EARTH RESOURCES
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Whilst at that time the traditionally locally traded low-cost building and construction
materials were experiencing unprecedented growth in output on the back of a demand for
new houses and offices and a rapidly expanding motorway programme, a different set of
factors were influencing those more costly minerals marketed internationally. Abroad, many
long-standing sources of supply appeared to be becoming problematic as reserves dwindled
or the political climate became more uncertain. At the same time new exploration techniques
were giving promise of the possibility of greatly increasing the UK resource base. This was
not merely in terms of reviving the fortunes of previously worked minerals, but also of
developing other non-renewable industrial minerals, some of which had made little or no
economic impact previously. Thus by the beginning of 1971, twenty-eight companies had
agents or staff geologists exploring eighty sites (Figure 4.2), ranging from one re-examining
the potential of the old Levant tin mine on the Land’s End Peninsula to another seeking to
evaluate copper deposits in Ross and Cromarty (Blunden 1975). All were also assisted by
government, first by investment grants and tax concessions and then in 1972 through its
Minerals Exploration and Investment Grant Act. In moving to replace the previous
arrangements the new legislation offered financial support of up to 35 per cent of total costs
for new exploration initiatives, leaving regional investment grants to play a major part in
helping to underwrite the costly early years of mining development and minerals production
(Rogers et al. 1985).
However, in the intervening period between the mid-1970s and the present day, other
exogenous factors have come to influence the exploitation of that resource base in terms of
those minerals that can be traded internationally. Further developments in methods of locating
and evaluating potential resources have achieved ever higher levels of sophistication and
have been applied in the 1980s in many developing countries (Andrews 1992) whose former
ambivalent political attitudes, particularly towards foreign investment, have undergone a
remarkable transformation. This has often been as a result of pressure from the International
Monetary Fund which sees mining development as an important tool in promoting economic
growth. Many countries, particularly in South America, are now offering mining companies
security of mining tenure; government joint ventures guaranteed through third parties; and
a prompt government response to, and assistance with, development plan proposals, including
those related to environmental controls. The result has been that newly discovered ore fields
have rapidly been developed and then brought into production, usually utilising surface
mining methods of the most capital-intensive and cost-effective kind (Gooding 1992).
But these intiatives have not been the result of the actions of the smaller, often national,
companies that characterised the early 1970s. They have been largely replaced by
multinational corporations operating at a global level and able to influence market conditions
and raise venture capital on the international finance markets. As a result they look to achieve
maximum economies of scale at large, long-life opencast operations, and, where possible,
in a local milieu relatively free from onerous environmental constraints (Radetski 1992).
This was a situation hardly likely to favour investment in the UK, with its rigorous system
of planning controls and where mining development, if approved, might at best be operable
only at the edge of profitability. Indeed, in the case of tin mining, when compared with the
extraction of the disseminated placer or alluvial ores by capital intensive open pit methods
in, for example, Indonesia and more recently Peru, its underground extraction in Cornwall
involving the working of vein deposits was bound to be a more costly operation. Under the