Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions
* Report: International Energy Agency. The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions
Discussion
Nafeez Ahmed:
"According to the International Energy Agency (IEA)’s report, The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions, solar PV plants and wind farms “generally require more materials than fossil fuel-based counterparts for construction.” The IEA points out that an EV typically requires “six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a gas-fired plant of the same capacity.” As a result, minerals and metals demand will skyrocket, the IEA projects, as the transition to clean energy accelerates. By 2040, as we attempt to replace the existing fossil fuel system with a clean energy system, demand for materials could either double or even quadruple with a faster rollout, encompassing minerals and metals like copper, cobalt, nickel, lithium, chromium, zinc, aluminium and rare earth elements.
The World Bank’s assessment is that production of minerals like graphite, lithium and cobalt could increase by as much as 500% by 2050 to meet demand for the clean energy transition. Yet the report also notes that mining for “low carbon technologies” will only generate 6% of the carbon emissions of fossil fuel technologies – a significant reduction.
Even within the conventional frameworks of the IEA and the World Bank, they recognize that there are solutions: mining can be expanded in a way that is environmentally and socially responsible, but we must also ramp up the scope for recycling and reuse.
On the other hand, a number of other studies claim that even with such approaches in place, the clean energy transition is bound to hit materials bottlenecks.
For instance, one major EU-backed model appears to show that the full electrification of cars, trucks and trains to run on clean energy will be constrained by mineral bottlenecks in a global economy which continues to grow at the current rate. The EV transition will “require higher amounts of copper, lithium and manganese than current reserves” by 2050, even with high recycling rates of 57 percent, 30 percent and 74 percent respectively, the study says.
Similarly, a report by the Geological Survey of Finland concluded that there are insufficient global reserves of nickel and lithium to produce the number of batteries required to replace the existing global transport fleet with EVs, while also providing a power buffer for when intermittent solar and wind energy is unable to meet electricity demand in the winter. The report arrives at the following grim verdict: “… replacing the existing fossil fuel powered system (oil, gas, and coal), using renewable technologies, such as solar panels or wind turbines, will not be possible for the entire global human population. There is simply just not enough time, nor resources to do this by the current target set by the world’s most influential nations. What may be required, therefore, is a significant reduction of societal demand for all resources, of all kinds.”
Yet these conventional approaches are deeply flawed. They completely fail to understand the dynamics of the disruptions, because they assume that clean energy technologies are supposed to simply replace incumbent fossil fuel technologies by way of a one-for-one substitution: hence the use of the phrase ‘energy transition’. The underlying assumption is that the system itself will pretty much operate in exactly the same way we are familiar with, albeit transitioning from one set of things to another.
In reality, this is not an energy ‘transition’ – implying a smooth and incremental progression from one set of technologies to another within the same architecture. Rather this is a complete transformation of the energy system, ushering in entirely new dynamics, rules and possibilities. Only when we understand those new dynamics can we accurately grasp the risks and opportunities ahead.
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Vast quantities of vehicles dedicated to heavy transport by land, air and sea will therefore become unnecessary. And by disrupting private ownership of cars, the EV and A-EV transformation along with the rise of TaaS will mean that only a fraction of cars will be on the roads. Instead of everybody owning their own car, most miles traveled will be by TaaS for ride-hailing with a much smaller fleet of vehicles in service. So EVs will not replace gasoline vehicles as a one-for-one substitution – instead we will use a fraction of the number of vehicles we used previously. Therefore, models which predict raw materials scarcity on the basis of a one-for-one substitution of gasoline vehicles with EVs are entirely wrong.
Maintaining the old industrial fossil fuel infrastructure with all its huge raw materials inputs in the form of minerals and metals will no longer be necessary. An analysis by Carbon Tracker compared the mineral inputs into the fossil fuel system to a clean energy system by weight. Coal generation needs 2,000 times more material by weight than solar, and overall the fossil fuel system requires over 300 times more materials by weight than a clean energy system. This means that although clean energy entails an increase in specific minerals requirements, it still entails a dramatic reduction in the global energy system’s total material footprint, including its logistics and transport requirements.
Conversely, the obsolescence of that huge infrastructure, as well as of the old internal combustion engine industry and its associated vehicles, will make a vast global repository of metals such as steel, copper, aluminum, nickel, and cobalt available for recycling to build out the clean energy, transport and food industries. We will therefore be able to meet demand for these metals and materials from the clean disruptions by a combination of new mining with recycling at a much higher order of magnitude than conventional models recognize.
Of course, none of this implies that we should be sanguine about the need for environmentally-sound circular economy approaches to mineral supplies. Such approaches will become even more important, and the locus of environmental legislation and policy will need to focus on ensuring stringent practices in place. "
(https://www.rethinkx.com/blog/part-1-the-mythology-of-mineral-shortages)
Findings from a sgnificant 'contrarian' landmark study
Nafeez Ahmed:
"So far, there are no studies which have modelled these cascading effects of the energy, transport and food disruptions in relation to minerals and recycling. However, some research offers more accurate insights.
The first major global life cycle assessment of a potential renewable energy system, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in 2015, corroborates the analysis set out here, although it didn’t fully appreciate or account for the novel dynamics of the new clean energy system because it focused almost entirely on the energy sector alone. Nevertheless, the assessment led by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology found that over time, the environmental impact of extracting raw materials for clean energy technologies would decline, while the total quantity of those materials would be a fraction of the volume of materials being mined today.
In the PNAS scenario, solar, wind and hydropower would make up 39 percent of total global power production. But because wind and solar power generation require no additional raw materials inputs over their lifespan (unlike conventional power plants which require continued additional mining and refinement of oil, gas and coal), overall renewable power requires far less raw materials. That crucial nuance has not been incorporated into other models.
In the PNAS scenario, new clean energy installations would increase demand for iron and steel by just 10%, with the copper required for solar panels equivalent to two years of current global copper production. When solar and wind installations need to be replaced, the raw materials to do so would be available from recycling of older power generators. Other benefits would be marked: freshwater pollution would reduce by half, and air pollution would decline by 40%. The human health benefits alone of a decline in air pollution would be enormous.
There are significant gaps in this model, which doesn’t incorporate the vast scope for metals recycling from the incumbent fossil fuel infrastructure in a 100% global clean energy scenario – but a cursory analysis of the paper’s figures show that if its findings were extrapolated to such a global system, much of the excess iron, aluminium and copper production required would potentially be acquired from the recycling of that obsolete infrastructure."
(https://www.rethinkx.com/blog/part-1-the-mythology-of-mineral-shortages)