The Importance of Water to the Minerals Industry in Britain

Thank you for this opportunity to speak. In addition to the brief speaker biographies in the notes I should say that I also Chair the Mineral Products Association Water Group.

I was asked to outline the importance of water to the minerals industry, the ambitions of Lafarge to achieve full water footprinting, and the contribution that good science will be needed to make in the future.

Forgive me if I first put into context the importance of minerals to society and the country. To be clear the minerals I refer to are the solid, non energy, industrial minerals. My own specific field is construction materials but broadly the principles I will outline apply across the sector.

My thesis is that there are 4 basic human needs: Food, Water, Shelter, and Warmth. We contribute directly or indirectly to all four of those needs. Then we need to stay healthy.

For food we supply minerals that help produce food - soil conditioners, purifying cooking oil, sugar stone, calcium in bread:

For water we obviously provide construction materials for infrastructure (pipelines, reservoirs) but also products for purification and treatment, water borehole products:

Shelter is our most obvious market and the largest quantity of contribution - all the materials for bricks, concrete, roof tiles, drainage, roads, - houses, schools, hospitals - if you go abroad on holiday and return to a major UK airport the chances are that you will land on a Lafarge runway:

For warmth, as non-energy minerals, we provide products that assist the production of energy - dust to prevent explosions in coal mines, limestone to purify flue gases, specialist products for oil wells, dense concretes for nuclear power:

On a personal level we provide the abrasives in your toothpaste, the paint on your walls, the structure of your pharmaceutical pills, the fluxes for your steelmaking, the fillers in the paper on your desk:

A good strapline to remember is "If it can't be grown, it must be mined".

In respect of a contribution to Society and the nation I refer you to a recent publication from the Mineal Products Association - Making the Link. This independently identified that

in broad terms we:- generate £9 billion annual turnover of our own, support £120 billion turnover of the construction industry, enable £400 billion turnover of industries using mineral products, and over 2.5 million people employed by those industries.

So how do we use water? Very broadly speaking we handle water in 2 contexts. At excavations we often need to create dry quarries or surface mines by removing groundwater - for this we pump large quantities of water but actually consume almost none of it, merely transferring it from one place to another. Then in the production of the saleable minerals - we in the aggregates game use water to wash sands and gravels, embody a small amount (a few percent) in the production of concrete, and use some for environmental purposes such as dust control and wheel washing.

My cement colleagues use water for cooling kilns and instruments that control the process, the brick industry use water for conditioning clays, and so on. Every sector has a few niche applications.

The volumes used in all of this are very small but the importance is very high. We come about number four on the Defra list of water abstractors (depending on how the list is measured), but we are actually the first wealth creating sector on the list. Without water we could not make our products, without the ability to pump it from excavations we could not operate many of our sites, and the financial impact on balance sheets, profitability, jobs, and the industries we support would be truly enormous. The Olympic Games wouldn't have happened at all.

There is no substitute for the majority of our water uses, no practical alternative. And we already have many constraints upon our ability to operate - an oft quoted but true statement is that minerals can only be worked where they lie - even within this geological constraint we operate under a huge list of other environmental controls. Bottom line is we simply cannot, for instance, relocate quarries to areas of the country that might from time to time happen to be better provided for in water terms than other areas. We are a long term and stable industry which is founded on physical assets and we need long term confidence in our licence to operate and to utilise those assets.

We need a few key features to be delivered by responsive future water legislation:

A recognition of our locational constraints.
Long term licences that run with the life of our assets.
Tolerable administration.
Intelligent Environment Agency decision making.
Compensation if licences are revoked.

We recognise the reality of climate change - we see the effects almost daily - and we recognise (indeed welcome) the recognition of water as a precious resource. As part our contribution to enabling responsive legislation we recognised that accurate information is vital in order to inform debate - i.e. identifying our actual water footprint. So we started to work towards measuring everything. On paper it is simple enough, just measure all the water coming into a site and all the water taken out of it. In practice it is more challenging because of the sheer numbers of potential measuring points, a not insignificant cost, a workload in monitoring and recording data, securing buy in from colleagues, and management and staff time involved.

Our starting point was to ensure that all our licensed abstractions (for consumptive use) were metered with working meters, that they were read regularly, and that the data was recorded. Next step was to install meters on the various offtakes from the main water feed - the readymix concrete plant, wheel wash or similar, dust suppression. Mains water is metered where it is used for domestic purposes or for concrete production and the task was to create centralised recording of data. This is now pretty much all in place.

