Greta Stacy is a high school science teacher in Doha, Qatar. She has previously taught in Ecuador and the United States.
Teaching about mineral mining is important because it addresses the complexity of climate change solutions. Engage your students with dilemmas such as the trade-offs between mining for the minerals necessary to make electric cars vs. driving a car powered by fossil fuels. Another engaging example for your students could be to have them consider what their phones are made of. Be mindful that this issue could hit close to home for some students, especially if they have ties to communities impacted by mineral mining.
Written By: MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative
The MIT Climate Change Engagement Program, a part of MIT Climate HQ, provides the public with nonpartisan, easy-to-understand, and scientifically-grounded information on climate change and its solutions.
Mining provides us with the building blocks of modern society. Think about all the commonplace objects that contain metals – washing machines, laptops, power lines, and even fertilizer. Metals are also key to our transition to less polluting energy. Technologies like solar panels and electric cars rely on metals like aluminum or lithium, so we will need to do a lot more mining in the future to create a low-carbon energy system.
But much of the energy used to get minerals out of the ground, and process them, today comes from fossil fuels, and releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Forty-four percent of all carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from industry come from producing steel and non-metallic mineral products like cement.
An energy-intensive supply chain
It takes many steps for the metal from a mineral to go from an ore below the ground to a steel beam or an aluminum frame, and every step takes a toll in carbon emissions. To extract mineral ore, large chunks of earth have to be removed with explosives or heavy machinery. Those machines run on fossil fuels that release CO2 and other pollutants, while explosives produce carbon monoxide, which also contributes to global warming. Once extracted, the ore is pulverized – a step that accounts for 40% of mining's energy use. Water is often used to separate desired minerals from ore, and it must be treated before and after use. This, too, requires a lot of energy, and means a large amount of water is not then available for other uses like agriculture.
The chemical reactions used to refine minerals also contribute to climate change. For example, one of the first steps in making steel is to heat a mixture of iron ore, limestone and coke, a coal product, to extremely high temperatures. This purifies iron by removing oxygen, but it also creates CO2 and carbon monoxide as a byproduct. Industrial steel plants also use tremendous amounts of energy overall. A typical steel plant uses over 2,000 megawatts of energy a year – enough to take up all the energy produced by a standard nuclear power plant.
