Great news, but just to tone it down to reality a bit. The current drilled orebody is only down to 400m and are only resources now and not fully reserves (important distinction in mining).
The massive numbers they are talking about are extrapolating drill results down to 4500m, which is pretty crazy. But let’s say the orebody does extend to depth at regular grades, that would be the deepest mine in the world, and there are a lot cheaper options.
If you're going to put money on a mining exploration result you want to put it on JORC (or equivalent) certified results from a filed Technical Report at the Toronto TSX (or London Metals, Sydney Mining, South African Exchange, etc)
JORC is Australian standard, however Anglo-Australian mining transnationals with the TSX as home base are the biggest mining concerns on the planet ATM.
Here is a third party discussion of the JORC definitions of 'Resource' Vs 'Reserve'
* Mineral Resources can be classified as Measured, Indicated and Inferred, according to the level of geological knowledge and confidence.
* Ore Reserves can be classified as Proved or Probable on the basis of the Mineral Resource classification and consideration of all JORC modifying factors.
'Resources' can be wishful thinking until they're actually Measured (to a degree of confidence).
I haven’t looked at the data, but junior mining and exploration is a bit of the wild west in terms of honesty and would not in the least be surprised if some trickery is at play to produce that result. Also a reason why it’s not advisable for new investors to get into this sector.
This is what I was curious about, thanks for clarifying.
But based on the 400m orebody results, do you have any suggestion for how much phosphate this "rock" might contain at reasonable mining depths based on todays technology?
I'm curious if this could turn out to be enough for 20 years, or a drop in the ocean.
Assuming it's enough for 20 years, and we estimate batteries will continue to get more efficient, does the 20 years in todays technology end up being 50 years?
Not with just that info. Lot of what I quickly found is all press release marketing fluff. You need the % phosphorus and a bunch of other variables.
Battery tech needs little phosphorous now, in terms of overall percentage and even with overly optimistic battery estimates I don’t think it will get to any more than 10% of demand. It’s mostly about fertiliser/agriculture.
"But based on the 400m orebody results, do you have any suggestion for how much phosphate this "rock" might contain at reasonable mining depths based on todays technology?"
Odds are they found a massive body of apatite. If so, huge amounts of phosphates.
Western Sahara but realistically it’s all morroco. They have largest reserves now and at the price to mine 4500m deep underground, it would turn a lot of resources in morroco to reserves.
I did feas work on a project in Tunisia a decade ago that was quite substantial but economics marginal and couldn’t get it over the line due to then prices of phosphorous and the ability of morroco to just ramp up production (actually should probably dust it off). There are lots of resources like this that would become economical faster. Supply/demand and all that.
That said the initial ore body may be great and 50 years from now who is to say
Sure. Super high level.
Resources are concentrations of some mineral that could be economically extracted.
Reserves are the economically mineable portions of those resources.
There are a bunch of levels to each, with varying levels of confidence.
I can drill two holes, 500m apart and by pure chance intersect nothing but lithium at same spacing between 10m-20m. I could theoretically say , you know what I think between these two drill holes it’s all lithium. It’s 500m spacing and according to grades I think we have 500ktons of inferred lithium resource here.
But for instance let’s say I did some more drilling and was confident I found a resource that indicates it has 1million tonnes of lithium in it. However, it’s located in the middle of Sahara desert, where there are no roads, water sources, or infrastructure of any type.
Just because it’s there doesn’t mean it’s economical to mine it (right now). So even though it is a resource it’s not a reserve.
To define something as a resource there is a lot of room for interpretation. Lots of statistical inference, and a bit of art meets science. From public company perspective you can announce you have calling a promising resource, but if you get it wrong, there’s a lot of leeway.
Calling something a reserve is a big deal. Not only are you extremely confident of the size, shape of the resource, but you have evaluated its economic viability to get it out of the ground and have determined that it’s net positive. You lie about this, and you are in trouble.
> A huge phosphate rock deposit discovered in Norway contains enough minerals to meet the global demand for batteries and solar panels for the next 100 years, according to the mining company that controls it.
90% of mined phosphates are used for fertilizer and pollution of waterways with it is a growing problem, but the mining company PR firm is telling us about electric cars and solar panels.
This is similar to discovering a massive new oil field, and telling the world that it'll help with electric cars because they all have plastic components.
