphate a year, much of which ends up in the oceans. at this rate, in 18 million years, the humans will have consumed 0.001% of the phosphate in the crust
but being able to find phosphate isn't the same thing as being able to mine it profitably, because, thanks to modern shipping, another phosphate miner halfway around the world can sell phosphate to your local customers at almost the same price they can sell it to their own neighbors. if they are working from more concentrated phosphate deposits, their price will be lower, and you'll lay off the miners and declare bankruptcy
so what's going on here is that local mining companies are fishing for government subsidies with rhetoric about sovereignty based on a completely imaginary phosphate shortage crisis
i'm not a hard rock mining engineer, just interested in questions of natural resources
Relating to this:
> so what's going on here is that local mining companies are fishing for government subsidies with rhetoric about sovereignty based on a completely imaginary phosphate shortage crisis
Is this kind of the same as the occasional panics about rare earths? My understanding is that they're not really that rare but the environmental impacts and costs of extraction are both high enough that in essence, nobody wants to bother for so long as it remains someone else's problem and the materials remain available.
even though rare earth metals are much less abundant than phosphorus, they still aren't rare. elements rarer than cerium include copper, nitrogen, lead, tin, tungsten, and fortunately arsenic
rarer in the sense of % on (in) earth, or % in the crust? I would have thought nitrogen requiring no mining would make it easier to obtain, even if technically rare?
Similarly, uranium is orders of magnitude more abundant in the continental crust than it is in the rest of the Earth.
the way you referred to us as "the humans" is slightly unsettling.
My takeaway (though not the author’s) was that it’s way down the list of things to worry about.
Basically, the cost of phosphate is such a miniscule component of the cost of food that it would make essentially no difference if we had to mine lower-grade sources of it.
Higher prices might also reduce the amount wasted as runoff, which also would reduce the environmental damage caused by fertiliser use, something we’re going to have to take more seriously at some point.
Phosphate removed from fields by erosion or in plant matter would have to be replaced at some point.
The most abundant rocks also contain huge amounts of potassium, but which is expensive to extract.
Neither in nature nor in agriculture potassium is ever a limiting nutrient like nitrogen and phosphorus.
For modern cultivated lands potassium must be indeed used as a fertilizer, because much of what exists in the soil is removed by remaining in the plant parts that are harvested then transported elsewhere. Another part of the potassium may be washed away by intensive irrigation.
So the potassium that is taken away depending on the cultivation methods that are used must be replenished. However its abundance is such that this will never be a problem.
And I even live in one of the blue states with lower P in the soil.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2017/5118/sir20175118_element.php?...
He also discovered commercial compost can be crap, since it hasn't broken down enough and soaks up nitrogen as it finishes its decomposition in the ground. So if your potatoes are struggling in something like that, slather on some urea and they'll perk (and green) right up.
You just have to provide your own transportation.
They fill a train a day (at least), the trains being some 2.4 kilometers in length carrying some 29,000 tonnes that typically travel some 100km from minesite to coastal port.
Ship capacities are 380,000 to 400,000 tons deadweight and travel about the globe.
"Tractor trailors" (or two to three trailer road trains) as you're describing are used to bring food and supplies and general light goods too and from a minesite.
There are such things as economies of scale.
Separately, what term other than tractor trailer should I use to sound cool?
a list of materials that cost less than US$600/tonne, aka 60¢/kg, near me at retail in the last few years:
- steel scrap (30¢)
- aluminum scrap (58¢) (this is what recyclers pay the cartoneros)
fine minerals for cosmetics, pottery, or foundry work:
- bentonite (28¢)
- mesh-80 calcite (45¢)
- mesh-200 calcite (20¢)
- dirty beach sand (6.2¢)
- tierra de Junín for aluminum casting (20¢)
- red clay (30¢)
- ball clay (30¢)
- 200-mesh quartz flour (30¢)
- pure quartz sand (35¢)
- 200-mesh talc (40¢)
- baryta (46¢)
- magnetite (10¢)
- infusorial earth (40¢)
- calcined metakaolin (35¢)
construction binders:
- plaster of paris (30¢)
- slaked lime (11¢)
- portland cement (26¢)
aggregates for construction:
- clean construction sand (2¢)
- pumice (42¢)
- broken-rock aggregate for concrete (8¢)
- ungraded gravel for concrete (0.8¢)
- 6–20 mm gravel for concrete (1¢)
- quartz gravel aggregate for concrete (15¢)
landscaping materials:
- pure white marble pebbles (12¢)
- quartz gravel for landscaping (2.1¢ in minimum quantity 6 tonnes)
- ornamental 1-4 cm landscaping rocks (8¢)
- round 1–3 cm river rocks (9¢)
miscellaneous:
- gravel for fishtanks (19¢)
- water (0.06¢)
materials this cheap vary a lot in price depending on location, because most of the cost is shipping. diammonium phosphate around here is about US$1/kg
i hope this helps
But if you ever have a larger landscaping job to do, go to a wholesaler, they can deliver tons of materials at your doorstep for relatively cheap.
