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Researchers have calculated, or approximated, the cost of creating bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies. Then compared said cryptocurrency costs vs the cost of real actual mining for minerals. Mining bitcoins etc requires more power then most actual mining such as actual gold. An average bitcoin-dollar, or if you will a dollar worth of a bitcoin, is calculated to require about 17 megajoule of energy, while digging up a dollar worth gold requires 5 megajoule. Aluminum is still a lot more expensive then most of the cryptocoins to produce as it requires a massive 122 megajoule to create a dollar worth of.
The Carbon dioxide creation due to cryptocurrencies mining is also estimated to be between 3 and 15 million tonnes, between January 2016 and June 2018. But a Chinese bitcoin emits four times as much CO2 as a Canadian one, so it is highly dependent on the form of energy used. I didn't find any comparable numbers to how much CO2 is created from the production of Aluminum, Gold or other metals.
Quantification of energy and carbon costs for mining cryptocurrencies
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0152-7
Bitcoin Will Burn the Planet Down. The Question: How Fast?
https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-will-burn-planet-down-how-fast/
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @11:02AM
Isn't that rather simple to calculate? The *cost* of production of both tend to be mostly in energy input costs. So you can equate these to CO2 emissions rather quickly.
https://barrick.q4cdn.com/788666289/files/presentation/2018/Barrick-Webcast-2018-Q3.pdf [q4cdn.com]
So, let's take about cash costs per once, is about $500, and oil is about $56. And if you look back, gold cost is almost about 10x oil before mines start to shut down - I WONDER WHY??!? So, each once of gold costs about 10 barrels of oil.
https://pyrolysium.org/how-much-co2-produced-by-burning-one-barrel-of-oil/ [pyrolysium.org]
So, about 4 tons of CO2 per ounce of gold.
For aluminum, you can do similar calculation. Cost of energy is main cost of Al production. Steel, copper, etc. also have similar cost profiles as majority is cost of energy to create these metals. So, do your own calculation as to how much it costs to create or refine or extract these metals. The difference is that once you have metal, you actually have something tangible. But once you have a Bitcoin, you actually don't have anything except a useless number.