I really appreciate your insights into and estimates on this potential cause area! I have heard of using plants to identify where there are precious minerals, and to concentrate radioactive material but not literal plant mining before now.
Apologies if you covered this in the article, but can phytomining scale? Does it have the potential to be an economical answer and major source of material. Or is it more for special circumstances where mining is unusually difficult for some reason eg the mineral is highly dispersed. If you answered this already please just link me to the section, I was skimming rather haphazardly.
I think I’ll go back now and read closer the different types of minerals discussed, but I wanted to write a comment expressing my appreciation before I got distracted. There’s not enough novel ideas explored thoughtfully and this is the kind of content that really makes EA shine in my opinion.
I cut out a bit that I had on how much it could scale to make it shorter, but there’s still a bit about that in the practical section. In general, phytomining could potentially produce the vast majority of some of the less common elements (thallium), and Krol-Sinclair and Hale say that the same is true for cobalt. It could also produce a pretty large chunk of nickel- I don’t have an exact number but I’m pretty confident that it could be a double-digit percentage of the world’s consumption. So yes, it scales, but figuring out how much it scales would be a good target for future research.
I was not expecting this to be the answer. That’s really fascinating. Phytomining is officially on my radar now, and I’ll be linking back to this article. I hope attention to it starts taking off.
I really appreciate your insights into and estimates on this potential cause area! I have heard of using plants to identify where there are precious minerals, and to concentrate radioactive material but not literal plant mining before now.
Apologies if you covered this in the article, but can phytomining scale? Does it have the potential to be an economical answer and major source of material. Or is it more for special circumstances where mining is unusually difficult for some reason eg the mineral is highly dispersed. If you answered this already please just link me to the section, I was skimming rather haphazardly.
I think I’ll go back now and read closer the different types of minerals discussed, but I wanted to write a comment expressing my appreciation before I got distracted. There’s not enough novel ideas explored thoughtfully and this is the kind of content that really makes EA shine in my opinion.
I cut out a bit that I had on how much it could scale to make it shorter, but there’s still a bit about that in the practical section. In general, phytomining could potentially produce the vast majority of some of the less common elements (thallium), and Krol-Sinclair and Hale say that the same is true for cobalt. It could also produce a pretty large chunk of nickel- I don’t have an exact number but I’m pretty confident that it could be a double-digit percentage of the world’s consumption. So yes, it scales, but figuring out how much it scales would be a good target for future research.
I was not expecting this to be the answer. That’s really fascinating. Phytomining is officially on my radar now, and I’ll be linking back to this article. I hope attention to it starts taking off.