What you will learn in Natural Resources, Energy and Sustainability

1. 1. What makes a rock valuable

   An ore body is a place where geology concentrated an element tens to thousands of times over the crust's average. Whether it counts as ore depends on the price, the cost and the technology — so deposits become ore and stop being ore without a single atom moving.

2. 2. How the Earth concentrates things

   Five processes make almost every ore body: magmatic segregation, hydrothermal fluids, chemical sedimentation, placer sorting and residual weathering. Each works only where the setting supplies what it needs, which is why ores sit where they do.

3. 3. Buried sunlight

   Coal is buried swamp plants; oil and gas are buried plankton cooked in the oil window. A field needs a source, heat, a reservoir, a trap and a seal all at once — and without the seal, the oil simply leaves.

4. 4. Energy, and what each source costs the Earth

   Eleven ways to make electricity compared on emissions, energy return, land, materials, dispatchability and geography. Each is lowest on something and none is lowest on everything, so the comparison stays a comparison and never becomes a ranking.

5. 5. Transition materials, and what sustainability means

   The energy transition is a materials problem: lithium, cobalt, rare earths and copper, each with its own geology and its own geography. Then sustainability, given its standard definition and applied to phosphate, groundwater and soil — and recycling, substitution and efficiency with their real limits.