INTRODUCTION TO MINING AND POWER | DON STEVE BLOG
March 29, 2024

Minerals are natural, chemical substances which make up the rocks of the earth’s crust. They have certain physical and chemical properties that differentiate them from one another. There are well over 2 000 known minerals scattered very unevenly throughout the earth.

They may exist in the form of metallic ores (iron, copper, tin), liquid (mercury), lustrous crystals (diamond, sapphire), mineral fertilisers (potash, phosphates) or organically formed deposits (coal and petroleum). Together they make up the subject of avery important branch of economic geography, the mining industry. Though the extraction of minerals was not the first craft known to man, our present industrial civilization has been largely due to the understanding and application of a large range of metallic ores and mineral fuels.

Unlike agriculture, minerals extracted from the earth can never be replaced (the robber industry), and the world as a whole is getting poorer everyday with such an intensive exploitation of the earth’s wealth to meet modern industrial demands. The world’s copper ores are becoming exhausted.

At the rate that automobiles and industrial plants are consuming petroleum, there will come a day when the oil-wells will dry up too. New substitutes must be found if the modern civilization created by man is to be sustained. The question of resource exhaustion is an important one and measures have already been taken by scientists and governments all over the world to conserve resources and invent substitutes.

Hydroelectricity forms a substitute power resource and steps have already been taken to harness tides and solar energy and to supplant present mineral fuels with atomic or nuclear power.

There are so many minerals known to man that it is necessary to group them for easy reference. The following are the more common minerals grouped under different headings.

1) Mineral fuels for power: Coal, petroleum and natural gas. Hydroelectricity may be used as a substitute for these where conditions permit.

2) Iron: Used in the manufacture of steel and thus the basis of many industries.

3) Non-ferrous metals: Copper, tin, aluminium, lead and zinc (also known as the five base metals).

4) Ferro-alloy metals: These are metals that are alloyed with iron to produce better steel, like manganese, chromium, nickel, tungsten, cobalt, vanadium and molybdenum.

5) Other metallic minerals: Gold, silver, platinum, antimony, cadmium, magnesium, berryllium and titanium.

6) Some unusual metals:

  • Mercury (quicksilver): ‘the liquid metal’.
  • Osmium: ‘the heaviest metal’.
  • Radium: ‘the life-saving metals’.
  • Plutonium: ‘the metal of fear’.
  • Uranium: ‘the metal of hope’.

7) Other industrial metals and minerals: These include graphite, mica, asbestos, pyrites, sulphur, potash, phosphate, borate, diamonds and other precious/ stones, kaolin, gypsum, marble and slates.

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