Simon Michaux on the Purple Transition

Discussion

Marco Fioretti:

"Michaux advocates a "purple transition" to a resource balanced economy that has reliable and consistently stable electricity generation with every weather, in all geographical locations, preferably in concentrated form, and low materials footprint.

Concretely, at the heart of his proposal there is a reimagined commodity sector, and (besides geothermal, which if someone does get it to work will provide enormous amounts of energy) four technologies:

• Small, modular, molten salt thorium reactors that have a very different logistical footprint, produce much less waste and are much easier to place and manage, because doesn't need water to cool it

• Iron powder, whose combustion is hot enough for cement production and iron smelting and yelds... plain old rust, which can be converted back to pure iron powder, sometimes even using dried human sewage

• Ammonium, which is much easier to store and transport than hydrogen, as fuel for internal combustion engines.

• Different batteries for energy storage, made out of much more abundant minerals than lithium, like chloride sodium magnesium

The real transition or revolution, however, would be the restructuring of the whole economy and society on regional scopes instead of global ones, around concepts like:

• replacing industrial agriculture with something else

• different transport technologies of raw heavy goods and materials

• population distribution: large cities or not? how large?

• replacing today's huge power grids with series of micro grids, each attached to one specific "customer" (village or neighborhood, smelter, hospital...), but all connected so they can transfer power between them

• a new relationship with raw materials and energy, that is industrial policies that put feasible rates and steps of mining in all its forms at their very heart, and allow for production to periodically shut down to reduce energy storage needs which, as said above, are a huge part of the problem

• information management systems that allow us to make intelligent choices fast, taking advantage of digital twins and mineral intelligence

• new social contract and new monetary system."

(https://mfioretti.substack.com/p/no-petroleum-and-minerals-no-problem)

The Green transition and circular economy cannot work as advertised

Marco Fioretti:

"Unfortunately, instead of taking those physical constraints into account, we tend to hope for future technology breakthroughs that will somehow deliver more commodity resources. But dogmas like "The free market will fix it" or "human Innovation is amazingly powerful" are just denials of reality, and the entire Green Transition can only be a stepping stone to something else.

Net Zero by 2050 means having, just 26 years from now, all energy from renewable sources, all transport of goods and people powered by assorted combinations of electricity, hydrogen fuel cells, synthetic fuels, biofuels or ammonia, and heating by electrically powered heat pumps. Is that physically feasible?

Michaux's answer, backed in the videos with plenty of research, data and charts, is NO, no way, because we simply don't have enough time and money, and even if we did, we'd meet huge bottlenecks:

• to make the current economy work with renewable but intermittent sources like wind or solar, there must be enough energy storage to power the whole system for at least four weeks, or months in many places. That (see next paragraphs) turns out to be the largest task

• we don't have the technology to save so much power for such a long time

• as large as they are, Chinese refineries and industries are not large enough to deliver all the physical stuff that is needed

• we don't even have to care that expanding mining would destroy ecosystems and have its own extra effect on climate change, because mineral supplies (from both land and sea floors) are "nowhere near enough, not even close"

• recycling (and by extension the circular economy) is not the answer, and not even because the quality of the material flows that are coming out of recycling is just not good enough. To make the Green Transition by 2050, we'd need 30 times all the copper that has been consumed in the last 30 years. Same for most other metals: the quantities mined until today are a tiny fraction of what would be needed to transition the whole world economy as it is today

Circular economy is just as flawed and imbalanced as the Green Transition, says Michaux: more specifically, he argues that European conceived the circular economy because they were concerned only with the dependence of European industries upon raw materials that came from China, not with the intrinsic scarcity of the same materials. In other words, the EU conceived the circular economy just as a market-based answer to a market phenomenon, not to hard, physical limits."

(https://mfioretti.substack.com/p/no-petroleum-and-minerals-no-problem)

We Don't Have Enough Materials

Marco Fioretti:

"To get to Net Zero by 2050 we’ll need to utilize from seven to 4.5 times the minerals we used in 2021 - up from 4.4 million metric tons to 30.9 million (S)

Smart grids mean higher copper and aluminum use than you could possibly imagine (S)

The copper demand alone for building enough solar panels just to maintain steady-state replacement in a full-scale solar deployment would rival present-day global copper extraction indefinitely (S)

Seafloor nodules could dramatically reduce the environmental impact of extracting the billions of tons of metals needed for a clean-energy transition (S), but that impact would still be huge, and in any case those nodules are another non-renewable resource that, once taken, could take millions of years to come back (S)

If today's demand for EVs is projected to 2050, the lithium requirements of the US EV market alone in 2050 would require triple the amount of lithium currently produced for the entire global market (S)

Even ignoring "rare" metals... Steel, concrete, plastic, and fertilizer (that is, food) are fundamental to modern civilization yet we have no idea how to make any of them at required scale without fossil fuels (S). The literal stuff of our daily lives-no idea how to manufacture it, at scale, without fossil fuels. (S)

A low-carbon power grid requires much more steel (and other materials) than an infrastructure based on fossil fuels. (S)

It is impossible to produce all the new steel that would be needed in electric arc furnaces, simply because there is not enough scrap steel available, and there cannot be, by definition, until steel demand continues to grow (S). Besides, a low carbon grid cannot be made from recycled steel S

Beyond a certain penetration level (and well below 100%), adding more renewables becomes prohibitively expensive, and eventually stops (S)

Renewables only address electricity generation - at least on paper. The main problem is, that the share of electricity in our final energy consumption is around 20%, and the remaining 80% of our energy use still comes from fossil fuels. (S)

That is, the energy transition depends entirely on the availability of fossil fuels. And lacking an energy miracle, it will continue to do so (S), but with oil extraction returning ever less net energy over time... to a point (called "called energy cannibalism") that may make any transition to any other energy source impossible (S). The moment when the world starts to be short of financially sustainable oil could be quite close (S), and possibly come at the same time as peak metals (S)

The least-impossible, least-unsustainable, less slow, large-scale miracle of that kind should be cheap nuclear power (S), but even doubling the number of plants completed in 2022 every year for the next 27 years would increase nuclear to only 16% of total electric power generation (S). That's unlikely to happen, even if my own "Liberty Plan for Small Nuclear Reactors" was 100% correct and started tomorrow."

(https://mfioretti.substack.com/p/where-is-the-stuff-to-make-enough)