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)