Following the Thread: Mining and Metals Industries

I am now reaching the last unexplored territory of my detailed review of key innovation dynamics in industry and will follow my thread (“FRED”) through the mining and metals industries. Mining obviously does not apply to metals alone. As I explained in the first part of this book, only 10 billion tons of around 100 billion tons of material extracted per year concern metals. The vast majority consists of quarrying for minerals. However, there are intimate ties between metals mining and metals processing, and, unlike quarrying, metal mining is a complex and growingly difficult and intensive process, which probably requires specific attention. I will focus on the three most important metals of today in this chapter: iron and steel, aluminum, and copper (steel demand is around 1,800 million tons a year, far ahead of aluminum, at 60 million tons, and copper, at around 19 million tons, but all three are fascinating objects of research and key constituents of our modern economies; see Loibl and Tercero Espinoza, 2021; United States Geological Survey, 2021a, 2021b; World Bank, 2017). This is not to discard the others, but an entire book would probably not be enough to accommodate every single peculiarity of every metal on Earth, an otherwise fundamental and fascinating topic…