There are fewer and fewer ore deposits readily available for global energy conversion. It seems that the traditional and traditional methods of obtaining them have exhausted their capabilities and are unable to provide the required quantities.

This is one of the reasons why metal prices are constantly rising, making the above-mentioned energy conversion costs higher and higher, and thus threatening their economic goals. The barrier to reaching the required amount of minerals creates a risk that fossil fuels cannot be completely eliminated from the energy sector.

An example of this is the letter from Professor Richard Herrington – Director of the Natural History Museum of Geosciences in London, which he wrote to the government just a year ago, in which he explained that “to achieve the goals of electric cars in the UK by 2050, we will have to produce double the The current total annual global cobalt production, nearly all of the world’s production of neodymium, three-quarters of the world’s production of lithium, and at least half of the world’s production of copper.

It should be noted that this observation applies only to the production of electric vehicles, and is not a single analysis of resource professionals around the world. The emerging crisis in access to critical minerals has led to many scientists in the field of raw materials beginning to analyze and search for the possibility of obtaining them in a different way than before. One of these proposals was made by a team of geologists from the University of Cambridge, proposing a detailed study of dormant and extinct volcanoes for this purpose. This proposal is justified because there are thousands of volcanoes of this type in the world, and hundreds in Poland.

Chile – Copper from Volcanic Porphyry Chimneys
On the surface, the idea of ​​the Cambridge scholars seems nothing entirely new. Almost two hundred years ago in Chile, thanks to our compatriot Ignacy Domeyko, several volcanic porphyry chimneys were discovered containing about 0.5 percent. copper. There are several dozen such chimneys along the Andes mountain range. Its formation is associated with the movements of origin that occurred at the turn of the Cretaceous and Paleogene, which occurred about 65 million years ago. At that time, acidic lava flows containing copper and gold were compressed to the Earth’s surface by the pressure of the changing continents.

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