Measuring water flows from excavation dewatering has to be done at at least 2 points - the pump or pumps that take water from the excavation and then the point or points where that water is discharged into another water body. The variations in pumping arrangements seem endless, and many of the water handling structures are not that amenable to measurement, but work on achieving this is progressing. At discharge points we also have to monitor quality.

Generally over a period of 3 years or so now we have very successfully pushed water up the agenda with colleagues and there is a much greater acceptance of the need to do this work than there was only a short while ago.

As to the 5 questions posed in the brief it is difficult to do anything other than just touch on them in this meeting and perhaps after discussion today these matters could themselves be subject of 'essays' much like the recent publication.

Significant risks posed to business. I've mentioned ability to operate and effect on asset value or balance sheet, there are also risks of increased costs by way of water infrastucture on sites; potential for seasonal working; uncertainty of the ability to operate in the future; environmental difficulties.
Scientific information. Well characterised river catchments would be a necessary starting point, and robust information on the interrelationship between features of ecological importance and the water scenarios. Good science should underpin good policy, for instance for catchment management, rather than policy and technical matters becoming divorced.
Standard water footprint and risk toolkit. A complex matter if only due to the limitless variations in how businesses handle and use their water. I would suggest the basics the water input to a business from sources then sub-metering to distinguish various uses - even if this was simply use in the office and use in the factory.
Mandatory water footprinting. Intuitively I feel that it is a bit early to go down this route whilst industry and the public are still trying to digest carbon footprinting. There is always benefit in achieving clarity of data and a greater concentration on controlling use of resources but there are also always risks associated with an inevitable bureacracy. It could be argued that a comparatively local water use matter does not have the global implications of atmospheric emissions.
Drivers for improvements in sustainable water use. Necessity, government regulation, or CSR values? Some combination of carrot and stick tends to be effective in my experience since different sizes and types of businesses tend to respond to different stimuli. So maybe 2 out of 3 drivers with regulation being the last resort. Necessity is in some measure already happening through the Environment Agency's requirements for information to support many types of licence, whilst many of the larger and especially European listed companies are positively keen to harness the investor perception benefits of CSR.

Supply Chain Resilience and the Environment

I sit on two of the Mineral Products Association committees and therefore try to speak for a wider constituency than just the aggregates industry. The minerals I refer to are the solid, non energy, industrial minerals.

A Few Quarry Problems Solved

Coastal gravel quarry in a Scottish raise bed, A limestone quarry in Staffordshire, A gritstone quarry in South Wales and many more.

Minerals Sterilisation considerations for Land Developers

For many years, since minerals planning was formalised through a Minerals Local Plan based system in the early 1980s, County Councils as mineral planning authorities have carried a general responsibility to try and avoid mineral resources - mainly bulk materials such as aggregates and clays - from being sterilised, or put beyond use, by permanent surface development.

In the author's experience this responsibility was discharged fairly patchily in the distant past but following the introduction of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) in 2012 many Counties are applying sterilisation policies with greater vigour.

Frequency Analysis of Clays in a Sedimentary Sandstone Sequence

The author's former company in the early 1980s purchased and began to develop a High Polished Stone Value (PSV) quarry in South Wales. The geological sequence was the Carboniferous Pennant Sandstone and altogether about 160 metres vertical thickness of this deposit was to be intercepted by the quarry working.

Prior to purchasing the operation a core drilling exercise was carried out involving drilling through the full relevant sequence.

Aggregates Landsearch - Then and Now - Changing practices in land search for aggregates and other construction materials

It is a simple truism that minerals can only be worked where they lie, and quarries for sand and gravel or for crushed rock need landsearch activity to identify mineral bearing land for greenfield developments or extensions to existing operations.

Supply Chain Risks due to Extreme Weather Events

The UK Government is aware of risks that are posed by extreme weather events to infrastructure such as roads, railways, power and communications systems, and consultations have taken place with various industrial sectors. The minerals industry as represented by producers of solid, non-energy, industrial minerals and construction materials has a voice in that consultation.

Responding to DEFRA at the MIRO Review of Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund Research Projects, Wellington Arch, London - 12th March 2008

Minister, Ladies and Gentlemen:

It is a privilege to be able to respond on behalf of the Mineral Industry Research Organisation to DEFRA's Review of the Sustainability Fund Research Projects. MIRO and English Heritage have selected a most interesting venue for this launch and The Wellington Arch is perhaps slightly more relevant than many people might at first think.

Further information

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