Simon Michaux

Former career mining professional Simon Michaux gives a public lecture in Adelaide describing the onset of 'peak mining' and its various implications for natural resource management. A significant and comprehensive update to the field. Governments will be watching this one and trying to ignore it.

A useful presentation of the decline in return on energy invested. The industry is having to work harder and harder in order to get returns. Of course the industry is not going to admit this to potential investors or to governments because, if they did, governments would put the brakes on, realising that we are heading for uncontrollable problems if we do not.

The United States with its fracking and oil-shale mining; canada with its tarsands etc - they are able to get money to invest in the short term because of high demand and low intelligence and education in the investor community. The same kind of thing is happening with many resources, including uranium.

This is the picture that is not shown by graphs of oil production, which manage to convey the impression that per capital production is on a very slightly declining trajectory. If the increasing cost of the extraction from the earth were actually taken into account, we would see a much more rapid downward curve.