A rig on farmland in the southwest corner of Norway, pulling rock up in cylinders.<\/p>\n
The survey work said the ore body ran a few hundred yards down and stopped.<\/p>\n
The cores kept coming up carrying the same thing.<\/p>\n
Not a seam. A single body<\/strong> that went on and on.<\/p>\n By the time drilling caught the bottom of it, the projection had moved down by a factor of fifteen.<\/p>\n Which would be a footnote in mining news, except that this particular rock sits under two supply chains<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Phosphorus is what makes half of a silicon solar cell work.<\/p>\n It is diffused into the top surface of the wafer to create a layer with spare electrons, sitting against the layer beneath it that has spare holes.<\/p>\n The boundary between those two is the junction, and the junction is the thing that pushes charge in one direction when light hits it.<\/p>\n Without the phosphorus side, a wafer is a slab of silicon<\/strong> lying in the sun doing nothing useful.<\/p>\n The same element, taken through to purified phosphoric acid, becomes the P in lithium iron phosphate, which is the cathode chemistry that has taken over stationary storage and a large slice of electric vehicles.<\/p>\n None of that is where the tonnage goes. Roughly 90 percent<\/strong> of mined phosphate still goes into fertilizer, and the energy uses are a thin slice growing quickly.<\/p>\n The rock sits in a layered igneous intrusion near Helleland, which matters more than it sounds.<\/p>\n Most of the world’s phosphate is sedimentary, laid down in ancient seabeds, and it comes with cadmium<\/strong> that has to be stripped out.<\/p>\n Igneous phosphate does not carry that problem.<\/p>\n The same body also holds vanadium and titanium, both on the European list of critical raw materials, and vanadium is the metal in the flow batteries utilities buy for long duration grid storage.<\/p>\n The company holding the licences puts the deposit at 70 billion tons<\/strong> of phosphate rock.<\/p>\n That figure is theirs, not an audited reserve statement, and it describes rock in the ground rather than rock anyone has permission or machinery to lift.<\/p>\n The estimate that changed is the one worth stating precisely.<\/p>\n Survey work in 2018 put the bottom of the ore body at roughly 1,000 feet<\/strong>, which is three hundred metres.<\/p>\n Drilling has traced it to about 15,000 feet, which is nearly three miles, and fifteen times the first figure.<\/p>\n That is not a revision. It is a different object.<\/p>\n On the strength of it the company says the deposit could theoretically cover global phosphate demand for 100 years<\/strong>, against world consumption running near 50 million tons a year.<\/p>\n A first mine has been talked about for 2028, subject to Norwegian and European permitting that has not been granted.<\/p>\n Nobody mines phosphate at 15,000 feet.<\/p>\n Nothing in commercial mining comes close, and the deepest hard rock operations on earth are a different kind of undertaking at a fraction of that value per ton.<\/p>\n The rock that matters this decade is the shallow part near the top. The rest is real and not minable<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Refining is the second wall. Europe processes essentially no phosphate, and the founder of the company has been blunt about why, pointing at a Dutch operation that shut down over pollution.<\/p>\n The wet acid route is energy and carbon heavy wherever it runs, and a European industry would need plants that do not exist<\/strong> yet.<\/p>\n Extraction economics have a way of outlasting the headline, the same way evaporation ponds<\/a> still do work that sounds like it should have been automated decades ago.<\/p>\n The comparison people reach for is the wrong one.<\/p>\n The geological survey that keeps the global books puts world phosphate rock reserves<\/a> near 74 billion tons, with Morocco holding 50 billion of that, or about seventy percent of everything currently worth digging.<\/p>\n Reserves means rock that is economic to mine now. Resources are a different line entirely, and that one runs past 300 billion tons<\/strong>, with the plain note attached that there are no imminent shortages of phosphate rock.<\/p>\n So the problem was never that the world is running out.<\/p>\n The problem is that one country holds most of what is currently minable, Europe mines none of it, and the scramble for critical minerals<\/a> is about who controls a chokepoint rather than who has the last of anything.<\/p>\n Against that, a large igneous body inside Europe is worth something<\/a> even if most of it stays underground forever.<\/p>\n The drill cores are the measured part. Everything downstream of them is still a permit application<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A rig on farmland in the southwest corner of Norway, pulling rock up in cylinders. The survey work said the ore body ran a few hundred yards down and stopped. The cores kept coming up carrying the same thing. Not a seam. A single body that went on and on. By the time drilling caught the bottom … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":35169,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"southwestern norway traced","rank_math_title":"Drillers under a Norwegian farm field expected the phosphate rock to stop about 1,000 feet down, and the cores kept coming up loaded until the ore was traced almost three miles below the surface","rank_math_description":"A 70-billion-metric-ton phosphate deposit found in southwestern Norway could supply the raw material for solar panels and batteries for decades \u2014 here's w","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35141\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Why a fertilizer rock turned up in a solar story<\/h2>\n
What is actually in the ground there<\/h2>\n
The number the drilling actually moved<\/h2>\n
The catch sitting inside the depth<\/h2>\n
What the supply picture actually looks like<\/h2>\n