Green new deals and natural resources

I think the NHM press release strikes the right tone, though there are questions about comparing stocks and flows: cars last longer than a year on average, so the amount of Co per year required would be significantly lowered. As Michael points out, recycling (which is an active topic) can hopefully reduce this further.

It’s also worth pointing out that one reason to believe John that we won’t run out of elements like Co and Te in the short term is that Co and Te are not mined themselves, but are byproducts of Ni and Au mining, so there is potential for expansion.

The Independent article agglomerates a lot of statistics, which make the important point that we should care about the effects of resource extraction, but the connection to the Green New Deals is perhaps less clear. This article draws heavily from a recent UN report, which argues I think a distinct case to the article: https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/27517/GRO_2019.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y
A few examples: ‘Resource extraction is responsible for 50 per cent of global emissions’ – this includes food production, which is not really a green new deal issue. If you drill down into the minerals and metals mining (which is the focus of the article), you’ll find that the major impacts of mining are primarily iron/steel and aluminium production*, rather than the elements highlighted as being important for the new deal [Fig 3.13], though there are specific issues with copper and precious metal mining. Another to point out here is that most of these environment impacts are in China, rather than sub-saharan Africa [Fig 3.15], which again doesn’t particularly suit a green new deal based narrative.

I guess my overall view is that although resource extraction has severe consequences, the few elements focussed on are not to be the biggest factor.

“John tells me he’s sceptical about claims that we are about to run out of some scare resource. Maybe he’s right about that and more exploration will reveal big reserves of copper and cobalt in other places.”

JQ is right. Sorta.

The usual mistake here is to think that “mineral reserves” are what we’ve got available to use. This is not so, reserves are what we have prepared for us to use. A colloquial description would be “working stock of extant mines”. OK, not very colloquial that but.

A “mineral resource” is the next step out. This again is not “what is available to be used”. This is the stuff that we’re really pretty certain can be turned into a mineral reserve if we applied ourselves to the process of proving it to be so. We have to drill it, sample, at least test process it, delineate the extent of the deposit, then prove that we can extract using current technology, at current prices, and make a profit. That’s just what the actual definition of a mineral reserve is.

It really is true that a mineral reserve is something created by human beings. Of course the ore body isn’t, but those lists of how many reserves of what are lists of things people have proven to this legal standard. And it is a legal standard – a mining company can’t claim a reserve unless it meets that standard above. All of the listings are composed of what people claim to have to that legal standard.

To give an example, and one of the reasons Simon won the bet with Ehrlich. In 1980 copper mineral reserves were all of copper sulfide deposits. Because that’s the technology we had, a pyrometallurgical one (stick it in a furnace and melt it out) to produce copper. Only some pile of “copper something” that we could actually produce copper from was a reserve.

In 1982 we started to apply the SW-EX process to copper extraction – dissolve in acid then get the metal using electric current. We’d previously used this for uranium, adapted it for copper. The really big distinction being that this worked on copper oxide deposits, not just copper sulfide ones. That means that every pile of copper oxide around the world just moved from not being a source of copper to being a source of copper. We’ve changed copper oxide mountains into possibly a mineral resource and if we apply ourselves and do the detailed work, into mineral reserves.

A mineral reserve simply isn’t, in any form whatsoever, a listing of what it is that we are going to be able to use of some metal.

This, from the US Geological Survey, is the document needed.

https://prd-wret.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/production/atoms/files/mcs2019_all.pdf

For each – and it includes all industrially important minerals each with a two page report – mineral people look at “world mine production and reserves” in the second page. As above that’s the amount that’s been prepared to be used, the output from and stock at current mines.

It’s the next paragraph, “world resources” which is more useful in these sorts of wonderings. That’s the amount we’re really pretty sure we can use if only we put our minds to it. And that’s all before we go wandering off to see if there’s more out there. Or some other process we can use to extract.

It’s worth reading the entry on lithium, something mentioned in the original at the top. Precisely because we’re more interested in it than we used to be more effort is being put into looking for the stuff. Meaning that resources and reserves are both rising as we use ever more.

