Usuario:Demaga/Taller

'Thanatia: The Destiny of the Earth’s Mineral Resources: A Thermodynamic Cradle-to-Cradle Assessment' is a non-fiction book by Antonio Valero Capilla, Professor of Energy Systems in the Depart-ment of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Zaragoza, and Chairman of the Research Center for Energy Resources and Consumption (CIRCE), and his daughter, Dr. Alicia Valero Delgado, Director of the Industrial Ecology Department at CIRCE. The book applies insights from market and ecological economics, industrial engineer-ing, geology, metallurgy and thermo-dynamics to assess the ongoing decline in worldwide availability of non-renewable, abiotic (i.e. not living) natural resources of economic value in modern societies: the fossil fuels and various kinds of minerals

Structure

The book is structured into an introduction, 16 chapters arranged in four “parts”, an “epilogue”, and 5 appendices:

• Part I: The “threads” of the argument.

1. Some current and implications of resource scarcity and depletion.
2. An historical and analytical review of contributions by economists, accountants and scientists to the reckoning and assessment of abiotic-resource depletion.
3. An account of thermoeconomics.
4. An account of “physical geonomics” (a new branch of thermoeconomics that is particularly applicable to abiotic nonrenewables).

• Part II (Chapters 5-8): Descriptions of the Earth’s mineral resources and of the technologies used for their extraction.

1. Accounts of the geochemistry of the atmosphere, hydrosphere and upper continental crust, with particular attention to the chemical compositions of the economically valuable minerals and their degrees of concentration in the upper continental crust.
2. Inventories of the main mineral resources and the main renewable and non-renewable sources of consumable energy.
3. Description of the physical processes, costs and impacts of the mining and metallurgical industries.
4. Description of the industrial processing of the most important (economically) mineral commodities.

• Part III (Chapters 9-13): Explanation of the economically relevant thermodynamic aspects of mineral resources.

1. Explanation of theoretical tools (with formulas for calculating exergy content and exergy cost) for thermodynamic evaluations of mineral formation, of the natural distribution of minerals into economically valuable ores, and of mining processes.
2. How to establish a valid baseline (thanatia) for exergy-content and exergy-cost assessment of minerals.
3. Exergy-content assessments of various kinds of mineral wealth.
4. Exergy-cost assessments of mining, using and disposing of minerals.
5. in which the Hubbert Peak Model is applied in exergy cost terms so as to estimate when the zenith of mineral extraction first for Australia and then for the entire globe may appear.

• Part IV (Chapters 14-17): How to slow down the depletion of mineral resources.

1. Recycling and “urban-mining” remedies.
2. Why mineral resources are being managed inefficiently.
3. Precepts conducive to using abiotic mineral resources more efficiently.

1. Epilogue.

Appendices

A: Discussion of which kinds of materials, and how much of each, are used in “green” technologies (mobile phones, electric and hybrid vehicles, recently developed kinds of electric lighting). B: Descriptions of the main groups of minerals in our natural endowment and of the geochemistry and various industrial uses 77 of commonly produced minerals (from “Aluminium” to “Zirconium”). C: Description and discussion of the parts of the U.N.'s internationally accepted System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) that are directly relevant to the subject of the book. D: “Additional Data and Calculation Procedures.” The topics are: standard redox potentials; voltage requirements for communition of various kinds of ore; estimates published by (a) Rudnick and Gao (2004) and (b) Grigor’ev (2007) of how much of this and that chemical element is in the Earth’s upper crust; Australian fossil-fuel production; worldwide fuel production. E: A philosophical interview in November 1991 with Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen.

Reception

Federico Mayor Zaragoza, the Director of UNESCO from 1987 to 1999, has called the book an “important contribution,” and a number of geophysicists, geologists and chemists have expressed appreciation for it. Frank D. Stacey has found “refreshing” its “way of analysing the run-down of our mineral inheritance”. Ugo Bardi has called it “fantastic, although not exactly the kind of thing you read in the evening before going to bed.” Robert Ayres has described as “very good” the idea of devising “a more appropriate reference state for exergy analysis as applied to mineral life cycles.” John Ludden, Executive Director of the British Geological Survey, has described it as “an essential read for any scientist who is concerned with resource evaluation and how we can best manage these assets.” Prof. Rafael Moliner of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) has commented, “The end of our civilization will not be by depletion of energy, which is renewed every day from the sun, but by the dilu¬tion of nonrenewable abiotic resources on the Earth’s crust to such low levels that they will be impossible to reuse.... I have no doubt that this book will become a high bench-mark for future generations.”