Why we shouldn’t rely on space mining to solve mineral shortages

I have been seeing a lot of speculation lately about how space mining will solve the critical mineral shortages that will be coming in the future. All of the talk about mining the moon, Mars and the Asteroid Belt strikes me as the ludicrous fantasies of people who don’t want to accept the resource limits that humanity faces.

It is understandable why people see space mining as a solution, as they survey the growing demand for minerals. According the US Geological Survey, the world mined 26 megatons of copper in 2022, but only has 890 megatons of copper reserves. Assuming that no more reserves are found, at the current rate of consumption, we will run out of copper in 34.2 years. Rising prices and new extraction techniques will make it possible to mine copper in more places on the planet, but we will also need massive amounts of copper to switch the world from running on fossil fuels to renewable energy. Today’s electric vehicles contain 3 times more copper than internal combustion engine vehicles, so futurists worry that lots more copper will be needed to electrify all transport.

The world won’t run out of copper in the next 3 to 4 decades, but it will get much harder to extract, as mining companies have to switch from sulfuride ores to laterite ores, which means moving a lot more earth and consuming a lot more energy to extract the same amount of copper. Mining will have to move to lower grades of ores with lower concentrations of copper and operate in more remote locations such as the ocean floor.