So how do you turn one of the world’s poorest countries into one of the most exploited? Well, one way is to discover trillions of dollars worth of natural resources lying in the ground underneath their feet. Unfortunately, Afghanistan is where its at, or likely to be at in the not too distant future.
It seems that a Pentagon funded team, I guess looking at ways to get the economy moving in Afghanistan, maybe get a few more Afghanis (that’s Afghanistan’s currency) or dollars into the pockets of workers so they can buy some more Coke-Cola or maybe just find more ways to justify their continued ‘War On Terrorism’… (Yes, there is a Coke-Cola plant in Afghanistan).
Way back when the Soviets were in Afghanistan, they had geologists look at what mineral wealth was available in the country and they found the potential for large deposits of iron and copper. Turns out the war at the time stopped any development, and then the Afghan geologists hid the information from the Taliban. Now though, according to information recently released by the US geologists, there are also large deposits of natural gas (36 trillion cubic feet (1,000 km3), oil (3.6 billion barrels (570,000,000 m3), and natural gas liquids (1,325 million barrels (2.107E+8 m3) waiting to be extracted.
There is also a veritable feast of other minerals such as niobium, gold and lithium available, with probably even more ‘treasures’ to be found in the mountains. Many of these modern age minerals, such as lithium, are in high demand for batteries and electronic devices.
This all sounds like a dream come true, paying the Afghanistan government billions of dollars over the coming decades to rebuild the country, raise the living standards, and improve the health and education of its citizens. But, in a country without a major road or rail infrastructure, no mining history nor technology, no experience of doing international business on such a scale and no environmental safeguards, it is probably not going to turn out as well as it could.
In fact, given that China has already been accused of bribing the previous Afghanistan Minister of Mines with an estimated $30M to develop a copper mine, and that China’s appetite for resources is only going to get bigger, along with the rest of the world, then you can see that Afghanistan is going to end up full of holes and wells and have its mineral wealth extracted faster than you can shake a poppy plant empty of its seeds.
Probably the US, Britain, half of Europe, Russia and a whole bunch of other countries are also interested in ever so generously ‘helping’ Afghanistan manage their mineral wealth? But maybe it’s a good opportunity to take a breather, let the Afghan people develop their own industry without too much outside ‘help’ and give the country (people, environment and animals) time to recover from all these decades of war?
I tell myself that there should be some restraint in any further exploitation of the Afghan people and their land, but I also know this is simply a dry run for what will eventually happen when all the ice and snow has melted from the Arctic, Antarctica, Greenland and the Himalayas…
Trevor Williams is a University of Victoria Mechanical Engineering PhD candidate specializing in renewable energy, power grid modeling and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. He has a bachelors in Aeronautical Engineering, a Masters in Management Science and over 23 years international experience in the space industry, having worked on Earth observation and telecommunications satellites. He is the author of the Eco-Geek blog.
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