Geotimes
Feature
Sustainable Development
and the Use of Nonrenewable Resources
F.W. Wellmer and M. Kosinowski
In July,
Newsweek International published a cover story titled: “Are the Oceans
Dying? Ninety Percent of the Big Fish Are Gone. Scientists Are Struggling to Make
Sense of the Fallout.” Based on an article in the scientific journal Nature
that was widely quoted in many daily global newspapers and spurred further debate
about sustainable development, the story questioned whether overfishing would
spell the death of the oceans.
Precision farming and sustainability: Guided
by GPS and a computer onboard a tractor with detailed information on soil properties,
a farmer can optimally dose the amount of fertilizers. This economical approach
can extend the availability of phosphorus, a nonrenewable nutrient. Photo courtesy
of BGR.
Overfishing obviously contradicts the basic postulate of sustainable development
and intergenerational fairness — both aimed at protecting the needs of current
and future generations and fundamental to the United Nations Brundtland Report
(named after the former Norwegian Prime Minister who headed the commission).
In terms of sustainable development, the situation today is no different from
how it was centuries ago in Central Europe, where the consequences of uncontrolled
deforestation had been apparent for a long time. For example, the medieval German
town of Nuremberg had a significant copper smelting industry fed by ores and concentrates
supplied by Czech and Slovak mines, until a shortage of firewood forced the entire
smelting industry to shut down from 1456 to 1461 and move 200 kilometers north
to the Thuringian Forest.
Nearly 300 years later, miner Oberberghauptmann Johann-Carl von Carlowitz published
the first practical guidelines for sustainable development, Sylvicultura oeconomica,
in 1713. Von Carlowitz headed the mining authority of the famous silver-mining
district in Freiberg, Saxony. In addition to mining and smelting operations, he
was also responsible for forestry, which produced the timber vital for mine safety
and the huge amounts of charcoal for silver smelting. His status in the Kingdom
of Saxony was further enhanced by the importance of silver as a monetary metal.
Von Carlowitz was the first to define the key to sustainable forestry: The amount
of wood cut should not exceed its growth rate.
The rule established for renewable resources in the Brundtland Report mirrors
that concept: To ensure intergenerational fairness, harvesting must not exceed
growth. The difficulty always is to gain broad international acceptance for such
rules. As graphically illustrated by today’s fishing quotas, acceptance in
practice requires drastic economic and social change, which is precisely what
the interested parties object to, and why they fail to embrace the long-term approach
on which intergenerational fairness is based.
Practice has shown us how difficult it is to establish intergenerational fairness
for renewable resources, and developing such a concept for nonrenewable resources
is even more challenging. To many people, sustainable development and the exploitation
of nonrenewable resources is a contradiction in itself because limited resources
are consumed. However, a closer examination of the paradox yields some surprising
results. With human ingenuity and enough time, we as a society can find the necessary
solutions for sustaining development on Earth.
Understanding cycles
The concept of a “cycle economy” was developed from the organic cycle:
Organic material decomposes to ultimately generate new organisms. This process
may be transferred to many nonrenewable resources, especially metals. Metals
are not so much consumed as used for a specific purpose for a limited period
of time. Copper, lead and steel may be recycled many times — often with
little reduction in quality or, in the case of alloys in particular, with somewhat
lower quality after primary or secondary recycling.
Thus, it is too shortsighted to focus just on the extraction of nonrenewable
resources from the solid Earth, the so-called geosphere, and their transfer
to the global industrialized civilization, the so-called technosphere. According
to the concept of sustainable development, the equation has to take into account
all the resources of the geosphere and the technosphere.
Metal recycling rates in industrial countries vary between 30 and 55 percent
of total annual metal demand and are on the increase. The larger the technosphere’s
reserves of metal, the higher the potential for recycling. So why aren’t
recycling levels even higher? Economic growth and metal product lifetimes are
both limiting factors. The lifetime of most copper products, for example, is
30 to 50 years. Take 40 years as an average: Annual copper demand 40 years ago
was 6.2 million metric tons compared to 18.7 million metric tons in 2000; so
even if the total copper production from 1960 was now available as scrap, the
technosphere would only cover one-third of current demand.
