Bardi's Universal Mining Machine

Introduction

A number of years ago, Dr Ugo Bardi published a very thought-provoking essay about the possibility of a universal mining machine (which I’ll refer to as “Bardi’s machine” from now on). Such a machine can take common dirt, melt it down, atomize it, and separate it into its elements, each in its own little pile. This would allow us to extract valuable elements from common dirt. It would also prevent us from ever running out any any elements, as I'll explain below.

Common dirt contains small amounts of all naturally occurring elements. You could dig up a cubic meter of dirt from behind your house, and it would contain trace amounts of every element which occurs naturally. If we atomized common dirt, using Bardi's machine, we would obtain all elements from any piece of earth fed into it. As a result, we would never absolutely "run out" of any element until we had exhausted all dirt on this planet.

Furthermore, the amount of rare elements available to us would be massive and practically inexhaustible. More than 99.9% of the rare elements (such as copper) exist as very low concentration deposits. The overwhelming majority of rare elements are found as an atom here, an atom there, spread out thinly throughout the earth's crust. If we could mine the low-concentration deposits, then we would increase the total supply of rare elements by more than a factor of 1,000x.

What's more, we would no longer be "running out" of rare elements at any rate. Once we began mining common dirt, the amount of all elements available to us would be constant, and would not diminish over any time period. When we throw away old smart phones, or we build structures that rust away, they would just return to being common dirt (eventually) and could easily be re-mined. As a result, the amount of materials available to us would not diminish over time.

Presumably, we will eventually be forced to use Bardi's machine at some point. If we continue mining and dispersing the concentrated deposits of rare elements, as we are doing, we will eventually exhaust all of them. At some point, far in the distant future, we will have exhausted all concentrated copper deposits, all the concentrated rare earth deposits, and so on. At that point, only common dirt will remain. If we wish to continue mining the rare elements at that point, we'd need to use something like Bardi's machine.

The problem with mining common dirt is that it takes so much energy to do so. Lower concentrations of elements require higher amounts of energy to mine them. The lower the concentration, the higher the energy requirement. For example, it takes 10 times as much energy to mine an ore which is only 1/10th the concentration. The problem is, the concentration of rare elements is extremely low within common dirt. As a result, it would be energetically extremely expensive to obtain any particular rare element from common dirt. From Bardi’s article:

"Consider copper, again, as an example. Copper is present at concentrations of about 25 ppm in the upper crust (Wikipedia 2007). To extract copper from the undifferentiated crust, we would need to break down rock at the atomic level providing an amount of energy comparable to the energy of formation of the rock. On the average, we can take it as something of the order of 10 MJ/kg. From these data, we can estimate about 400 GJ/kg for the energy of extraction. Now, if we wanted to keep producing 15 million tons of copper per year, as we do nowadays, by extracting it from common rock, this calculation says that we would have to spend 20 times the current worldwide production of primary energy."

That is a valid point. It seems to rule out the possibility of mining undifferentiated crust.

However, one of the commenters for that article pointed out that mining undifferentiated crust would allow us to obtain all the elements at once, not just copper, for the same expenditure of energy. In other words, that expenditure of 400 GJ would yield not just 1 kg of copper, but many kilograms of many other elements also.

Bardi wisely made a concession to that point. In his subsequent book, he calculates the energy expenditure of mining undifferentiated crust while obtaining many uncommon elements thereby.

However, I wish to continue with the commenter’s line of thinking. I wish to explore the possibility of mining undifferentiated crust (dirt) and using all the elements obtained thereby, including the common elements such as iron, aluminum, silicon, oxygen, and so on. That is the purpose of this article: to explore the energetic effects of mining undifferentiated crust and using all the material obtained thereby, or at least using as much of that material as possible.

Can we mine undifferentiated crust?

If we started mining undifferentiated crust, using Bardi’s machine, then the elements emitted from it would not correspond to our needs for them. For example, almost 80% of the material emissions from Bardi’s machine would consist of silicon, oxygen, sodium, potassium, and magnesium, which only could be used for making glass, at least in those quantities. Another 18% or so of the material emissions would be common metals such as aluminum, iron (for steel), titanium, and so on. Less than 1% would be the “uncommon elements” such as copper, nickel, rare earths, and so on. We must use the elements in precisely those proportions if we wish to avoid throwing away any elements emitted from Bardi’s machine.

It’s necessary to avoid throwing away materials, because that’s what would determine how much energy would be required for Bardi’s machine, per kilogram of materials mined. If we used everything emitted from Bardi’s machine, in the proportions in which they were emitted, then the amount of energy used for mining undifferentiated crust would be 10 MJ/kg, as per Bardi’s quotation above, which is a modest amount of energy and is similar to what we use for mining today. If, on the other hand, we mine only copper from undifferentiated crust, and throw everything else away, then the energy expenditure is 400 GJ/kg, which is 40,000 times higher.

Since we wish to avoid throwing away material, we must align our mining of undifferentiated crust with our usage of materials. Presumably, only a fraction of all mining could be done using Bardi’s machines. Some of the common elements (like aluminum and iron) would still be mined using traditional methods, so only a fraction of our mining would use Bardi’s machines. That fraction must be low enough that no materials are emitted from Bardi’s machine in greater quantities than are used by that civilization. In that manner, Bardi’s machines would displace the energy which otherwise would have been used to obtain materials for glass, steel, and so on, using traditional mining methods. We would get the common elements “for free” from Bardi’s machines, as a side effect of trying to obtain the rare ones, which would reduce the energy expenditure for mining elsewhere in the economy. As a result, the net effect of using Bardi’s machines would not increase the energy requirements for mining as a whole, at least not by very much. The advantage of using Bardi’s machine is that it would also emit small quantities of all the uncommon elements, so we would never run out of them over any time scale.

