Turning copper and nickel into gold to save the world, or at least to save the conveniences we don’t want to let go of, despite what it’s costing us — could it work?

An ancient branch of natural philosophy, alchemy’s central aim was the transmutation of base metals into gold. The conversion occurred through an ostensibly magical process requiring a respectful, esoteric predisposition on the part of the alchemist but also within the psyche of the society in which the alchemist and the alchemical practice existed. The analogies to our continued obsession with the extraction and conversion of metals today as well as the mindset entailed within the social environment are striking and can be enlightening for our path forward.

Fascination with our ability to change the very form and nature of concrete substances like minerals coupled with natural human creativity led primitive people to innovative applications. Entire ages in human history were defined by these innovations. Knowledge of metals through the early extraction processes coupled with creative experimentation led to the discoveries of alloys like bronze (made from copper and tin) and development of multi-faceted uses for the elemental metal iron. Thus civilizations were transformed in such periods as the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.

Later, as the alchemists of late antiquity labored in their efforts to create the mythical “philosopher’s stone” — the essential material required to enable the metallic transmutational process known as chrysopoeia (gold making) — they were also important contributors to mining and metallurgy (as well as to pharmacology and medicine). For many, alchemy was a manifestation of a belief in the ability of human beings to both imitate and improve upon what they found in nature.

In his book The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy, Mircea Eliade points out that very early in our history, humans realized that metal ores “grow in the belly of the earth after the manner of embryos.” The miner, then, assists Nature in giving birth more rapidly through the extraction of these ores. The rituals and behaviors of early miners were laden with symbolism. The work of the alchemist was more practical as he carried out his work in the laboratory. Still, the early alchemists were concerned with phases of the work that were loaded with esoteric meaning. Eliade gives examples such as “the ‘passion’, the ‘death’ and the ‘marriage’ of substances in so far as they will tend to transmute matter and human life.”

The difference between alchemy and its descendent science, chemistry, is the removal of the former’s sacred components from the latter’s more profane concerns. Nevertheless, the interest in alchemy continued behind closed doors even as science moved further away from the ancient practices. As late as the 17th century, no less a scientist than Sir Isaac Newton secretly pursued his obsession with alchemy from a young age to well into his later life. This fact both amuses and embarrasses many in the sciences today as they hold it to be an unaccountable aberration to be set aside from the great man’s famously august work. But in reality, Newton spent over 40 years in diligent pursuit of his alchemical goals.

Remarkably, we continue in the alchemical quest today. Contemporary alchemists follow the age-old pursuit of turning base metals into gold, but most recently they seek to do so via a larger transformation of the fossil fuel economy into a green energy economy. While the symbolism of our contemporary alchemy seems to revolve around the representations of ‘status’, ‘green virtue’, ‘technology-as-savior’, etc., the basic requirements are the same: locate and extract the lode of base metal, process it into a usable ingredient for inclusion in the magical formulation, convert the processed metal into an energy producing product via the magical formulation, and . . . voila . . . behold the gold.

The problem with today’s alchemy is that the land from which the metals are to be extracted must be purchased or somehow negotiated in a way that is rarely in the country of origin’s interest, and the human rights and environmental violations through the mining, processing, and overall extirpation leave horrific scars on the land, the ecosystem, and the lives of the people native to the area.

Examples abound. In fact, there really is no place where extraction and processing occur that doesn’t serve as an example of what’s wrong with our current transformation of mined metals into green energy gold. A few of these metals, in some combination, will be critical to any green energy future and all require intensive extraction and processing. I’ve already written about cobalt and lithium, but I’ll focus here on the other two — copper and nickel — as the situations relative to each of these metals are somewhat distinct.

