Mineral Reserves Are Created, Manufactured, By Humans

It absolutely is not true that mineral reserves are the amount of something that can be used

This will come across as being excessive pendantry and given who it’s being written by this could well be so too. But mineral reserves are something manufactured, created, by human beings. They are not, not in the slightest, the amount of something that’s out there that we can use. That may indeed be that pendantry but it’s also of vital importance in trying to understand the world.

Humans make mineral reserves.

Our example for today comes from this story about Portugal’s election. The Socialist Prime Minister resigned because there are allegations of cash changing hands over certain mining and variedly green projects. We’re rather in Captain Renault territory here, we’re in the Olive Belt, Iberian and Latin business - and political - practices are perhaps a little more African than those that apply in the home life of our own dear nation. Local reaction here in Portugal was not “What?” but rather “Again?” which gives a good flavour. One place I’ve lived here they jugged so many of the local mayors that Terry Pratchett’s idea of sticking them inside upon election would have saved all a great deal of time.

But, you know, in foreign is indeed a foreign country, they do things differently there. Local customs are part of that grand multiculturalism, as in Tower Hamlets and all that.

Just as background:

The village has no shop and its only café serves no food.

That’s particularly rural even by Portuguese standards. Tras os Montes is an area really rather cut off from Portugal itself. Think of the country as that rectangle that it is, then the top right hand corner is - sorta - cut off by a diagonal line of mountains running from the NW to the SE. There’s a popular dish here, feijoada (bean stew) and one type is Tras os Montes - means beans and pig offal. Which is, in the better places, signified by ensuring there’s a nice crunchy pig’s ear sticking up out of it. Think Deep Dorset, or Priddy etc in Somerset, but without the sophistication and urban glamour.

So, a potential lithium mine up there and those talks of summat about cash and permits for lithium projects and - not the point I’m making here. That’s just the background which is why The Times is reporting on all of this. In which they say:

The village sits on the largest lithium reserves in Europe — key for powering electric cars — worth an estimated €1.3 billion and recently prioritised as a “strategic” mineral by the EU eager to reduce its dependence on sources in China and Chile.

No, it doesn’t. The pendantry here concentrating upon that word “reserves”. There are no lithium reserves at the Barrosso site (that this is all called after a past PM of the country is nominative coincidence, nothing else). Not one drop nor ounce. And yes, this is vitally important to our understanding the world.

The company hoping to mine it is Savannah Resources and from their presentation we get:

100% owner of the Barroso Lithium Project: Europe’s largest spodumene resource

This is a mineral resource, not a mineral reserve.

We can check this. The United States Geological Survey runs useful listings of reserves and resources. 2024 (which applies to 2023) for lithium:

The size of the Barrosso mine means that we can easily see that it’s not included in that listing of global reserves, nor those assigned to Portugal. OK.

Actually, the size is such that we can also see it’s not been added to the global listing of resources as yet.

Well, so what, mere pendantry, right?

No, humans create mineral reserves. Humans manufacture both mineral reserves and mineral resources. The trick here is in this about that mine in Portugal:

Despite the opposition, last May the company received approval from Portugal’s environmental agency, APA, to move forward with its plans. They hope to build rock-crushing and water recycling plants and roads next year and begin mining in 2026.

But so far they have acquired only 100 hectares of the 593 projected. To move forward they need the baldio, the common land, which is 350 hectares.

They don’t own the land they want to mine. Therefore it’s not a mineral reserve.

For the definition of a mineral reserve is where we have proven - proven to the standard necessary that a bank will lend to us, or a stock market to claim reserves against which capital will be raised - that the target mineral is there, we can mine it, using current technology, at today’s prices, make a profit and we’ve the licenses and all necessary rights to do so.

Don’t own the land yet? Then you cannot mine it, it’s not a mineral reserve. A mineral resource is a looser definition, in several flavours, but basically where all of those things should be true, should be possible to do, but we’ve not filled in all the details just yet.

At which point, we should be able to see that mineral reserves - and resources - are manufactured by going and doing the work to prove - to the standard necessary that a bank will lend to us or a stock market to claim reserves against which capital will be raised - that the target mineral is there, we can mine it, using current technology, at today’s prices, make a profit and we’ve the licenses and all necessary rights to do so.

Mineral reserves are created by human activity.

Now, sure, there’s another looser again description, mineral deposit. That is indeed the stuff that the engineer God got in to fill in the details put around the place.

But, in order to understand the world, it’s vital that we grasp the definitional differences here. Deposits exist, resources and reserves are manufactured by humans.

OK, so we might well like to know how much is out there of something we might be able to use. After all, we’ve half the species shrieking at us that we cannot continue with this living high on the capitalist hog because we’re about to run out of everything. The Club of Rome, Limits to Growth, Teddy Goldsmith’s Blueprint for Survival, plans from the US and EU governments about critical minerals and all the rest. Obviously, including George Monbiot’s - on a good day - shrieks about how we must retreat to eating bugs (on the bad days he merely weeps that we don’t understand him).

But all of these - and I really do mean all of them, without exception - fail to make the correct pendantic differences between our varied different lumps of minerals. They look at mineral reserves (Limits to G did at least accept that resources exist but then still got it wrong) and declare that we’re about to run out. Without grasping that pendantic point. If we run out of reserves we can simply make some more. Because reserves are the thing we make.

We make mineral reserves from mineral resources, which we make from mineral deposits. This means that the limitation - for sure, there are limits, there are only so many lithium atoms on the planet - is how many deposits are there out there from which we can manufacture mineral resources and then mineral reserves?

Which means that while doom and gloom is still possible we must look at the right listing. Which none of the doom merchants do look at. Which is why their calculations are so screwed.

Oh, and if you decide you want to have a look at the list of mineral deposits then there isn’t one. No one at all collects that statistic. Just doesn’t exist. Largely because no one has ever surveyed the world at that level of detail.

We do have a guess at the outer, outer, limit. There’s something called the Clark Number, which is the geologists’ best guess at the percentage of each element - there are only 90 of them which make up the whole planet after all - in the lithosphere. Calculating that out there are 2,850 million, billion, tonnes of lithium on the planet. As Tesla seems to think we need to use 20 million tonnes for batteries we seem to have enough to go around. But how much of that is in deposits which we can turn into resources then reserves? The collective human knowledge on that is “Dunno”. Shrug.

But now do you see the value of pendantry? It enables us to understand the world. Everyone claiming that we’re about to run out of minerals is looking at mineral reserves. Which is the wrong number to be looking at. Which is why they’re failing to understand the world of course. So, logically, we should tell the fools to bugger off.