Depletion of Minerals Resources

The global and national socio-economic metabolism is supported by a continuous and ever-growing flux of energy and material from natural sources. The primary energy flux amounts to about 18 TW, 85% of which comes from fossil fuels. The materials flux composed of cement and other construction materials, plastic, glass, iron, aluminum, copper, and virtually all the other metals of the periodic table, plus the nitrates and phosphates used in agriculture, shows a rate which is in the order of the several billions of tonnes of materials per annum, a quantity which is believed to exceed the yearly mid-ocean crust creation. These fluxes are giving rise to two interconnected phenomena: (1) the depletion of planetary sources of economic materials and fossil fuels (geo-resources) and (2) the saturation of the different planetary sinks with solid, liquid and gaseous wastes. In this poster, we will tackle the first phenomenon only. The depletion of geo-resources is often treated in the frame of the Hubbert model, which applies to the case of mineral resources when exploited in a free market economic regime and successfully applied to the case of oil depletion, popularized with the term of Peak Oil.