“But even if he is, we still have to get that stuff out of the ground, and that’s predictably bad for local environments and their people, and in the short to medium term it may yet be further bad news for the people of DR Congo who have already endured seventy plus plus years as a “free” country (and 135 years since Leopold set up in business) in conditions of violence and exploitation, whilst already wealthy northerners get all the benefits.”

The resource rents of mineral deposits should be – righteously – taxed until the pips squeak. The best way to do that being to have large multinationals doing the mining – people with reputations and stock market listings to protect.

CB
Surely, the fate of the Congo is not exclusively a function of it being resource rich – but a function of it being resource rich with a dysfunctional and corrupt state. The resources may make the wars worse (because they enable the participants to buy weapons) but bad government is not a necessary function of being rich in resources (ask Norway).

“[…] and that’s predictably bad for local environments and their people, and in the short to medium term it may yet be further bad news for the people of DR Congo who have already endured seventy plus plus years as a “free” country (and 135 years since Leopold set up in business) in conditions of violence and exploitation, whilst already wealthy northerners get all the benefits.” OP

In itself the fact that Congo has a lot of a scarce resource is good for the inhabitants of Congo, IF they can sell it to westerners at a high price.

We westerners (and likely others) are asses who prefer to steal and plunder than to pay something for a high price, but this isn’t really a problem of green technology, it’s a problem of us being asses.

I’m confident that the same kind of exercise could be done if you predicted what would be needed to meet projected demand for smart phones or TVs. The problem isn’t technology specific, it’s that we use lots of different materials. Given a more or less random distribution around the world, lots of the resources are going to be found most conveniently in Sub-Saharan Africa and other poor places.

Resources in such places are nearly always a curse, essentially because securing control over the output (for example, by being part of a military regime or an effective insurgency) yields better returns than doing things that are socially productive, like being a doctor or building a mobile phone network.

The real problem here isn’t specific resources, it’s poverty and inequality. As the Norway example suggests, if Africa were democratic and prosperous, we’d have no trouble getting all the cobalt (etc) we need.

Good piece, Chris. Just to throw one more element into the mix – based on one of my current interests, as you know. Here’s a striking fact: The amount of cobalt, thallium, nickel and yttrium contained in one place on earth – the ‘Clarion-Clipperton Zone’ under the Northeast Pacific – outstrips all known ‘terrestrial’ reserves combined. That’s why the seabed might well be the new resource frontier, if the technology can be made cost-effective. If it can, the impacts on global resource politics could be dramatic. The idea of being able to source these elements without having to deal with organised labour, indigenous movements, and environmental NGOs is a tech billionaire’s dream.

@15

We could definitely have some breakthroughs in battery technology, although what I’ve read from battery researchers suggests that they’re pessimistic about any big breakthroughs versus marginal improvements. Just finding batteries that are almost as good as Lithium-Ion but made of cheaper elements would be a big improvement.

@3

It’s the cost versus electric vehicles. Getting hydrogen for fuel cells either requires an environmentally unfriendly method of getting it from natural gas, or cracking water with electrolysis (the latter consuming a fair amount of energy). The overall system is much less cost-effective than electric battery vehicles. There’s a really good video on it here.

4: “The resource rents of mineral deposits should be – righteously – taxed until the pips squeak. The best way to do that being to have large multinationals doing the mining – people with reputations and stock market listings to protect.”

10: “We westerners (and likely others) are asses who prefer to steal and plunder than to pay something for a high price, but this isn’t really a problem of green technology, it’s a problem of us being asses.”

A significant portion of global raw materials trade goes through Switzerland – not physically of course but financially. CT readers might be interested to know that the Swiss Coalition for Corporate Justice (SCCJ) is active working for laws that would makes “First World” businesses accountable for their conduct in places like Congo.

