General Mining

Mining markets concern the capital expenditures, product demand, and products produced by the mining industry. Mining as an industry activity is defined as the extraction or physical removal of solid ores, materials and substances from geological deposits. The global mining supplies various metals (iron, gold, silver, platinum, tungsten, lead, mercury), rare earths, uranium, coal, diamonds, building materials, stone, rock, other quarried materials, and various chemicals and industrially-important solids.

The recovery of petroleum deposits in shale, sands or bitumen is also commonly referred to as mining when the surface is excavated and earth is removed, as opposed to methods that use wells and thermal energy, gases, chemicals or waters to produce the petroleum and bring it to the surface.

Mining is accomplished through excavation types such as surface mining (responsible for the recovery of some petroleum trapped in shale and bitumen deposits) and placer mining (unconsolidated deposits in river and water-associated gravels and sands) or sub-surface mining like open pits, strip mining, shaft mining, and slope mining. Another option is solution mining where fracturing and boreholes are used to access deposits that can be produced at the surface through their solubility in water or leaching chemicals and salts. Petroleum (crude oil) and natural gas recovery are also considered mining in some contexts due to their role in extracting substances from subs-surface deposits, although physical removal and extraction methods as found in mining are not applicable; wells are used to produced pressured fluids rather than shafts that facilitate miners and equipment to enter sub-surface deposits and ore veins.