Copper: All that Glitters Is Not Gold

“Everything in this room, too, I thought, started life in the earth, as a rock or a mineral vein, a layer of an ancient seabed, or perhaps the remains of a 400 million-year-old volcano. The plastic casing around my computer screen, the steel radiator beneath the aluminum-framed windows with their panes of glass, the copper wiring carrying the electricity to my laptop, the rare earth metals that enable my mobile phone to perform its many wonders, the clays in the paint that brighten up the walls of this room. Before they all became this material stuff, they were the end product of some geological process, some rock-forming activity, some rock-weathering breakdown, some human intervention.”

David Howe in Extraction to Extinction: Rethinking Our Relationship with Earth’s Natural Resources

Over 10,000 years ago, the first copper was extracted from ore (like the malachite pictured below, or the related copper carbonite known as azurite). A good campfire can get hot enough for smelting copper ore so getting the first metal to ooze from heated rocks could have come about incidentally, or it could have been an intentional experiment based on observation of the surrounding environment and previous discoveries. (At this time, clay was already being fired to make containers and figurines so the basic principles would have been well understood.) For at least five thousand years, copper was the only metal used by humankind.

When the people of the Bronze Age dug up the bright green mineral malachite and produced copper, they found that mixing it with tin produced bronze. Seven thousand years ago, this discovery forged a profound step in the history of human civilization.

The extraction of copper, and then the smelting and forging of tools, weapons, and other useful or decorative items became significant activities for Bronze Age people. In his book, Extraction to Extinction: Rethinking Our Relationship with Earth’s Natural Resources, David Howe points out that today we can “mine, quarry, pump, cut, blast and crush billions and billions of tons of the rock that lies beneath our feet every year . . . digging and scraping away the surface of our planet at an unprecedented rate.” Once we’ve done so, we rather easily and efficiently transform what we took from the earth into every manner of useful and useless objects for the consuming world of human beings. Again, behold the gold. But the amount of time and difficult effort required of Bronze Age people for extraction and formation of a new object put a natural limit on the damage that could be done to the environment by those efforts. Today all natural limitations have been blown away by human ingenuity. Our modern extraction and manufacturing processes have instead destroyed the environment and its natural habitats, decimated biodiversity, polluted the oceans and freshwater streams and lakes, as well as helped to create the climate crises from which we may not escape.

While copper’s abundance in the Earth’s crust is only 0.00068 % (iron’s is 6 %), its brightly colored ores were readily visible to Neolithic people. At about the same time Stonehenge was being constructed, around the world clay bricks were being used to create clay-lined furnaces for more formalized smelting of copper. Through this smelting, zinc was added to copper for brass and tin was added for bronze, a much harder substance than the two original minerals alone. It made better weapons like swords and axes, but also better tools for construction and agriculture and domestic tasks. For the next two thousand years the former Stone Age functioned as the Bronze Age. The discovery of techniques for smelting iron finally replaced bronze for many uses, but its elemental copper would still see a resurgence in the advancement of humankind. It would only take 2,500 years to reach that point.

In both the past and the present, copper’s anti-corrosion properties and its ability to conduct heat (and later, electric current) have been central to its success. As we moved into the Age of Electricity, 2,500 years after the close of the Bronze Age, copper was back in a big way. With the discovery of electromagnetic induction, one modern innovation after another deepened our dependency on the generation, transmission, and conversion of electricity and, thus, our dependency on copper. That dependency was complete once it was understood that information could be carried along these same electric lines. As Howe put it, “whole new industries and inventions quickly emerged based on electricity and magnetism, radio waves and microwaves, visible light rays and infrared rays, X-rays and gamma rays. . . . somewhere along the technological line there would be copper playing a vital role in helping first to generate, and then to conduct, these forms of energy from one place to another.” And doing so at a rate requiring about 20 million metric tonnes of copper per year. This figure is projected to grow dramatically as countries work diligently to build out their all-electric world of the new green economy. Behold the gold.

Where is all this copper coming from? Today the chief producers are Chile, Peru, China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the United States, and Australia, in that order. The copper ore mined in the Andes in northern Chile was formed by the Earth’s own alchemy 50 to 100 million years ago and is found in great quantity very near the surface. Before it can be used in the manufacturing of copper wire and other products, it must be extracted, crushed, ground, smelted or chemically treated (depending on the type of copper ore being processed).