“Swiss based companies have made and continue to make headlines for human rights abuses and environmental damages committed through their global activities. This is why, on April 21st 2015, a broad coalition of Swiss civil society organizations working in human rights, development and environmental protection launched the Responsible Business Initiative. The initiative aims at introducing a biding framework to protect human rights and the environment abroad.”

https://corporatejustice.ch/

The initiative proposes a constitutional amendment that would hold “Companies […] liable for damage caused by companies under their con-trol where they have, in the course of business, committed violations of inter-nationally recognized human rights or international environmental standards”. It is currently being debated in Parliament and the outcome could be a compromise proposal adopted by Parliament, or a referendum in which the chances of success are intact. The business side is quite concerned about this possibility. Besides, there is a lot of publicity, media coverage, and political debate on this important topic.

https://corporatejustice.ch/about-the-initiative/

“Under their control” is going to be heavily litigated, because it creates a huge open-ended liability concern that would tend to choke off the business entirely.

“For example, near-Earth asteroids.”

Space mining for stuff we’re going to use on Earth has a certain problem. It’s not going to be worth it for low value per kg materials. No point in bringing iron down. High value per kg, say platinum group metals – one type of asteroid being rich in them – look much more attractive. But then, their high value is a result of scarcity, and if we’re to bring such material down in the right sort of volume to pay the overheads of the process, how much scarcity and thus value will remain?

This isn’t confined to space mining. There are several companies out there jostling for finance to extract a particular rare earth. The process itself benefiting from a certain economy of scale. The calculations requiring a, say, 80 tonne a year output at current sorts of prices. But global usage is about 15 tonnes a year. It’s difficult to see one of these proposed plants coming online and prices remaining where they are. But the financing assumptions require that prices do stay up even while production volume soars.

Obviously new production processes do get used, new materials come onto the market in volume. But I’m not sure I can see a way around this problem in space mining.

Of materials to use up in space, yes, it’s obviously worthwhile, not having to drag stuff up out of the gravity well.

faustusnotes, while you are right in saying that the decision to immiserate weak and poor nations is a political decision, the problem is that it’s a very easy decision to take (as opposed to immiserating nations which can defend themselves, or immiserating powerful people at home).

Also, I doubt that the Green New Deal people are terribly good at controlling the behaviour of the extractive industries in countries like DRC. If you recall, the Congolese war at the turn of the century happened during the Clinton-Blair era, who are kind of the godfathers of contemporary Western liberalism, and I’ve always suspected that they were up to their armpits in that particular shenanigan which promoted most of the problems the DRC currently faces.

Going back to the start, has nobody noticed that the article talking about how a certain action actually requires more materials than the world actually produces at the moment, is an action referring only to one industry in only one country? That is, in order to produce not just electric cars but a wholly electric transport and manufacturing infrastructure, not only in the UK but all over the planet, would require a couple of orders of magnitude more raw materials than that?

If this is really the case, it’s hard to believe that the seabed and the tech industry’s tweaks are going to solve the problem.

“Going back to the start, has nobody noticed that the article talking about how a certain action actually requires more materials than the world actually produces at the moment, is an action referring only to one industry in only one country?”

I was struck by this, but a closer reading left me thinking the claim was that meeting all the needs of the UK for the entire transition would require more than *one year’s* output of these materials. If we treat the UK as being 2 per cent of the problem, that suggests we need more than 50 years worth of current output. So, to meet this in 25 years, while serving existing needs , with current technology, would require a tripling of output. That’s challenging, but the discussion above suggests that after taking of substitution, untapped reserves, and technological improvements, it ought to be feasible. That’s if we can overcome more immediate problems like Trumpist resistance to doing anything.

A note on space resources of any kind: Any and every heavy cargo has a second use as a weapon of mass destruction. Robert Heinlein pointed this out over fifty years ago.

Carbon recapture is significantly overlooked. But the obstacles to the simplest kind, forests and coastal algae, are currently blocked by property rights, national sovereignty and the absence of profit. (The threat to coastal waters is largely pollution.) Carbon recapture at large fixed point emitters (power plants, gigantic container ships) would seem to be improbably technology…but how does hoping for a technological assist count as prudent planning? It’s not like planning to win the lottery, at least, but…

The attack on the new green deal as colonialist strikes me as just another conservative who likes to think of themselves as liberal, and not committed to a blind defense of the old (thus “left,”) doing ju jitsu. It’s like reactionaries moaning about “soft racism.” But there is also a strong sense the real objection is to spoiling nature, to changing things. Given that the world has changed even without people, that extensive changes in nature due to anthropogenic change are already inevitable, the implicit requirement that basically nothing really change is deeply reactionary. Just not gonna happen. Also, the real implication there is the problem the Earth is an overloaded lifeboat and the wreck of the Medusa is on us.

