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Minerals used to produce metals and non-metallic mineral raw materials could hold the key to mankind's survival. With the global population at seven billion and rising, Julian Turner talks to experts on both sides of the Atlantic about mining the minerals of the distant future.

If the human race is to continue in rude health into the next century and beyond, it must develop cost-effective, sustainable ways of sourcing and exploiting everyday industrial metals like copper, steel and iron, as well as rare earth elements such as dysprosium, molybdenum and lanthanum, many of which were formed in the Earth's crust hundreds of millions of years ago.

Our future prosperity is therefore inexorably linked to our most distant past, an irony that is not lost on John DeYoung, director of the National Minerals Information Center at the US Geological Survey (USGS).

'New technology will continue to provide the world with applications using many mineral commodities and materials made from minerals, but what will be used to build these devices? Machinery built from steel, aluminium and many of the other materials that we take for granted today,' he told me from USGS headquarters in Virginia.

'The Mineral Information Institute estimates that every child born in the US in 2011 will require more than 575t of non-fuel minerals - everything from cement and crushed stone to copper and gold - during his or her lifetime,' he added.

Industrial strength: copper and iron ore

'Industrial metals that we've used for thousands of years such as iron, copper, lead, zinc and aluminium will continue to be indispensible,' confirmed Andrew Bloodworth, head of science for minerals and waste at the British Geological Survey (BGS). 'The fact that we are mining vast quantities of iron ore in places like Australia and Brazil is feeding the building boom in China. All those buildings have to be wired for electricity and data, and most of that is still copper.'

With the global population now topping seven billion people, satisfying mankind's insatiable appetite for mineral resources has forced scientists to look at new ways of recovering, recycling and reusing them.

'We spend an enormous amount of money mining metal out of the earth, transforming it into its metallic form and putting it into electronic goods, only to disperse it all again,' said Bloodworth. 'How do you recover seven or eight milligrams of gold from each mobile phone that's been thrown away and re-concentrate that metal? That is a huge challenge.'

A potential solution is using sophisticated modern technology to exploit existing facilities, like the one in Hemerdon near Plymouth in Devon, UK. In September 2011, Australian company Wolf Minerals announced it had secured £4m of funding to reopen the lapsed tungsten mine, which was first discovered in 1867. Tungsten is used as a metal in alloys and can be found in everything from light bulbs to jewellery and watches.

Similarly, the Mountain Pass mine in California, US, once supplied most of the world's rare earth elements (REEs), before it was closed in 2002 as a result of environmental restrictions and lower prices for REEs. Now though, owner and operator Molycorp Minerals is planning to bring the facility, once owned by Chevron, back to full production.

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