China is the world’s largest producer of finished copper but also its biggest consumer. Other countries are quickly growing in their consumption as copper is key to both the Information Age and the Age of Electricity. While the future being planned in these terms has as a primary goal a reduction in carbon emissions and thus cleaner air and water, the mining and refining of such vast quantities of copper destroys the land and water, and requires a great deal of heat and electricity in the process. The requisite smelting process is also pollution intensive, contributing to acid rain. And because quantities of copper appear at low density even in large deposits, vast amounts of earth are removed in its extraction. Deforestation and removal of grasslands precede miles of huge pit mines and decades (even centuries) of polluted land and water, as well as biodiversity decimation in areas much greater than the pitted area itself.

Even more than lithium, cobalt, and nickel, copper is ubiquitous in our lives today. It’s in our appliances, in our pipes and our wiring, in our cars, and in all of our devices. Forecasts hold that in the next 25 years, we will consume more copper than we have in the past 5,000 years. Manufacturing 300 million electric vehicles, just one third of all vehicles currently on the road around the globe, would require nearly all of the total world consumption of copper. After more than a hundred years of extraction, Chile’s copper mines are playing out. The best remaining mines are in Africa and the US ceded these to China during the Obama and Trump administrations. Now what?

Who Has Rights to Oak Flat, Arizona: The US Government, the International Mining Company, or the Indigenous Tribes For Whom It’s Been A Sacred Site for Millenia?

A 2,000-acre piece of high-desert land in southern Arizona is a sacred site to the Apache and other Arizona tribal nations. It is also the site of the third largest deposit of copper ore on the planet. In 2014, the U.S. Congress used the National Defense Authorization Act to approve transfer of this land to Resolution Copper, a mining company owned by British-Australian mining companies Rio Tinto and BHP, in exchange for 6,000 acres in an unrelated area. The mine is projected to be able to supply up to one quarter of the copper needed by the United States.

This land is known as Oak Flat or Chi’chil Biłdagoteel. For hundreds (probably thousands) of years, Apaches and other indigenous tribes have collected medicinal plants and acorns, and held coming-of-age ceremonies for generations of their young people on this site. The current campground in the Tonto National Forest would become a giant sinkhole when Resolution Copper has extracted the ore there. The extraction method planned is called block cave mining which tunnels beneath the ore deposit, collapses it and moves the ore out through another tunnel to a facility where it will be crushed. The remaining crater will eventually be 1,000 feet deep and about 2 miles across. Once sacred land would be an unusable gouge deep into the Earth, devoid of biological and spiritual life.

Additionally, the proposed mining project would necessitate the building of a 60-story tailings dam to hold back the rock and water sludge leftover from extracting and processing the copper. Skunk Camp is the proposed site for this dam. A natural wash in Gila County, Skunk Camp is part of the Gila River Watershed. Such tailing dams become a permanent fixture of the landscape and essentially must be maintained forever to avoid collapse.

A 2021 poll showed that 74% of Arizonans are opposed to the proposed copper mine. Announcement of the poll results was joined by the release of a new hydrology report showing that the mine would consume water equivalent to the annual usage of a city of 140,000 people for 40 years. It’s further suggested that underground water channels and major aquifers will be damaged, polluted, or even destroyed. Meanwhile, about 60 miles west of Oak Flat, the state of Arizona has limited new housing construction around the city of Phoenix because of dwindling water supply. Mines are not accountable to water usage controls despite the southwestern region’s ongoing mega-drought that’s brought current water shortages and a projection of more in the future.

Due to its religious significance to the Apache and other Arizona nations, Oak Flat has been kept separate from mining claims since the Eisenhower administration. Environmental protections have also been upheld until now as Oak Flat is one of the state’s rare riparian habitats. Animals, birds, and plants depend upon it for water and shelter. This includes the Emory Oak which has been a critical staple in the Apache diet for hundreds of years.