That said I agree that treating DR Congo like the coal fields of Appalachia is an appalling idea.

notGoodenough, I’d be interested in your thoughts on Lithium Iron, as per Matt’s post above.

IIRC from reading up a few years ago, the benefits were better thermal stability, so safer to use in homes and hospitals etc, and much longer cycle life than lithium ion. And already in current production, not a pipe dream.

Are there downsides we should be aware of, other than taking up a bit more room?

Thank you to everyone for the warm welcome – I am very much obliged to you.

So, to (hopefully) address @29 Another Nick’s question and provide a bit of a case study in why things are rarely simple in the battery world:

Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) is a polyanionic cathode material. It has some excellent properties – a high capacity, excellent cyclability (how many charges and discharges can it do before it stops working), and very good rate capability (how rapidly can you charge and discharge). For this reason it is, as far as I am aware, already commercialised (I believe a certain brand of power drill uses LFP exclusively, for example). It also nicely gets shot of the cobalt issue (and also nickel, which is another terrible element to use but seems to get a bit of a pass).

However, as with all things in batteries, there are challenges.

The first intrinsic science issue is that LFP, like most polyanionics (that I am aware of) suffers from low electrical conductivity. Since you want to make all your material particles “connect” to the circuit (or they won’t be active and will just be “dead space”) you have to make them conductive.

This is possible by a) making the particles small and b) carbon coating them. Carbon coating requires some fancy chemistry or a second process – both of which add cost and make it more difficult to commercially exploit. Making the particles small creates a whole range of problems, but the main ones are that small particles are:

1) intrinsically les safe (more energy in a smaller packed volume means these are one step closer to being an uncontrolled fire, even given the safer thermal profile)

2) much harder to synthesise in large scales (well, technically it is the filtration and handling steps, but this post is long and rambling enough already)

3) much harder to process into electrodes (they have a tendency to gum up all the slurry casting equipment)

None of this is impossible to deal with, but it all adds expense, time, etc. If I recall correctly the most successful manufacturer of LFP (who I probably shouldn’t name for legal reasons) has had a lot of cash-flow problems, despite providing a good product.

Another issue is a non-science one. I won’t go in to details (again due to legal reasons, though it should be fairly google-able) but the development of LFP has a pretty dark and sordid side, which culminated in legal battles and police being called to stand guard over a lab. It is probably one of the most unbelievable examples of bad behaviour I’m aware of in recent research– and I have seen a fair amount. For that reason, many people have been reluctant to touch it.

Finally, another thing to be aware of is the end-user requirement. Making a battery a bit bigger and heavier isn’t a problem for, say, a drill (and they can be recharged quickly enough), but in an iphone (where the drain is ridiculous) you quickly run into issues of scale.

Of course, this is just the cathode. I could (and possibly, assuming people don’t get too bored, will) go on at length about the issues of the complexity of the battery system, how we are hitting a brick wall on electrolytes, and how another potentially big break through is in Silicon-carbon composite anodes….but all this is a story for another day!

Apologies in advance if this is a bit of a mess. I’m afraid not being a science communicator, and lacking talking to people outside the field, has probably made it difficult for me to avoid slipping into jargon and assuming knowledge – please just let me know and (with the kind forebearance and tolerance of the owners of this blog) I’ll expand on any points people might find interesting.

To make a high-capacity solar panel, one might need copper (atomic number 29) from Chile, indium (49) from Australia, gallium (31) from China, and selenium (34) from Germany. Many of the most efficient, direct-drive wind turbines require a couple pounds of the rare-earth metal neodymium, and there’s 140 pounds of lithium in each Tesla….

