Natural Resources
Sussex's natural resources have been used for thousands of years. The South Downs includes some of Britain's earliest mines, including Church Hill, Findon which dates from around 4200BC. while the Sussex Weald was historically the centre of England's iron industry, using iron ore in the form of siderite. The Wealden iron industry was established before the Roman invasion and was superseded in the 18th century by coal areas of Wales and northern England. There remains a long-established deep-mining operation centred on the High Weald village of Brightling, the country's largest resource of calcium sulphate or gypsum. Used primarily to make plaster, plasterboard and cement, gypsum has been excavated in the area since the 1880s.
In the 21st century, there has been oil drilling at Singleton, in the South Downs north of Chichester as well as Baxters Copse and Storrington in the Low Weald. With some controversy locally, hydraulic fracturing of shale gas has been proposed to be taken from the Low Weald near Balcombe close to the Brighton main line railway. A proposed wind farm off just 10 miles off the Sussex coast called Rampion, named by E.ON after the county flower for Sussex, would according to E.ON, deliver 450MW of electricity.
Read more about this topic: Geography Of Sussex
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