All the above examples can serve as a hint that forced dependence on any technological path or the abandonment of one, like it happened in 2011 with the German exit from nuclear power and like the planned exit from fossil fuel-powered vehicles by 2035 in the EU, are not totally beneficial when looking at the whole picture. It is the network effects that count.
In September 2014, the US senate passed legislation claiming that resources on asteroids belong to the entity that discovers / mines them.
https://www.congress.gov/114/plaws/publ90/PLAW-114publ90.pdf
Using microorganisms such as Sulfobacillus harzensis that can recover the majority of cobalt metal in an mine tailings: https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/ijsem/10.1099/ijsem.0.004871
Alternative process: phytomining, where plants that are so-called hyperaccumulators take up the metal and incorporate them, creating high concentrations of metals in their biomass.
“Pressure to Power” describes technology that recovers energy at distribution stations of gas pipelines where the pressure is reduced before distribution to local users. (expansion turbine)
For crude oil pipelines, this has already been realized in 2018 with the Trans Alpine pipeline from Italy to Austria using the potential energy from the pipeline traversing the Alps to recover some of the energy required for pumping the crude oil.
Pigging devices currently used to inspect and clean pipeline networks could be modified to a form of hydraulic transport using the existing fossil fuel and gas pipelines, although it would require the constrution of a greater number of receiver stations than those that currently exist. Such “pigs” are already used today when multiple products differing in composition are sent into the pipeline at the same time, with the devices limiting mixture of the different products.