The quoted article contains many half-truths and some outright nonsense. Since there are no citations for the numbers I’m not sure where the author acquired his mistakes in the first place. I’ve seen nearly identical arguments from fossil industry shills — “renewable energy requires a lot of mining too, so really it’s not any greener.”

The amount of lithium in a Tesla is much closer to 14 pounds than 140.

The only solar cell type that requires copper, indium, gallium, and selenium is called copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS). This type accounted for less than 1% of the solar capacity manufactured in 2018. It is not a particularly “high capacity” type — the highest wattage solar panels and the most efficient solar panels are made from crystalline silicon. CIGS is relegated to niche uses — especially lightweight panels for fragile rooftops, and small flexible panels for portable device chargers. Solar panels based on crystalline silicon have 95%+ market share and do not require indium, gallium, or selenium.

Or take this bit:

To replace current US energy consumption with renewables, you’d need to devote at least 25–50 percent of the US landmass to solar, wind, and biofuels, according to the estimates made by Vaclav Smil, the grand doyen of energy studies.

That casual “and biofuels” accounts for the vast majority of area, because growing crops for biofuels has pathetically low areal energy productivity. To replace all American primary energy consumption with solar electricity, joule-for-joule, would take more like 4% of the area of the continental United States if you assume that none of that solar hardware is installed over existing rooftops or parking lots. Merely replacing the corn acreage currently used to make ethanol with solar farms would be enough to generate about 200% of current annual electricity demand in the United States. (Not that a real solar transition is going to be based on replanting Iowa with solar farms instead of corn farms and then building a radiating transmission system connecting every other state with it.)

Growing biomass is absurdly inefficient and too expensive to displace fossil energy at scale. I suppose that biofuels seemed more (relatively speaking) practical back when solar PV was less efficient and much more expensive, e.g. 10 years and more ago. I think they’re going to keep shambling around slowly, pathetic and undead, because farming and (to a lesser extent) forestry communities now depend on the incentives. The graph I linked above shows that 38% of US corn went to ethanol last year.

Thanks notGoodenough, that’s very informative.

“the most successful manufacturer of LFP (who I probably shouldn’t name for legal reasons) has had a lot of cash-flow problems, despite providing a good product”

Not sure which manufacturer you’re referring to, but I’m guessing it can’t be BYD, 25% owned by Berkshire Hathaway?

The largest and most profitable EV and energy storage manufacturer in the world doesn’t appear to be having any issues, cash flow or otherwise, with its fleet of cars and buses running predominantly on cobalt-free lithium iron batteries?

@34 Matt

Depending on how carbon restrictions play out, the main buyers for biofuel in the future will probably be airlines. There’s just no good replacement for jet fuel right now, so it’s either going to have to be aviation biofuel or some type of carbon-air-capture-to-fuel service.

Depending on how carbon restrictions play out, the main buyers for biofuel in the future will probably be airlines. There’s just no good replacement for jet fuel right now, so it’s either going to have to be aviation biofuel or some type of carbon-air-capture-to-fuel service.

I agree that airliners are going to mostly run on liquid fuels rather than electricity in my lifetime. There are some other applications where electrification seems far from practical, like long distance cargo shipping. I tend to think that carbon-neutral fuels for these applications will have little to no “bio” about them by the time they become common. For simple molecules like fuels, there is no advantage to the sometimes-astonishing chemical selectivity of biological processes, and biology tends to be less robust than conventional industrial chemistry.

In the bio-light case, I mean that people might gasify rice hulls / wood scraps / bagasse etc. and convert it to liquid fuels with a generous addition of electrolytic hydrogen. The biomass would function more as a source of carbon atoms than a source of fuel energy. The bio-none case would be to use electrolytic hydrogen plus CO2 to synthesize fuels, with no fuel value derived from the original biomass. This would also describe the case where e.g. a CO2 stream is sourced as byproduct from a brewery.

@ notGoodenough, I’m appreciating your comments very much. Thank you for the effort of so much explaining.

Now that topic could be an opportunity to google arcane technology stuff or just go with my rule of thumb which tends to work very well with such topics:

Anything that sounds like club of rome help basic resource x will be extinct in 30 years now we all need to go urban farming rethoric is usually quasi religious and wrong.

