https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/heavy-metal
More than 7,000 years ago, humans first began mining copper. Since then, humans have mined more than 700 million tonnes. According to a fascinating study of the metals requirements of a net zero energy transition, the world will need to produce another 700 million tonnes of copper over the next 22 years.
The study, by Simon Michaux of the Geological Survey of Finland, does the math of “what a complete phase out of fossil fuels would entail” for metals production.1 Here at THB we like it when people do the math — And, wow, the results are sobering about the massive scale of achieving net zero.
The Finnish study concludes:
The estimated total quantity of metals to manufacture one generation of renewable technology units to completely phase out fossil fuels (replace the existing system) is far larger than existing strategic thinking allows for. (p. 252)
What about the massive amounts of battery storage implied by a transition to large amounts of wind and solar electricity production?
Battery banks will not be useful for stationary power storage in large quantities, even though policy makers believe this is the most useful option to stabilize intermittent power grids (EMA 2020). The numbers presented in this study show that there are not enough mining production or mineral reserves to deliver enough metal to manufacture enough batteries to do this, where the majority of the metals would be needed to produce battery banks for power buffer delivery. . . To meet power grid stability requirements through season changes in solar radiance and the large swings of power production for wind power, a storage capacity of several months might be required, not just a few days. At the time of writing, there was no viable technology that could store such a large quantity of electricity for such a long time period. There may be no visible technology solution for viable long term power storage (Menton 2022), that could be constructed in the short term (the next 5 years). (p. 253)
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The image below shows the implied metals requirements for copper, nickel, and lithium, under different assumptions (the study discusses many more metals). In each panel the short black bar on the left shows total global mining production for 1990 to 2023. The bars to the right of the black bar show the metal requirements implied by different amounts of battery storage in a net zero energy system. Of the large blue bar on the right, representing 84 days of storage, the study says it “may well be still too small” to adequately buffer delivery of electricity.
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