> Pollution is a huge problem, but climate change is literally an existential problem
100% agree. If there's a choice between a small amount of pollution vs a large payoff to cut carbon emissions, it's definitely a good idea. For instance, any pollution that comes from the production of solar panels and batteries is probably something we should accept, because the payoff is a large cut in emissions.
But we're not talking about pollution directly in the cause of cutting emissions here. We're talking about separate pollution which is avoidable and has nothing to do with cutting emissions.
The point is, if we use all of this phosphate to make better batteries it would be great and have a good impact on emissions, but most of it will be spread on the ground and let run into rivers because that is the main industrial use of phosphates
Isn't running out of phosphate rock almost a similar scale problem? I thought like a billion people were going to starve to death without it or or something?
I’d say number four should be first in your list. Had they not been sensible they might not even have found this deposit, nor would they have had a massive sovereign fund. They’d been buried in rusty lambos and warlord money.
Yep, just look at Australia - bending over backwards for the foreign mining companies, quivering in fear at the prospect of taxing them even a fraction of Norway's 78%. Spine vs spineless.
For those unfamiliar with the resource curse [1] this isn't usually a ticket to victory. The largest proven oil reserve in the world isn't in Saudi Arabia, it's in Venezuela - the poorest country in the Americas.
What Norway deserves huge credit for is the way they manage their natural resources, and how they designed their sovereign wealth fund.
?
The latest official figure for Berlin is 3.6 million.
You mean the Berlin + Brandeburg metropolitan region, which is Berlin (city state) plus an area that’s at least as big as the metro area including the Berlin city suburbs expansions into Brandenburg.
With the resulting area, 6.2 million people still amount to a quite low density compared to many other cities. Paris would have been a better example.
You can't take this list seriously. Cheddar has similar score as Gruyère. Or Norwegian Salmon similar as 'Fish and Chips'. No wonder English cuisine is rated so high there.
lmao, some stupid list. Scandinavia has world renowned cuisine, with some of the best (THE best) restaurants in the world, new inventions, and a food culture quickly spreading throughout the world.
Then some live laugh love travel girls and guy come to "list cuisines".
What a stupid list. I could as well just have pull something out of my arse by vacation photos posted here by HN contributors. If you think that list is in anyway meaningful or sophisticated I have a whole highway to sell you
Can't comment on that processed fish matter but mosquitos there are beyond ridiculous in the summer (Finland ain't much better). Having dozens of bites on every bit of skin that isn't completely covered, constantly. One hitchhiker who I've met who had his one hitching hand uncovered counted 168 bites, on one hand, within 2 hours. When you hike, you have easily 100 of them sitting on you, your backpack, everything. They are also huge compared to central Europe.
Sure, you get used to being full of red spots, you stop scratching them, but occasionally you run some part of your skin against something and all hell breaks loose.
Then you come back to sanity and realize freedom has many shapes, and being able to dress as you like in summer is definitely one of them.
Point 4: as a notorious economics philosopher once said, "never get high on your own supply."
Along with not immediately blowing the petro money on a national level, Norway taxes petroleum products more heavily for local consumption than even its high tax neighbors - for a long time, gasoline was cheaper in Germany than in Norway, and Germany has high fuel taxes like pretty much every other European country (EU and non).
I mean it'll be more expensive, but since their economy is doing so well I can imagine it's still a lower percentage of people's incomes than in e.g. Germany; all is relative.
I mean cost of living is higher in cities but so is income. Usually. Sometimes.
Norway really should have their ill gotten carbon profiteering assets stripped away and redistributed to less advantaged nations. Hopefully that will come soon, and this rock deposit could help pay for some of the interest.