Let’s suppose that civilization has exhausted all ores and all concentrated deposits, of all rare elements, everywhere. All that remains is undifferentiated crust for uncommon elements. Also assume that civilization wishes to use Bardi’s machines as much as possible to obtain uncommon elements from that point forward. We’ll assume the civilization uses the same proportions of common elements (such as silicon, iron, and so on) as we use today.

In which case, Bardi’s machines could be used to mine all the materials for all glass produced by that civilization. Glass would be the material which was relatively most over-supplied from Bardi’s machines (almost 80% of the material emitted could only be used for making glass). As a result, if there was enough demand for all that glass from Bardi’s machines, then there would also be enough demand for all the iron, aluminum, calcium (for cement), and so on. Little material would be thrown away. All other glassmaking operations in civilization could cease, thereby saving the energy that had been expended on it. Also, some of the mining for bauxite, iron, and so on, would also be displaced by Bardi’s machines. The amount of energy used by Bardi’s machines would be on the order of 10 MJ/kg, which is not higher than civilization was already expending upon glass, aluminum, and so on.

It would be possible to make glass directly from the output of Bardi’s machines, by mixing together the necessary elements while they were still molten, and cooling the result quickly enough that glass is formed. This would displace the amount of energy used for glassmaking elsewhere in the economy, which is on the order of 15 MJ/kg of glass. Of course, we would also make some steel and some aluminum from the output of Bardi’s machines.

This strategy would reduce the amount of energy required for mining undifferentiated crust. The amount of energy for mining altogether would not be much higher than today. Furthermore, we would get all of the elements which occur in the Earth’s crust, as long as mining continued.

Elemental Scarcity

As a result, we could use Bardi’s machines to a limited degree, and could obtain all elements indefinitely, without ever increasing the energy we use for mining. We would just have to limit the use of Bardi's machines so that they don't produce much more of any elements than were otherwise mined.

The problem is, the amounts of uncommon elements would be emitted in fairly limited quantities. We’d never run out of uncommon elements, but the amounts produced per year of copper, nickel, and so on, would be fairly limited, assuming we don’t wish to “throw away” anything, and thereby increase the amount of energy devoted to mining intolerably.

At present, global civilization produces about 70 million tonnes of glass per year. If all that glass were produced from materials from Bardi’s machines, then the following amounts of rare elements would also be obtained:

Copper (70 megatonnes * 70ppm) = 4,900 tonnes/year

Nickel (70 megatonnes * 90ppm) = 6,300 tonnes/year

Lithium = ~1,800 tonnes/year

"Rare Earth" elements = ~20,000 tonnes/year

As a result, we would mine 0.7 grams of copper per person per year, and also 0.9 grams of nickel, worldwide, and similar or smaller amounts of all the other uncommon elements per person each year. Doing so would never require more energy than is expended on mining now. We could mine those rare elements, in those amounts, from undifferentiated crust until the sun explodes. We would never run out of them, and would never expend any more energy on mining than we do now.

Conclusion

As a result, our civilization could always have enough of the uncommon elements for things like smart phones, flat screen televisions, computer chips, and so on. Many of those devices use less than one gram of uncommon elements, per device. We could always mine enough materials for those purposes, even after billions of years.

We would also have enough uncommon elements for "massive" uses of them, such as electric cars, as long as we enforce high rates of recycling. For example, we would have enough lithium for electric cars indefinitely, provided that the batteries are sealed from the environment and the recycling rate is 99% or higher. If we assume that an electric vehicle has 30 kg of lithium in its batteries, the batteries are sealed from the environment, the car lasts 20 years, and 99.9% of the lithium in electric cars is recycled, then an average electric vehicle would require a net of 1.5 grams of lithium per year to be mined. That amount is on the order of what would be emitted from Bardi's machines, with no additional expenditure of energy. As a result, we would have enough lithium (and other uncommon elements) for "bulk" uses, indefinitely, as long as we enforce high rates of recycling.

We would not, however, have enough rare elements for “bulk” usages that are just thrown away. Some day, we will not have enough uncommon elements to allow people to throw away larger than single-digit gram quantities of rare elements per year. At some point, careful recycling will be required for devices (such as electric cars) which use large quantities of uncommon elements.

A few caveats are necessary here. It's possible that we won't have enough lithium in the future to build additional new electric vehicles. We would have enough lithium to sustain the peak number of electric cars indefinitely, but not enough to build additional new electric cars. Also, it is quite possible that we will simply substitute other elements when rare ones become scarcer, in which case, we would not pursue the diffuse deposits for those elements.

However, we will never "run out" of any element over any time period. The conclusion is that we can mine undifferentiated crust, in limited amounts. It is energetically feasible to do so. As a result, we will never run out of any element over any time period. We may have much lower extraction of some elements, far in the future, but extraction will never be zero for any important element. All uncommon elements will always be available, at tolerable energy expense.

NOTE: I made two changes to this article the day after it was published, as explained in the comments below. I also added the "caveats" paragraph shortly after this article was first published.