Exactly how much is the cost of turning copper into gold? And what, really, is the value of the gold at that point? The fight for Oak Flat continues.

Nickel: Beware the Goblin’s Copper

Humans have mined nickel for thousands of years. It wasn’t until 1751 that the element was isolated and its unique properties understood. They gave it the name kupfernickel which translates to ‘goblin’s copper’. Nickel, like copper, is a ubiquitous part of life around the globe today. It is a critical component in cell phones and electric vehicle batteries, but it’s also used to make such an abundant material as stainless steel. With the cheapest, highest energy density of any of the critical minerals, development for more and better uses of nickel is ongoing. Tesla has always featured more nickel in its batteries. To reduce the amount of cobalt, the amount of nickel must be increased. With its higher energy density, nickel allows Tesla to market greater range for its cars.

Demand for rechargeable batteries central to the green economy is expected to increase the demand for nickel as much as 65% by 2030. And Indonesia is expected to deliver at least two-thirds of that increased demand for nickel. By 2027, some forecasts call for as much as 88% of the world’s nickel coming from Indonesia. But for decades conservationists have been warning about the devastating effect of nickel mining and processing on Indonesia’s formerly pristine environment and its locals’ way of life.

As with mineral mining elsewhere, the process for mining nickel in Indonesia begins with the deforestation of large expanses of trees. Then the land is gouged to create open pits. Without the expansive network of tree roots, the ground is no longer stabile and the frequent abundant rainfall washes away the earth leaving a denuded and infertile landscape. In Southeast Sulawesi, nearly two dozen floods and mudslides occurred in 2022. Before the mines, there was an average of two to three per year. Adding insult to injury, the floods and mudslides carry waste sludge containing sodium cyanide, diesel, and other chemicals from the mines. The end point for the sediment of this toxic sludge is the sea — the same part of the sea where local fishermen have been making their living since long before the nickel mines were introduced into their world. Coral reefs nearby have already been suffocated by this sediment. Locals fear the giant clams, lobsters, and sea cucumbers will be next.

Many of the nickel mines in Indonesia produce hexavalent chromium. This heavy pollutant was made famous in the film about Erin Brockovich’s battle to clean up toxic drinking water. In Indonesia, the chemical washes downstream from the mines, flowing across agricultural lands, family vegetable gardens and rice paddies. Most of Indonesia’s nickel projects are also sited in what were among the most biologically rich and diverse areas in the world. The island of Sulawesi, for example, supported seventeen species of primates. They are now under threat from mining activities.

There are regulations but oversight is poor, as it is everywhere mining takes place. And of course the worst offenders are the illegal mines which are found throughout Indonesia. Conservationists worry that the damage caused to the environment and to the local people’s way of life could be permanent. In Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green, Henry Sanderson cites similar findings at another nickel mine site. He tells of a Swiss mining consultant conducting an environmental assessment of a nickel and cobalt project run by the Chinese in Papua New Guinea. After extensive testing, the consultant concluded that the mine waste would “have a drastic, non-reversible impact on the eco-systems, marine life and humankind’s health in totality.”

Other Alchemical Approaches for Chrysopoeia (Gold Making)

We could forget the alchemical process of transmuting copper, nickel, and other base minerals into gold and go straight for mining the gold itself. In the village of Falan, Colombia, the multinational mining company AngloGold Ashanti is overcoming strenuous resistance from village residents to decimation of their healthy, lush environment, replacement of clean water with contamination and scarcity, destruction of local agriculture, and ruination of any current and future tourism in the area. (Ironically, local tourism there is related in part to the attraction of the ruins of two famous 16th-century gold mines nearby; extraction exploitation has a long tail.) Thanks to lobbying, pay-offs, and promises of things like better roads and schools, even farming tools, food and money, the resistance to the open pit mining for gold has been by-passed enough to proceed but not without creating disruptive division within the community. When necessary, threats and intimidation have also been a part of the mix. Throughout, the project has been described in terms of growth and development without mentioning that the growth and development is for the mining company, not the people of Falan. The jobs will be temporary but much of the damage will be permanent.