“Anything that sounds like club of rome help basic resource x will be extinct in 30 years now ”

Quite. The basic complaint is that mineral reserves will be exhausted in 30 years. Which is true, they will be. Mineral reserves are always exhausted in 30 years*. Because mineral reserves are the minerals we’ve prepared to be used in the next 30 years. By and large and not exactly they’re the working stock of extant mines.

The Club of Rome then said that mineral resources were 10x reserves. Thus everything runs out in 200 to 300 years and all die. Except there is no relationship – absolutely none, nothing – between the amount that we have prepared for use in the near future and the amount that we can prepare for use in the further future.

*To a not very large level of accuracy

When it comes to forecasting demand for metals there are some odd overlaps between different industry groups (sometimes with opposing goals — metal miners vs. coal miners), environmentalists, and anti-environmentalists.

Take for instance this recent slick infographic:

Visual Capitalist: Visualizing Copper’s Role in the Transition to Clean Energy

It’s courtesy of the Copper Development Association Inc., a trade group for copper producers. (The same infographic is sometimes credited to another promotional group, ThinkCopper).

I saw this infographic floating around in the past month on mining industry news sites as well as cleantech news sites. It has great production values, which makes it more likely to be shared and less likely to be questioned.

Consider a key statistic from that infographic: A three-megawatt wind turbine can contain up to 4.7 tons of copper with 53% of that demand coming from the cable and wiring, 24% from the turbine/power generation components, 4% from transformers, and 19% from turbine transformers.

Now let’s do a search for that “up to 4.7 tons of copper” phrase.

The top hit for me is an article titled “So You Want Wind Turbines But Don’t Want Copper Mines?” — a diatribe about how hippies shouldn’t get in the way of miners if they want renewable energy, and also how renewable energy is a bad idea in the first place.

The second hit is a promotional piece from the Hecla Mining Company titled “Why Silver & Copper,” making a case to prospective investors and the public at large why their proposal for a new mine should go forward. …a single wind turbine can contain 335 tons of steel and 4.7 tons of copper. Put simply, what we’ll mine from Rock Creek is what the world needs.

There’s another promotional piece titled “Minerals Help Us Meet Our Energy Needs” from the National Mining Association-sponsored site Minerals Make Life.

It’s cited again in a 2013 hippie punching article from the Heartland Institute titled “Environmentalists Want You Powerless.”

Just last month there was a story on CounterPunch titled “Renewable Energy: the Switch From Drill, Baby, Drill to Mine, Baby, Mine.” Where did the author learn the facts about how renewable energy requires a vast increase in metal mining, including copper? From a pamphlet supplied by an industry trade group called the Minerals Education coalition!

The earliest hit I can find for that 4.7 tons number is from a 2010 book titled “The Modern Energy Matchmaker: Connecting Investors with Entrepreneurs.” It says:

Did you know that a 3 megawatt wind turbine needs 335 tons of steel, 4.7 tons of copper, 1200 tons of concrete, 3 tons of rare Earth elements, and other resources? There are no citations for those numbers.

The fact that this “4.7 tons” figure has been floating around since at least 2010 is suspicious. No wind manufacturer in 2019 is selling the same turbine models that they offered in 2010 but the number stays the same. It’s also suspicious that these numbers come from mining trade groups and secondary citations of the mining groups, rather than actual wind turbine manufacturers. Did this “4.7 tons” number come from measurement in the first place? If so, when was the last time the measurement was repeated?

Despite the suspicious provenance and age of these numbers, they don’t die. They’re still uncritically repeated by groups from the Heartland Institute to CounterPunch. Different authors just have their own spin on what the numbers mean. (Heartland: “stick with good old fashioned fossil powered electricity.” CounterPunch: “we should use brooms instead of electric vacuum cleaners.”)

I have also seen miner self-promotion that ends up repeated uncritically for other materials like lithium, silver, and neodymium. To make even somewhat accurate demand estimates for specific metals in renewable energy requires a lot of effort. It basically requires either disassembling products and measuring them in a laboratory, or chasing a long chain of citations until you found someone who measured instead of citing a previous number or guessing.