Yep. that's what happens we decide 4 million people get the territory the size of Western Europe more or less. They were there first so ... makes sense.
for context here, phosphorus is the 11th most common element in the earth's crust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth... making up 0.1% of the crust. phosphorus and oxygen be sittin' in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g, so virtually all of it is in the form of phosphate (PO₄), which is 33% phosphorus by mass, so the earth's crust is about 0.3% phosphate. the most common phosphate is apatite, which is ubiquitous in igneous and metamorphic rocks. you can find phosphate literally anywhere on earth; there is no danger of any country monopolizing world phosphate supplies
if the crust is 3 × 10¹⁹ tonnes then phosphate is about 10¹⁷ tonnes of it, and phosphate rock a slightly larger amount
this article says the humans use 50 million tonnes of phosphate a year, much of which ends up in the oceans. at this rate, in 18 million years, the humans will have consumed 0.001% of the phosphate in the crust
but being able to find phosphate isn't the same thing as being able to mine it profitably, because, thanks to modern shipping, another phosphate miner halfway around the world can sell phosphate to your local customers at almost the same price they can sell it to their own neighbors. if they are working from more concentrated phosphate deposits, their price will be lower, and you'll lay off the miners and declare bankruptcy
so what's going on here is that local mining companies are fishing for government subsidies with rhetoric about sovereignty based on a completely imaginary phosphate shortage crisis
i'm not a hard rock mining engineer, just interested in questions of natural resources
That is a really interesting response and I hadn't considered any of it. TIL.
Relating to this:
> so what's going on here is that local mining companies are fishing for government subsidies with rhetoric about sovereignty based on a completely imaginary phosphate shortage crisis
Is this kind of the same as the occasional panics about rare earths? My understanding is that they're not really that rare but the environmental impacts and costs of extraction are both high enough that in essence, nobody wants to bother for so long as it remains someone else's problem and the materials remain available.
even though
rare earth metals are much less abundant than phosphorus, they still aren't rare. elements rarer than cerium include copper, nitrogen, lead, tin, tungsten, and fortunately arsenic
I remember reading part of a PhD thesis about the implications of “peak phosphate” more than a decade ago. (Not my area of expertise, but the guts of it weren’t particularly difficult to understand).
My takeaway (though not the author’s) was that it’s way down the list of things to worry about.
Basically, the cost of phosphate is such a miniscule component of the cost of food that it would make essentially no difference if we had to mine lower-grade sources of it.
Higher prices might also reduce the amount wasted as runoff, which also would reduce the environmental damage caused by fertiliser use, something we’re going to have to take more seriously at some point.
Phosphate in soil is mostly in fixed, unavailable forms (like ferrous phosphate). Prolonged application of phosphate fertilizer would cause their accumulation. At that point, I think it would be worthwhile to look for ways to tap into that store, for example Phosphate Solubilizing Bacteria (PSBs), or plants genetically modified to perform the same function in their roots.
Phosphate removed from fields by erosion or in plant matter would have to be replaced at some point.
Just 10-20% of applied phosphate fertilizer is taken up by plants. The rest gets lost in these insoluble forms. So there's a lot of room for improvement here.
Perhaps I live under a rock, but phosphate is expensive. I was buying diammonium phosphate at $250 per ton a few years ago. Then it went to $340. Then COVID happened and it went to $600. Then the next year it was over $800. The ag supply company didn't even have enough cash to pay for a truck load. They've completely stopped carrying it now.
So for NPK fertilizer, I now know that nitrogen is manufactured cheaply with the haber-bosch process, and we've got a lot of phosphate available. Do we also have plenty of potassium around? i.e. enough to realistically never worry about "peak potassium".
Fun little thing to mention about Phosphate mining.
A tiny island country called Nauru (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauru) got super rich off of Phosphate mining which kept going into the 1990s. This led their government to invest in many projects abroad, including what may in fact be the worst large-scale well funded musical ever.
Now Nauru is getting that money back via Australia's off-shore detention program! A bipartisan program by previous governments that spends hundreds of millions on private security companies to run private prisons for asylum seekers who tried to get to Australia by boat. (likely illegal under international law?)
>By August 2021, the number of asylum seekers and refugees held on the island had fallen nearly tenfold, but the costs of running the offshore program remained broadly static. In that month, there were 107 refugees and asylum seekers on Nauru at a cost to taxpayers of $464,486 a month for each person, or more than $15,000 a day.
Imagine getting paid $15,000 per day... I guess Nauru is getting its P money back.
Readit News
The massive numbers they are talking about are extrapolating drill results down to 4500m, which is pretty crazy. But let’s say the orebody does extend to depth at regular grades, that would be the deepest mine in the world, and there are a lot cheaper options.