One more way to get gold from a metallic transmutation is the atomic process of nuclear fusion which has been proven to create one element from another. With a particle accelerator and a tremendous amount of energy, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory created small pieces of gold from bismuth, a metal adjacent to lead on the periodic table. Through a high-speed particle collision process, protons were sheared off the bismuth atom, leaving minute quantities of gold. Finally, the original alchemical goal had been achieved by human-kind. The ancient alchemists had been on the right track after all. Unfortunately, the cost today would be well over one quadrillion dollars per ounce of gold produced. Well, there’s still the chance that nuclear fusion will one day create gold by being the world’s next clean energy source . . . (of course, the mining of these minerals doesn’t go away at all with nuclear fusion and if we decide to just ramp up more status quo nuclear plants, we also add more waste and risk issues).

What Then Is the Answer?

The US produces almost no lithium, cobalt, or nickel, and very little of the copper required for use in electric vehicles and their charging stations, for solar and wind farms, for digital devices, and for the electrical grid. The situation is essentially the same in Europe. Both the US and Europe are looking to mine again in order to be self-sufficient as well as competitive in these areas. But as Henry Sanderson reminds us in Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green, “we take mines for granted, yet they are huge feats of engineering, discovery and money, that take time to bring to fruition. Developing a new copper mine takes at least ten years.” And of course there are the many environmental and social downsides to mining.

What then is the answer? We must transition away from the burning of fossil fuels as quickly as possible and the new green energy replacements are heavily dependent upon the use of minerals that are in short supply and whose mining and processing adds to the climate and ecological problems driving the transition to them. Green energy infrastructure and manufacturing is also inextricably dependent upon fossil fuels. The hard reality is that both the old and the new energy systems have very real problems. As is so often the case in life, it’s entirely possible to have more than one possibly insurmountable problem at the same time even when we are only focused on one of them. Alchemy won’t help us here.

For many concrete reasons that I’ve yet to lay out, as well as the ones I’ve probably spent enough time on, I don’t believe the current path forward for transition to a new green energy economy is feasible. And we can’t ignore the fact that we’re still escalating in our use of fossil fuels at the same time one government after another is backing away from its commitments on this matter. Collectively, we’ve made zero strides in meaningful changes to how we live in rich countries even as we begin to experience in our own domains a modicum of the effects our lifestyles have wrought upon poorer countries around the world. Personal, political, and corporate will in general remain unmoved.

Genuinely viable solutions for a livable future include ways of living that are an anathema to many people in rich countries today. New economic models underpinned by a change in values will be required and that too escapes the imagination of most people. Our current economic models are dependent on ongoing growth to prevent collapse. Thus, just like the old energy system, the new energy system will need to keep growing and feeding growth as well.

We can hope for another solution besides the green energy renewables and their myriad electric applications but (unless this is just a failure of my own imagination) any energy system that is as cheap, abundant, and accessible as fossil fuels (i.e., something that will allow us to maintain the standards of living to which we are accustomed), all the same ensuing detriments are the Earth’s future.

Full transition to a green energy system is a narrative. It’s a narrative that makes us feel better in the face of a future that can be very tough to look at directly. But a narrative is not a plan. A comprehensive, well-thought-out, down-in-the-weeds detailed plan for a green energy transition that takes us all the way through to completion has yet to be presented. There are pieces being implemented here and there as well as steps taken backward on commitments already made. But the kind of plan that will get countries all the way through the transition (because part-way won’t do it), including addressing all the issues I’ve yet to explore here and also those I have, hasn’t been put forward. A transition from one energy system to another is not about a few corporate heads making a lot of money, or as many municipalities as possible getting subsidies. It is not about gold-making. It is about a viable future on a healthy planet for all living things, without whom we ourselves are doomed.

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