Unlike metals, other nonrenewable materials, such as the majority of plastics,
can only be recycled with a substantial loss in quality. Other materials change
in composition or can only be recycled as totally new materials. For example,
cement in concrete can only be recycled as low value aggregate. Other natural
resources in this category become highly dispersed, as with potash and phosphate
fertilizers, or are irreversibly converted, as with fuels.
The need for natural resources
In many instances we do not need a resource itself — we need its function,
or a physical or chemical property. We do not require one metric ton of copper,
for example; we need its electrical conductivity for transmitting electric power
or transferring messages via electric pulses in telephone wires. The latter
function can also be fulfilled by glass fiber cables, by directional antennae
or by mobile phones. And every technical solution has its own raw material profile.
Until recently, silver was essential in photography, but today’s digital
cameras require totally different raw materials. These are just two examples
illustrating our need for properties, rather than specific resources.
There are, however, two exceptions to this rule: potassium and phosphorus. These
essential plant nutrients cannot be replaced. They are as important as water,
which is the most important natural resource. It’s not a problem for potassium,
which, with seawater as an inexhaustible source, is basically a renewable resource.
But for phosphorus, finding alternative sources is not so easy. Unlike potassium,
phosphate has very low water solubility, so the solution needs to be sought
elsewhere — maybe in improved fertilizing technology. Precision farming
with better use of manure, sewage and other relevant waste, enables farmers
to accurately dose the amount of phosphorus required for optimum plant growth
(Geotimes, November 2003). In
this case, economical use extends the availability of this essential plant nutrient.
Alternatives may be possible for the properties and functions of other resources
because, in addition to all the resources in the geosphere and technosphere,
we have a third resource: unlimited human ingenuity. The motor that drives the
supply cycle and combines these resources to find new solutions for functions
is the commodity price. If a commodity becomes scarce, prices rise in our market
economies, promising rewards for those who find solutions quickly.
A good example is the 1978 cobalt shortage associated with the Shaba crisis
in Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo), which was the world’s largest
cobalt supplier. Prices skyrocketed. A few years before, the Club of Rome (a
global think tank) had published its Limits to Growth report, which sensitized
the political arena to raw material issues, and galvanized geological surveys
and other institutions in every major industrial country to initiate studies
into the sensitivity of national economies to commodity shortages. The conclusion
was that chromium, cobalt and other steel alloy metals were very critical strategic
commodities because they could not be substituted. Recycling options were reckoned
to be limited, and in case of shortages, economic research institutes anticipated
that large sectors of the economy would be affected. But when cobalt prices
skyrocketed in 1978, the potential financial rewards led to the discovery of
substitutes. Ferrites replaced cobalt in permanent magnets and totally changed
the cobalt demand pattern.
New alternatives
Finding new solutions for specific functions is one way to compensate for scarce
commodities or high prices. Another approach is to find ways of using materials
more efficiently. LURGI, an engineering company based in Frankfurt, Germany,
reported in 1991 that the Eiffel Tower could be built today with just 2,000
metric tons of steel instead of the 8,000 metric tons used in 1885.
Other solutions include improving recovery rates during extraction. Horizontal
directional drilling, for example, boosts oil field recovery rates from 30 percent
to more than 50 percent. An improvement of 1 percent in worldwide recovery rates
equals one year’s global oil demand.
Yet another solution is to continuously discover new deposits to maintain the
status quo between proven reserves and consumption. The ratio between reserves
and consumption (R/C ratio) is frequently misinterpreted as the lifetime of
reserves. This fallacy is highlighted by the status of zinc, copper and oil.
Since 1955, the R/C ratios for these commodities has fluctuated around 25 for
zinc, 35 for copper and 40 for oil, despite increases in consumption between
1955 and today, respectively, from 3 million to 8 million metric tons zinc;
3 million to 12 million metric tons copper; and 770 million to 3.5 billion metric
tons oil.
At any given time, the R/C ratios are only statistical snapshots of a dynamic
system because reserves are as dynamic as annual consumption. Reserve figures
change continuously; they are dependent on many factors, including exploration
intensity, statistical size distribution of the deposits, commodity price ranges,
production cost structures and technological changes. For example, offshore
oil fields with water depths exceeding 200 meters were barely a resource before
the oil crisis in 1973. Today, developed offshore oil fields sit in water depths
of more than 2,000 meters.
