2021年经济学人 火山卤水矿,真正的绿色来源(1)（在线收听）

Science & technology

科技板块

Copper gushers

铜井

Brine mines

卤水矿

People may one day drill for copper as they now drill for oil

也许有一天，人们会像现在开采石油一样开采铜

Copper was the first metal worked by human beings. They hammered it into jewellery and ornaments as much as 11,000 years ago.

铜是人类最早加工的金属。早在11000年前，人们就把它锤成珠宝和装饰品。

Today, Homo sapiens uses more than 20m tonnes of the stuff a year, much of it in buildings and electrical infrastructure.

如今，智人每年使用超过2000万吨的稀土，其中大部分用于建筑和电力基础设施。

More will be required in coming decades, to meet the need for widespread electrification brought about by the transition to less carbon-intensive economies.

未来几十年，为了满足向低碳密集型经济转型所带来的广泛电气化的需要，还需要更多的电力。

Copper is an essential part of batteries, motors and charging equipment.

铜是电池、电机和充电设备的重要组成部分。

Solar and wind installations use more copper than their fossil-fuel counterparts, and electric vehicles contain four times more copper than do cars with combustion engines.

太阳能和风能装置要比化石燃料使用更多的铜，电动汽车含铜量是内燃机汽车的四倍。

This has spurred interest in new sources of the metal, most of which comes at the moment from rocks dug out of vast opencast mines that are then ground up and processed to release the copper they contain, typically about 1% of their mass.

这激发了人们对铜的新的来源的兴趣，目前大部分的铜来自于从大型露天矿山中挖掘出来的岩石，然后将其碾碎加工，释放出其中所含的铜，一般约为其质量的1%。

Metal-rich nodules scattered across various parts of the ocean floor are a possibility.

有一种可能的来源是分布在海底各处的富含金属的结核。

But exploiting these brings technological and regulatory difficulties, and is in any case controversial because of the damage it would do to deep-ocean ecosystems.

但是利用它们会带来技术和管理上的困难，而且无论如何都具有争议，因为会对深海生态系统造成破坏。

Jon Blundy of Oxford University, however, offers an alternative.

然而，牛津大学的乔恩·布伦迪选提供了另一种选择：

This is to extract, from deep under Earth's surface, the mineral-rich brines from which ores of copper and other valuable metals are generated in the first place.

首先从地球表面深处提取富含矿物的卤水，从卤水中产生铜和其他有价值的金属。

As Dr Blundy points out, "pretty much all of the non-ferrous natural resources that we exploit come ultimately from ancient volcanoes."

正如布伦迪博士指出的那样，“几乎所有人类开发的有色自然资源最终都来自古代火山。”

In particular, in 2015, he and his colleagues worked out the chemical details of how copper-sulphide ores form when sulphur-rich gases rise through the plumbing of active volcanoes and encounter metalrich brines trapped in rocks sitting just above pockets of magma.

特别是在2015年，他和同事们研究出了当富硫气体通过活火山的管道上升，遇到困在岩浆口袋上方岩石中富含金属的卤水时铜硫化物矿石形成的化学细节。

Modern mining operations dig up examples of these ores that formed millions or billions of years ago.

现代采矿作业挖掘出这些形成于数百万甚至数十亿年前的矿石。

Dr Blundy proposes instead to cut out the middleman and go straight to the deep copper-rich fluids themselves.

相反，布伦迪博士建议省去中间步骤，直接进入富含铜的深层液体。