KoBold Metals says Zambia copper find largest in a century | Hacker News Reader

KoBold Metals says Zambia copper find largest in a century

mining.com

32 pointsjocho1231 comments

Volts Podcast had an interview with the CEO of KoBold. It was definitely interesting and a needed improvement in finding resources considering the stakes. Hoping this isn't a Jevons Paradox and we don't ruin equally valuable ecosystems in our path. This is a real ethical concern given that the amount of resource extraction has grown so much year over year.

https://www.volts.wtf/p/getting-better-at-mining-the-mineral... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/31/raw-mate...

We had unprecedented social upheaval last year in Panama to free ourselves from a big Canadian copper mine and to push for nature and forests as our primary source of wealth. Zambia has of course not benefited from mining[0] (surely with the exception of big politicians), serving as just another third world source of raw materials with the usual consequences for the locals and the environment.

About time more people in the global South reject this arragement.

[0] https://dailynationzambia.com/2023/04/mingomba-mine-a-wester...

I like KoBold a lot, but this is a wild take on what has happened so far - a traditional mining exploration technique found this deposit, KoBold then brought into this as a typical cashed up midtier/large miner would and haven't released a resource and reserve calculation at all.

I'm curious about the environmental impacts of this deposit vs the copper sulfite mine we've been debating in Minnesota near Lake Superior / Boundary Waters.

Does anyone know the etymology of the name KoBold?

Because kobolds are the little mining tunnel rats in World of Warcraft. Surely this company wasn't named after a warcraft species.

I don't know about the etymology for the company, but Kobold is a German word for a kind of sprite from folklore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobold

If I remember my folklore correctly some variants of them are associated with resource deposits. Maybe that's the connection?

Sounds like kobolds were in Dwarf Fortress. The WoW writers lifted from every fantasy/mythology ever, so I'm not sure if wow kobolds are a nod to DF or just a fantasy folklore reference. Probably the former.

Kobolds are from D&D. Both Dwarf Fortress and World of Warcraft got them from there. D&D got them from Tolkien, like most of the fantasy races, but I think the small lizard people concept is from D&D.

You are correct. They are in fact named after the Kobolds in Dwarf Fortress. https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Kobold

Ah, from Dwarf Fortress! I think DF was a bit before my time. Thanks for the trivia :)

Neat. Copper is expensive. Good find.

Another way to look at it. Hopefully the find brings the price of copper down so it is less attractive to thieves who steal it and interrupt infrastructure projects.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-01-27/la-me-co...

I'd argue that's less of raw-materials issue and more of a "fencing stolen goods on a black market" one.

Thieves are less sensitive to the prices somebody else is paying.

>Copper is expensive.

The double-edged sword is, this also makes it famously dirty. This is structural, not incidental. An iron deposit is only viable at 20% iron (4 tons of slag for every ton of product), but copper is viable at 1% (99 tons of slag for every ton of product).

Apparently it as high as 150t of ore per 1t of copper, and yeah it's an environmental disaster. [1] I can't help but feel this discoveries are such a mixed blessing for developing countries, when even Western countries do such a bad job of controlling for bad environmental outcomes. [2]

As with rare earths, it feels like a good way to get clean outcomes at home and export and concentrate the environmental implications abroad. [3]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5579155/

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/09/copper-minin...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...

Thanks. I probably understated my case, but I try to err on that side.

So the question becomes, how do we fix the environmental optimization algorithm? Then it hits me: "It's the price signals, stupid." It's only economical to dig 150 tonnes instead of 5 because copper is 30x as expensive. So if your environmental optimization goal is simply set to "reduce cost," then these factors cancel out, and you 'auto-magically' optimize for minimum environmental impact. :D

Obviously I'm simplifying here and there are cost differences in processing copper vs iron too, but those differences should also "flow through" and get weighted appropriately.

The problems start when externalities (pollution shirking) and middle-men (rent seeking) enter the room. Both of these distort the price signals, which should (but rarely do!) convey the true underlying environmental cost.

> The problems begin when externalities (pollution) and rent seeking (middle-men) enter the room. Both of these distort the price signals, which should (but rarely do!) convey the true environmental cost.

This is my opinion as well.

> The problems start when externalities (pollution shirking) and middle-men (rent seeking) enter the room. Both of these distort the price signals, which should (but rarely do!) convey the true underlying environmental cost.

This makes it sound like externalities are the distortion rather than the primary driver of the environmental cost. This is not my area, but my understanding is that b/c environmental systems almost never have an "owner" who is a party to transactions/development, the environmental costs are almost entirely externalities. What are the important underlying environmental costs which _aren't_ externalities?

I don't think we disagree on this point.

Externalities are both "a [pricing] distortion" and also "the primary driver of the environmental cost." The former is what allows the latter problem to persist, despite the efficient market hypothesis.

>get clean outcomes at home and export and concentrate the environmental implications abroad

Yes this is a huge problem. If your inputs tell the market that certain humans or certain biomes are economically less valuable than others (eg through statistical life valuations, or environmental regulation arbitrage), then the market genie will say "you asked for it you got it!" and 'efficiently' re-allocate pollution to those poor countries. :-\

Markets are fundamentally a tool for distributed computation, and "garbage in, garbage out" still applies.

Does this make Gates and Bezos the Lords of KoBold (hear our prayer)?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com