Class VII Geography: Resources around the World IE Sheet 4

The Role of Technology in Resource Depletion

On the demand side, consumption of energy is becoming less intense and more efficient as
people use less energy to live their lives and as energy-efficient technologies become more
integrated in homes, businesses, and transportation. In addition, technological advances are
helping to bring down the cost of renewable energies, such as solar and wind energy, with
significant effects for both producers and consumers of fossil fuels. On the supply side, resource
producers are increasingly able to deploy a range of technologies in their operations, putting
mines and wells that were once inaccessible within reach, raising the efficiency of extraction
techniques, shifting to predictive maintenance, and using sophisticated data analysis to identify,
extract, and manage resources.
The global mining industry is under pressure. The industry has shifted its focus to improving
productivity by “sweating” existing assets, but this strategy will go only so far. Despite the
industry’s booms and busts, the nature of mining has stayed the same for decades. Achieving a
breakthrough on productivity performance demands rethinking how mining works. The potential
to achieve such a breakthrough is now coming within the industry’s reach through digital and
technology innovations that could transform key aspects of mining. There is a number of digital
technologies that have long been in the works and are now available and affordable enough to
become operational at scale across the mining industry. Their applications include building a
more comprehensive understanding of the resource base, optimizing material and equipment
flow, improving anticipation of failures, increasing mechanization through automation, and
monitoring performance in real time.
Farms have also changed a lot in the last 50 years. Farms are bigger, livestock are usually raised
inside, yields are higher, and less manual labor is needed. Why is this? The answer is simple.
Technology i.e. livestock genetics and breeding, crop genetics and pest management, improved
farm equipment, etc.