THANATIA: THE DESTINY OF THE EARTH'S MINERAL RESOURCES - A THERMODYNAMIC CRADLE-TO-CRADLE ASSESSMENT

Is Gaia becoming Thanatia, a resource exhausted planet? For how long can our high-tech society be sustained in the light of declining mineral ore grades, heavy dependence on un-recycled critical metals and accelerated material dispersion? These are all root causes of future disruptions that need to be addressed today.This book presents a cradle-to-cradle view of the Earth's abiotic resources through a novel and rigorous approach based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics: heat dissipates and materials deteriorate and disperse. Quality is irreversibly lost. This allows for the assessment of such depletion and can be used to estimate the year where production of the main mineral commodities could reach its zenith. By postulating Thanatia, one acquires a sense of destiny and a concern for a unified global management of the planet's abiotic resource endowment.The book covers the core aspects of geology, geochemistry, mining, metallurgy, economics, the environment, thermodynamics and thermochemistry. It is supported by comprehensive databases related to mineral resources, including detailed compositions of the Earth's layers, thermochemical properties of over 300 substances, historical energy and mineral resource inventories, energy consumption and environmental impacts in the mining and metallurgical sector and world recycling rates of commodities.

This book presents a comprehensive examination of the physical stock and degradation velocity of the Earth's mineral resources. The Earth's mineral resources are analyzed through a revolutionary and novel approach - the exergy approach, which accounts for all physical features of the resources. The largest database of thermodynamic properties of natural substances is compiled in this book to facilitate this analysis. Furthermore, for the first time, the depletion degree of the natural capital and the year where the peak of production is reached is assessed. The world's historical statistics (mostly since the beginning of the 20th century), describing the consumption of the most important mineral resources is also presented.

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