Question

Your friend believes that only gold is a valuable mineral. List down at least

three minerals and their uses to prove otherwise​

Answer 1

Answer:

Types of Mineral Resources:

Minerals in general have been categorized into three classes’ fuel, metallic and non-metallic. Fuel minerals like coal, oil and natural gas have been given prime importance as they account for nearly 87% of the value of mineral production whereas metallic and non-metallic constitutes 6 to 7%.

(A) Fuel Minerals:

Coal, oil and natural gas are the basic fossil fuel. We have good reserves for coal but are very poor in more essential fuel — oils and natural gas.

(i) Coal:

Proven coal reserves of the country as on January 1994 (estimated by GSI) is about 68 billion tonnes. We are mining about 250 tonnes annually and this rate is expected to go by 400 – 450 tonnes by 2010 A.D. If we could maintain our mining rate of 400 tonnes per year then the coal reserves might last for about 200 years taking proven reserves as 80 billion tonnes.

(ii) Crude Oil (Petroleum):It is believed that petroleum has been formed over a period of millions of years, through conversion of remains of micro organisms living in sea, into hydrocar­bon by heat, pressure and catalytic action. The petroleum on fractional distillation and further processing provides us nu­merous products and by-products.

Some of the common products obtained on fractional distillation are given in Table 2.4, along with the temperature (just below the boiling point) at which they tend to liquefy after crude oil feed at the base is heated to about 400°C. One million tonne of crude oil on fractional distil­lation provides about 0.8 million tonnes of petroleum products.

The percentage composition varies with the quality of crude oil or it could be varied up to a certain limit depending upon the requirement or demand. On an average the percentage composition of the common product with their number of carbon atoms is given in table 2.4.

We have very poor reserves for petroleum just limited to 700 million tonnes. About 40% of the total consumption of the overall petroleum products of the country is used in road transport sector (in case of diesel, consumption of road transport sector is to the extent of 70% of the total diesel consumption of the country).

Rest 60% of the petroleum products are used in industries including power generation, domestic and for miscellaneous purposes. In view of rapid growth of these vital sectors, the consumption of petroleum products has been increasing consistently over a period of last few years and is bound to increase at rapid pace in near future

(iii) Natural Gas:

The proven reserve for natural gas on April 1993 works out to be approx. 700 billion cubic meter (BCM). As regard to production vis a vis utilization aspect in earlier years, more than half of gas coming out of the wells remained unutilized. However, in recent years, we have achieved a utilization rate of 80 – 90%. Keeping in view the future demands and proven gas reserves, it is unlikely that our gas reserves might last for more than 20 years.