(I’m a hard rock mining engineer)
Surely this assumption is based on data of some sort? Assuming what’s in front of you is also 4km away seems a risky bet.
https://www.jorc.org/
JORC is Australian standard, however Anglo-Australian mining transnationals with the TSX as home base are the biggest mining concerns on the planet ATM.
Here is a third party discussion of the JORC definitions of 'Resource' Vs 'Reserve'
https://www.mmg.com/our-business/mineral-resources-and-ore-r...
* Mineral Resources can be classified as Measured, Indicated and Inferred, according to the level of geological knowledge and confidence.
* Ore Reserves can be classified as Proved or Probable on the basis of the Mineral Resource classification and consideration of all JORC modifying factors.
'Resources' can be wishful thinking until they're actually Measured (to a degree of confidence).
I'm curious if this could turn out to be enough for 20 years, or a drop in the ocean.
Assuming it's enough for 20 years, and we estimate batteries will continue to get more efficient, does the 20 years in todays technology end up being 50 years?
Battery tech needs little phosphorous now, in terms of overall percentage and even with overly optimistic battery estimates I don’t think it will get to any more than 10% of demand. It’s mostly about fertiliser/agriculture.
Odds are they found a massive body of apatite. If so, huge amounts of phosphates.
I did feas work on a project in Tunisia a decade ago that was quite substantial but economics marginal and couldn’t get it over the line due to then prices of phosphorous and the ability of morroco to just ramp up production (actually should probably dust it off). There are lots of resources like this that would become economical faster. Supply/demand and all that.
That said the initial ore body may be great and 50 years from now who is to say
Any chance you could explain the distinction to a layman? To me they seem to mean roughly the same thing.
Reserves are the economically mineable portions of those resources.
There are a bunch of levels to each, with varying levels of confidence.
I can drill two holes, 500m apart and by pure chance intersect nothing but lithium at same spacing between 10m-20m. I could theoretically say , you know what I think between these two drill holes it’s all lithium. It’s 500m spacing and according to grades I think we have 500ktons of inferred lithium resource here.
But for instance let’s say I did some more drilling and was confident I found a resource that indicates it has 1million tonnes of lithium in it. However, it’s located in the middle of Sahara desert, where there are no roads, water sources, or infrastructure of any type.
Just because it’s there doesn’t mean it’s economical to mine it (right now). So even though it is a resource it’s not a reserve.
To define something as a resource there is a lot of room for interpretation. Lots of statistical inference, and a bit of art meets science. From public company perspective you can announce you have calling a promising resource, but if you get it wrong, there’s a lot of leeway.
Calling something a reserve is a big deal. Not only are you extremely confident of the size, shape of the resource, but you have evaluated its economic viability to get it out of the ground and have determined that it’s net positive. You lie about this, and you are in trouble.
for brief distinction and line of further study.
> A huge phosphate rock deposit discovered in Norway contains enough minerals to meet the global demand for batteries and solar panels for the next 100 years, according to the mining company that controls it.
90% of mined phosphates are used for fertilizer and pollution of waterways with it is a growing problem, but the mining company PR firm is telling us about electric cars and solar panels.
This is similar to discovering a massive new oil field, and telling the world that it'll help with electric cars because they all have plastic components.
Pollution is a huge problem, but climate change is literally an existential problem. I'd trade a bit of the former for less of the latter.
100% agree. If there's a choice between a small amount of pollution vs a large payoff to cut carbon emissions, it's definitely a good idea. For instance, any pollution that comes from the production of solar panels and batteries is probably something we should accept, because the payoff is a large cut in emissions.
But we're not talking about pollution directly in the cause of cutting emissions here. We're talking about separate pollution which is avoidable and has nothing to do with cutting emissions.
The point is, if we use all of this phosphate to make better batteries it would be great and have a good impact on emissions, but most of it will be spread on the ground and let run into rivers because that is the main industrial use of phosphates
1. Huge oil and gas resources
2. Huge hydropower resources. 96 per cent of all electric power generation comes from hydropower.
3. Gigantic phosphate deposits.
4. Sensibility to avoid resource curse and invest excess money.
5. Fjords designed by Slartibartfast
https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.2604105
What Norway deserves huge credit for is the way they manage their natural resources, and how they designed their sovereign wealth fund.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
Then some live laugh love travel girls and guy come to "list cuisines".
