Potash is a soft rock, which is extracted from sedimentary sea beds formed by evaporation of ancient seas, which is mined via conventional shaft mining like gold and silver.
Pattern analysis -- the heart of data mining -- is conventional crime-solving, whether the suspicious patterns are spotted on a crime pin map, on a city street, or in an electronic database.
It's true that mining oil sands is terribly inefficient and wasteful of water and natural gas when compared with pumping crude from conventional reservoirs.