Science & technologyCopper gushersBrine minesPeople may one day drill for copper as they now drill for oilCopper was the first metal worked by human beings. They hammered it into jewellery and ornaments as much as 11,000 years ago.Today, Homo sapiens uses more than 20m tonnes of the stuff a year, much of it in buildings and electrical infrastructure.More will be required in coming decades, to meet the need for widespread electrification brought about by the transition to less carbon-intensive economies.Copper is an essential part of batteries, motors and charging equipment.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.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.Metal-rich nodules scattered across various parts of the ocean floor are a possibility.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.
