January: Fortress Britain

A grim start to the new year with the new variants of Covid-19 threatening to spread across the country and savage the beleaguered NHS.  On the 4th of the month Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a complete lockdown of the UK. The previous evening he had said that primary schools in much of the UK would remain open, as schools were "perfectly safe", so the following day children returned to school after the Christmas break, to be told in the evening that schools were no longer safe and would have to close until at least mid February.

Parents, including MEI's Jon and Amanda, are having to balance work and home teaching duties and this is true not only in UK but around the world, so I must apologise to those who have submitted manuscripts to Minerals Engineering and are awaiting news of the outcome of assessment of their papers. The stresses of the pandemic are such that many potential reviewers are overworked and there has been an inevitable slowing down of the whole peer-review process.

Couple all that with an egregious storming of the White House by pro-Trump supporters contesting the result of the Presidential election, and leading to five fatalities, then the first week of January wasn't the best way to start a New Year.

From the middle of the month travel into and out of the UK became virtually impossible as most of the travel corridors with the UK were suspended and, coupled with Brexit, Britain became, for the first time in its history, an effectively isolated nation, with a tragic milestone of 100,000 deaths from Covid reached last week, 30,000 more than the number of British civilians killed by bombing raids in the whole of WW2.

However the beginning of the month was also tempered with optimism, as on the same day as the lockdown announcement the first Briton was injected with the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, a silver lining in the cloud of gloom, offering an escape from the mounting horrors of this pandemic. 

Source: Rebecca Hendin/The Guardian

The future is in safe hands

I had my first armful of the Pfizer vaccine two days ago, but aside from Coronavirus, which is the main topic of conversation on everyone's lips, there was news that the 2021 G7 Summit will be held in Cornwall in June, so perhaps fortuitous that MEI's conferences planned for the same week were postponed to the following year and Falmouth's popular Sea Shanty week, also in mid-June, is going virtual. We felt that the 'new norm' wouldn't be with us by then and it will be interesting to see if the G7 goes ahead as planned.

There was also some good news on the ever increasing importance of Cornwall to the mining industry. Geothermal Engineering Ltd continues to push forward with the United Downs Deep Geothermal Power project. The production well is 5.275km deep and the temperature is 188 degrees C. GEL has signed a power purchase agreement with Ecotricity whereby a minimum of 3 MW of electricity, enough to power 6,000 homes, will be distributed to Ecotricity’s customers via the National Grid. It is the first time that geothermal electricity will be produced and sold in the UK.

GEL also hopes to supply heat energy to a new local rum distillery which will use zero carbon heat from the plant. The Cornish Geothermal Distillery Company has submitted plans for the UK’s first geothermally heated biome which will be used to mature and then distill sustainable rum.

GEL is hoping to secure planning for future sites around Cornwall over the next two years. Each new site will aim to produce a minimum of 5 MW of renewable baseload electricity and up to 20 MW of renewable heat which will be available 24/7. 

A massive bonus has been the discovery that the geothermal water has a high lithium content and GEL is working closely with Cornish Lithium Ltd to develop zero-carbon lithium extraction from these hot lithium brines, and the Crown Estate, manager of the seabed and much of the foreshore around England, Wales and Northern Ireland, recently announced the outcome of its Minerals Licensing Round, granting Cornish Lithium rights to explore for lithium within geothermal waters in areas off both the north and south coasts of Cornwall.

The world’s ever-increasing demand for car-battery lithium is now focusing on Cornwall where lithium was first identified in 1864. Europe presently has no secure supply of lithium, and nearly all lithium comes from the Central Andes – the desert salars of Chile, Argentina and soon from Bolivia – or from Australia (posting of 23 November 2020). Cornish Lithium aims to maximise product recovery from the geothermal waters in a small footprint, energy efficient extraction plant, which will be powered by an on-site geothermal power plant. Lithium will be extracted from the water from the geothermal power plant's 5.2km deep borehole and the water will then be re injected into the rock.

And finally I must mention a short video, in which Cornish Lithium's Senior Geologist (Business Development), Lucy Crane, is interviewed by 10 year old school girl Sophia on the importance of mining to society and what it is like to work in the industry. Lucy has a keen interest in furthering the interests of young mining professionals and in promoting the mining industry to students, and sits on the committee of both the Young Mining Professionals and Women in Mining (UK). I would urge all readers of this blog to make teachers of children of every age aware of this inspirational video.

Lucy and Sophia

It might inspire youngsters to train as mining engineers but Camborne School of Mines (CSM) is the only university department in UK offering a degree in mining engineering. In September I reported that the University of Exeter had announced a plan to ‘pause’ recruitment to the BEng Mining Engineering programme at CSM for the 2021-22 academic year, but stressed that it hadn’t been scrapped, instead recruitment was paused while it looked to reshape the opportunities to study mining and related topics. 

Following 5 months of deliberations, the University decided in January to continue the ‘pause’ in offering the Mining Engineering undergraduate degree programme. It is not likely that recruitment will resume in 2022 so there will be no mining graduates after 2024 when the current cohort has completed their BEng degree.

Camborne School of Mines Association has tried to influence the decision by submitting letters of support from its members, many of whom wrote to the Vice Chancellor Prof. Lisa Roberts in September and October 2020.   Unfortunately, these letters were dismissed as  “sentiment”.

So this effectively brings an end to CSM's proud record of training graduate mining engineers, which has its origins back to 1888. And all at a time when there is a resurgence in mining activity in Cornwall and Boris Johnson, in bringing the G7 to Cornwall, has talked enthusiastically of Cornwall's proud mining heritage.

@barrywills