The Old frontier

There has been a veritable explosion in international mining over the past ten years, and the scale and variety of projects in modern industrial Europe are showing us that discoveries are not confined to the Andes or the Borneo jungle.

Explorers do not need to go to the Third World for geological potential. What Europe lacks in land area it substantially makes up for in geological variety — and it is tectonic activity, not volume of rock, that makes mineral deposits possible. Europe is the home of many classic mining camps, including the Pyrite Belt of Spain and Portugal, the vein deposits of Bohemia and Saxony, and the vast base metal deposits of Meggen and Rammelsberg. There were elephants long before Hannibal decided to bring his own.

Another of the great advantages of Europe is that it is the birthplace of mining as a craft, and the home of the Industrial Revolution. Centuries before Christ, the Phoenicians had come to trade with barbaric tribes of tin miners, descendants of those who had reduced bog iron over hot coals in the Iron Age. Etruscans worked the mines of northern Italy, and Romans, those of Andalusia.

A medieval Saxon named Bauer wrote the first text on mining and prospecting; for form’s sake, he Latinized his name to Georgius Agricola. And in twenty-first-century Sweden, one of the most modern copper smelters in the world takes ore from a mining camp that started production in the thirteenth.

That means, most of all, that Europe, to a far greater extent than many other parts of the world, has a “culture” of mining, and a population that knows how to make a living that way.

Beyond that, northern and western Europe are what used to be called the First World, a direct inheritance of the Industrial Revolution. It was here that machines were first driven using fuel, rather than muscle power, making it possible to create an industrial economy.

The outgrowth of the industrial age is evident throughout Europe, which in the late twentieth century led the world in automation. The use of capital has made the European worker — not excluding the European miner — among the most productive in the world.

And a long modern history of mining in places such as Ireland, Poland, Spain, the Czech Republic, and the Nordic countries, means a competent and willing workforce may already be in place when a find is made.

Many European countries also bring another advantage to the table: transparency. There are great advantages to operating in places where (to quote the Australians) you don’t have to meet the president to get a mine permitted.

These are First World countries with First World standards for development and environmental compliance, but companies operating in Europe have shown that this is no competitive disadvantage.

Closely related to that is respect for property rights, which is strong throughout most of Europe. Even in the old Soviet-bloc countries, a legal framework is developing that assures mining companies that a deal is definitely a deal.

When mining companies from North America, the Pacific Rim, and southern Africa spread out across the world in the 1990s, they tried out a lot of places. If Europe proves to be one of the places where they will stay, that need come as a surprise to nobody.