Even the geological nature of a deposit affects R/C ratios. Commodities in stratified
deposits like potash, chromite or bauxite can be easily calculated and extrapolated.
They have high R/C ratios (greater than 100 and even up to 300), whereas commodities
in lenticular deposits, like zinc, lead, gold or silver have R/C ratios less
than 30.
The learning process
Energy consumption is one arena in which it is not possibly to simply solve
the natural resource/sustainable development paradox by finding alternative
solutions for functions. We rely on fossil fuels, but the reserves of fossil
fuels are finite. If fossil fuels are converted into energy, they are truly
consumed. Thus, the answer in this case lies in the potential of renewable energy,
which exceeds present demand by an order of magnitude.
Although this potential is not currently economically feasible, renewable energy
illustrates another important aspect in successfully solving the sustainable
development paradox: We need enough time to move up the learning curve. This
is the only sensible interpretation of R/C ratio history; low ratios of reserves
to consumption reveal a higher need for innovation.
Developing new
ideas and concepts in our technological world frequently requires time scales
of around 20 years. A good example is the development of wind turbines for generating
electricity in Germany. In 1983, the German Ministry of Research and Development
hoped to make a quantum jump in renewable electricity generation and developed
a large 3-megawatt wind turbine. It collapsed only a few weeks after commissioning.
The wind turbine had been constructed by the giant aerospace industry. This
disastrous first attempt was followed by new small- to medium-sized enterprises,
which initially developed smaller wind turbines that worked well. It took 20
years of climbing up the learning curve before 3-megawatt-sized units were successfully
built. And today, 5-megawatt wind turbines are under construction.
Learning to move up the learning curve:
In Germany, it has taken 20 years for the successful construction of 3-megawatt
wind turbines for generating electricity. Photo courtesy of BGR.
The critical point about finding new-function solutions for nonrenewable resources
is that there is not a resource problem, but a matter of having industrial structures
that give us enough time to climb up the learning curve and achieve the desired
solutions. The suspected oxymoron between the use of nonrenewable resources
and the requirements of sustainable development can be solved by wisely using
the three realms of resources available to us: resources from the geosphere,
resources from the technosphere and human ingenuity.
The Anthropocene
The epochs of the Tertiary and Quaternary periods, such as the youngest epoch
the Holocene, have the ending -cene derived from the Greek word kainós
for “recent.” Because humankind has become a truly geological element,
the term Anthropocene has been created for the time in which we are living.
Certainly humankind today has the same impact as nature. Mass movements in mining,
construction and other operations have been estimated to be nearly equivalent
to the volume of geological mass movements associated with erosion or the formation
of new crust via seafloor spreading (approximately 35 billion cubic meters per
year).
Unlike nature, where mass movements are unplanned and random and can be especially
destructive (volcanic eruptions or landslides), humankind can plan its mass
movements and minimize its impact. Although it cannot be denied that humankind
has sometimes wreaked havoc at mining locations in the past, society has also
rapidly moved up the learning curve to minimize such impacts. Mines today are
treated as borrowed land, where a commodity is taken out before restoring and
returning the site to agricultural, forestry or industrial use.
Humankind’s impact in the Anthropocene is far more critical when it comes
to water and soil. Salination, the “mining” of fossil water in arid
and semiarid areas for drinking and irrigation, and increased soil erosion due
to deforestation and population growth are all critical elements for the renewable
resource food. Providing food to a growing world population is a far more pressing
problem than any nonrenewable resource. So the true resource paradox is not
the sustainable development of nonrenewable resources, but rather that the vital
elements in the Anthropocene are renewable resources.
Wellmer and Kosinowski are president
and vice president respectively of the German Federal Geological Survey BGR and
the Lower Saxony State Geological Survey in Hannover, Germany. Both come from
the natural resources industry, Wellmer from the base metal and Kosinowski from
the hydrocarbon industry. Wellmer teaches raw materials policy and economic geology
at the Technical University Berlin, and Kosinowski teaches hydrocarbon geology
at the University of Göttingen. E-mail: f.wellmer@bgr.de
or michael.kosinowski@nlfb.de.
Links:
"Precision
Agriculture: Changing the Face of Farming," Geotimes, November 2003
Back to top
