A Year’s Worth of Resources in British Columbia

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A Year’s Worth of Resources in British Columbia

Earlier this month, we created a slideshow visualizing the amount of metal and oil extracted globally with famous landmarks and cities.

We’ve received numerous requests from folks in our hometown of Vancouver, BC to show how much resources are extracted in British Columbia. As you can see in the above slideshow, we have covered gold, silver, zinc, molybdenum, copper, lead, metallurgical coal, and even wood products.

It surprises many British Columbians that one of the most valuable resources is met coal, which is not used for power generation but to produce steel. Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon, and the carbon comes from the metallurgical coal. In fact, 70% of steel worldwide is made this way.

Also surprising is that less than 1m cubed of gold is produced in BC each year. This may change soon with some of the many projects that may eventually go into production, but for now it remains quite low and rare in BC.

To us, one thing is clear: BC is a beautiful and resource-rich province. We at Visual Capitalist hope that companies learn from the tragic events of Mt. Polley this summer and are able to start building and maintaining mining projects that far exceed expectations for safety and environmental stewardship.

Special kudos to PwC for providing most of the information in their latest Digging Deeper report. (Note: some cube sizes were estimated in size based on value of commodity shipped and avg. 2013 commodity prices)