To build something valuable money is not enough. The model in the game should considers also “resources” but there are thousands of different types of resources: we have commodoties, we have food, we have soil…
It is clear we need a huge simplification here. Let’s focus on minerals/metals and oil and coal.
The best source is the World Economic Forum that made the analysis in terms of extracted quantities.
We need to understand the production per area.
US Geological Society (link) has some raw data you can use, but the most usable source I have found is Wikipedia .
What is also missing is the value for each mineral: because 1 tonne of iron has not the same value of the same quantity of Palladium.
This article of Mining (link) makes an analysis of the most important minerals, and in Ychart we can find the prices (USD/mt):
- Potassium Chloride (Muriate of Potash): 560 link
- Zinc: 3,100 link
- Lithium: 78,000 link
- Aluminium: 2,450 (should be Bauxite) link
- Cobalt: 55,000 link
- Gold: 60,000,000 (1,700 USD/oz link)
- Silver: 700,000 (20 USD/oz link)
- Iron ore: 100 link
- Platinum: 31,000,000 (880 USD/oz) link
- Copper: 7,750 link
Mineral Production is available on ychart (link)
1 tonne = 35274 oz (for silver and gold)
To have an idea of the number of variable should be considered, you can watch this realtime dashboard and the number of commodities (link).
At the end I have considered the 2 biggest that are Iron and Aluminum.
I have considered Oil and Coal (excluded Gas for the simplification), because I have realised that the Oil Market is bigger than the double of the total market for all minerals (link).
Oil has been considered also to estimate resource consumption. Because in our global market it is not true that who produces resources also consumes them, it is very different and this is a great lens to understand how the world is working effectively.
So interesting that I will write an article on this.
Another important hypothesis is that I consider that every resource produced in a year is consumed during the same year in the 5 activities that I have described in the CO2 emission (link): Food, City, Electricity, Mobility, Industry.