What a stupid list. I could as well just have pull something out of my arse by vacation photos posted here by HN contributors. If you think that list is in anyway meaningful or sophisticated I have a whole highway to sell you
Well sure.
But then they also have Lutefisk [1] and one of the world's most annoying population of mosquitoes.
You can't have it all good.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutefisk
Sure, you get used to being full of red spots, you stop scratching them, but occasionally you run some part of your skin against something and all hell breaks loose.
Then you come back to sanity and realize freedom has many shapes, and being able to dress as you like in summer is definitely one of them.
Along with not immediately blowing the petro money on a national level, Norway taxes petroleum products more heavily for local consumption than even its high tax neighbors - for a long time, gasoline was cheaper in Germany than in Norway, and Germany has high fuel taxes like pretty much every other European country (EU and non).
I mean cost of living is higher in cities but so is income. Usually. Sometimes.
Deleted Comment
I'm pretty sure the Sámi would disagree on that one.
A certified 4 dimensional big brain achronal chess move us puny mortals are incapable of comprehending.
if the crust is 3 × 10¹⁹ tonnes then phosphate is about 10¹⁷ tonnes of it, and phosphate rock a slightly larger amount
this article says the humans use 50 million tonnes of phosphate a year, much of which ends up in the oceans. at this rate, in 18 million years, the humans will have consumed 0.001% of the phosphate in the crust
but being able to find phosphate isn't the same thing as being able to mine it profitably, because, thanks to modern shipping, another phosphate miner halfway around the world can sell phosphate to your local customers at almost the same price they can sell it to their own neighbors. if they are working from more concentrated phosphate deposits, their price will be lower, and you'll lay off the miners and declare bankruptcy
so what's going on here is that local mining companies are fishing for government subsidies with rhetoric about sovereignty based on a completely imaginary phosphate shortage crisis
i'm not a hard rock mining engineer, just interested in questions of natural resources
the way you referred to us as "the humans" is slightly unsettling.
Relating to this:
> so what's going on here is that local mining companies are fishing for government subsidies with rhetoric about sovereignty based on a completely imaginary phosphate shortage crisis
Is this kind of the same as the occasional panics about rare earths? My understanding is that they're not really that rare but the environmental impacts and costs of extraction are both high enough that in essence, nobody wants to bother for so long as it remains someone else's problem and the materials remain available.
even though rare earth metals are much less abundant than phosphorus, they still aren't rare. elements rarer than cerium include copper, nitrogen, lead, tin, tungsten, and fortunately arsenic
Deleted Comment
My takeaway (though not the author’s) was that it’s way down the list of things to worry about.
Basically, the cost of phosphate is such a miniscule component of the cost of food that it would make essentially no difference if we had to mine lower-grade sources of it.
Higher prices might also reduce the amount wasted as runoff, which also would reduce the environmental damage caused by fertiliser use, something we’re going to have to take more seriously at some point.
Phosphate removed from fields by erosion or in plant matter would have to be replaced at some point.
The most abundant rocks also contain huge amounts of potassium, but which is expensive to extract.
Neither in nature nor in agriculture potassium is ever a limiting nutrient like nitrogen and phosphorus.
A tiny island country called Nauru (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauru) got super rich off of Phosphate mining which kept going into the 1990s. This led their government to invest in many projects abroad, including what may in fact be the worst large-scale well funded musical ever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_the_Musical:_A_Portra...
But, yeah the majority of that wealth was extracted by Australia before independence.
Not that any of that excuses the grossly wasteful spending.
But the money's gone, the phosphate's gone, and most of Nauru looks like that crazy bit of Madagascar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsingy_de_Bemaraha_National_Pa...
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/nov/07/cost-...
>By August 2021, the number of asylum seekers and refugees held on the island had fallen nearly tenfold, but the costs of running the offshore program remained broadly static. In that month, there were 107 refugees and asylum seekers on Nauru at a cost to taxpayers of $464,486 a month for each person, or more than $15,000 a day.
Imagine getting paid $15,000 per day... I guess Nauru is getting its P money back.
- Amount of minerals worth discovered so far approx. $33 billion
- Drilled to 2200 meter in 2020 and confirmed extension of orebody
- Mining already takes place in the surrounding area, for ilmenite, part of the same orebody
https://norgemining.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Norge-Min...