A tiny island country called Nauru (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauru) got super rich off of Phosphate mining which kept going into the 1990s. This led their government to invest in many projects abroad, including what may in fact be the worst large-scale well funded musical ever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_the_Musical:_A_Portra...
But, yeah the majority of that wealth was extracted by Australia before independence.
Not that any of that excuses the grossly wasteful spending.
But the money's gone, the phosphate's gone, and most of Nauru looks like that crazy bit of Madagascar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsingy_de_Bemaraha_National_Pa...
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/nov/07/cost-...
>By August 2021, the number of asylum seekers and refugees held on the island had fallen nearly tenfold, but the costs of running the offshore program remained broadly static. In that month, there were 107 refugees and asylum seekers on Nauru at a cost to taxpayers of $464,486 a month for each person, or more than $15,000 a day.
Imagine getting paid $15,000 per day... I guess Nauru is getting its P money back.
It isn't a prison if you are free to leave........
- Amount of minerals worth discovered so far approx. $33 billion
- Drilled to 2200 meter in 2020 and confirmed extension of orebody
- Mining already takes place in the surrounding area, for ilmenite, part of the same orebody
https://norgemining.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Norge-Min...
Maybe it's something about the cold weather/caution as a people, Protestant/Lutheran/Calvinist cultural restraint, or factors along those lines, but I have relatively more confidence that this country will not squander and flush the money from this resource down the toilet like some other countries. (at least under the country's political leadership that has given an observable track record with the oil resource as an example)
Maybe it's that they can manage the expectations of their people not to suddenly want to get rich and live off of mineral resources and nothing else. Like some other countries have fallen into the trap of.
[1] https://eros.usgs.gov/media-gallery/earthshot/phosphate-mine...
[2] https://interestingengineering.com/culture/phosphate-mining-...
While I'm happy we got Freedom of Religion from the movement, if you look at the actual belief system its regressive(dogmatic interpretations of 'holy' text). I find myself in the Catholic camp when I study philosophy. It aligns more with what the Deists think God would want if he was interested in Earth/Humans. (Do good vs believe in 1 holy human)
Still happy we got Freedom of Religion so I can be a skeptic. I can't help but roll my eyes that the perfect, all knowing, all powerful God doesn't care if we are good, he want's us to believe 1 human is the son of God. Deism is so much easier to rationalize.
I liked what the Muslim Philosophers said: "Religion is for the masses, philosophers can logically deduce what God wants."
I'm primarily a Skeptic/Agonistic, but Deism solves the cause and effect problem. I generally don't find skepticism useful for real-world uses, despite it being so easy to argue from.
I also wonder if it could be mined by dissolving it underground with acid, rather than mining it and dissolving it at the surface.
https://phys.org/news/2023-02-phosphorus-shortage-affect-wor...
https://www.wired.com/story/the-worlds-farms-are-hooked-on-p...
Norway also seems to be the luckiest/most blessed nation on earth, now they struck another gold mine to go along with all their oil
A failure to plan is a plan to fail.
I don't know about that.
And Norway is not a frozen wasteland. Where I live in Norway is currently rather warmer than where I am visiting family in southern England. And the average annual temperature is 13°C, hardly a frozen wasteland.
If there's something nice to do in Norway and Denmark, regardless of weather, it's fishing and eating fish.
At least the whole population will be seeing the benefit, not just the corrupt few.
Indeed. Had this happened in a country more vulnerable to regime change their government may have been couped already.