Fireside Chat with Tim Biggs
The fireside chat, held on 22 October 2025 at the MINEX Europe Forum in Lisbon, featured Ros Lund, International Mining Professional, and Tim Biggs, Adviser to the mining sector and author of Mining: Why It’s Essential for a Sustainable Future. The discussion focused on the critical, yet often misunderstood, role of mining in enabling the transition to an electric and sustainable future.
The Motivation and Audience for the Book
Tim Biggs explained that he was driven to write his book after realising that even engineering students lacked a basic understanding of modern mining. The book is aimed at two main audiences:
- The Public: People with little to no knowledge of mining, or those who hold a negative view based on the legacy of dangerous, dirty, and polluting coal mines of the past.
- The industry: To serve as a primer to help miners become better advocates for the industry, enabling them to “take control of the narrative” and win arguments about mining’s essential nature. The industry is currently “hopeless at promoting” itself and needs to communicate its value to the wider world.
Controversial Views and Environmental Realities
The conversation addressed several contentious issues surrounding mining:
- Defending Coal: Biggs dedicated a chapter to coal, not to promote its use, but to argue for a globally responsible approach. He contends that if countries like Australia refuse to export high-quality, lower-polluting thermal coal, countries determined to burn coal anyway (due to the need for cheap energy) will simply use much more polluting Indonesian, Indian, or Chinese coal instead. The net result is a worse environmental outcome for the world.
- Addressing Legacies: He emphasised the need for mainstream, sensible investors and financiers to be involved in the mining sector. If regulated jurisdictions make it too difficult to operate responsibly, miners will be driven to countries with no interest in sustainability, closure preparation, or legacy management, thus funding “state-owned enterprises of dodgy countries” and private capital with “no interest in these things.”
- Pollution and Processing: Biggs highlighted that the bulk of pollution related to critical minerals comes from processing, not extraction. The reason China dominates processing is that 30 years ago, the West willingly exported its pollution there. He questioned whether the political will exists in Europe to permit the construction of domestic processing plants, which are inherently unpleasant operations involving heavy metals and significant water usage.
- Total Cost of Use: He criticised the “not in my backyard” (NIMBYism) approach prevalent in the UK and Europe, where environmental ministers only consider the local impact. The idea of rejecting a bulk mine in Europe only to import the same material via ships burning heavy fuel oil is environmentally meaningless, as the overall global impact is identical, plus the pollution from shipping. Externalities and the total cost of use must be assessed globally.
Modern Mining Solutions
- Recycling is Insufficient: While a “huge fan of recycling,” particularly the “right to repair” concept, Biggs stressed that it can never be the entire solution. Bulk materials like steel and copper are tied up in long-life infrastructure (e.g., buildings lasting 50 years), meaning new material must constantly be mined to meet growing global demand, especially in rapidly urbanising nations like India.
- Keyhole Mining: He agreed that technologies like keyhole mining (as used at the Woodsmith polyhalite mine in the UK National Park) are a fantastic solution for crowded continents like Europe, as they drastically reduce the surface footprint and minimise local opposition (NIMBYism). However, he argued that demanding underground mining in sparsely populated, remote areas like Australia’s Pilbara (iron ore region) is illogical and unfeasible.
The Final Message: More Mining is Needed
Biggs’s final thought was the most crucial takeaway:
“When you’re talking to people who don’t know much about mining, their immediate expectation and perception is that when we talk about a more sustainable world… their expectation will be that that’s going to lead to less mining. And we need to very quickly disabuse them of that notion and make help them understand that actually no, it’s the exact opposite… we’re going to have to do a whole lot more mining.”
This increased demand requires more miners. The industry must work to influence children’s perceptions of the sector at an early age (e.g., 12 years old), countering the negative inclination of some within the teaching profession and encouraging the next generation to consider careers in geology and engineering.