Academic papers tend to be more careful about citing someone who actually measured, but they tend to overestimate material intensity due to the time lag between commercial introduction of new material thrifting measures and re-analysis. The consumption of purified silicon per watt in solar PV devices has dropped markedly over time, for example. This is an area where manufacturers are making progress with practically every new model that they release. Still, when I look at academic life cycle analyses of solar PV, the numbers they cite tend to lag 5 or more years behind the devices being installed today and thereby overestimate present and future material demand. Some make the problem even worse with meta-analyses incorporating numbers from 10+ years ago — in extreme cases, all the way back to the 1990s. Meta-analysis incorporating past results does not improve the error bars on estimating the material intensity of solar PV. It’s a bit like including 10 year old lightbulbs in a projection of future energy demands for lighting.

Iiuc, fuel cells have little to do with energy storage for the renewable grid, unless you are talking about using renewable electricity to produce hydrogen for storage, which I doubt could be very efficient, despite the efficiency of fuel cells utilizing hydrogen as a fuel source.
One thing that gets mentioned rarely is that a geographically dispersed and efficient grid doesn’t have as much of a storage problem, the production of electricity in the aggregate could be adequate. The big question mark would achieving transmissions efficiency high enough to make the aggregating work.

Corn ethanol

“Growing biomass is absurdly inefficient and too expensive to displace fossil energy at scale. I suppose that biofuels seemed more (relatively speaking) practical back when solar PV was less efficient and much more expensive, e.g. 10 years and more ago.” (34)

I worked out the conversion efficiency of corn ethanol almost 10 years ago (https://de.slideshare.net/amenning/quantitative-problems-food-security, page 5)

It is so shockingly inefficient one can hardly believe anybody would support such an idiotic policy. And yet this is what happens. Note that the calculations are easy but I have never seen them done anywhere in the literature.

General comment: I think I’m at risk of getting a bit off topic, and generally derailing this thread into old-man-yells-at-cloud territory. I think it makes sense for me to take a step back, make this last comment, and then leave it there unless there are specific questions.

@ Another Nick 45. I think you are right and we are talking past each other a bit. This is my fault (as I said, I’m not so good at the communication bit, and since I love my subject I tend to go on tangents a bit), so I apologise for that.

What I was trying to get at is not that LFP isn’t feasible (it clearly is!) but to try and show that there are a lot of problems going from “brilliant lab result” to “this could be an actual batter” and use LFP as a case study (since we already know these problems and have addressed them). This wasn’t actually useful, I now realise, and probably just wasted people’s time a bit.

I agree that the BYD have shown some excellent progress with these materials. I’m not entirely convinced it is unfair of the article to point out problems with, for example, Co use though. I am not an expert in this side of the field, so perhaps some legal/economic people could help me with this, but surely – at least to a certain extent – if we are looking at European supply chains, to what extent do BYD’s advances impact European Co use?

@Hidari 53. For me, speaking at the R&D side, we already have alternatives to Co. There is literally no technological reason to extract Co from the DRC. At all. What is tricky is the commercial side – i.e. getting alternatives above TRL 3, and to marketplace. This involves a concerted effort from research and industry to essentially “bridge the gap”, which – though technologically feasible – is often not done because of many reasons (some of which I’ve rambled about in my post at 41.

I think (as I alluded to briefly already) this is getting pushed more by the European grant commissions, but this is more gentle nudging rather than overwhelming driving force. This probably isn’t much help to the people getting the sticky end of the extraction industry.

I think everyone agrees that the human cost is high, and we need to address this. But how?

For example, I think there is no battery-design reason we couldn’t just ban Co in batteries. Setting aside whether or not it is politically feasible (also an important consideration), would that be the most sensible approach? Or would the loss of income from this do more harm than good? Please note I am not arguing for continuing exploitation (I am very, very much against it), but rather asking what is the best way of stopping it without making things even worse?

I am completely out of my depth on this side, and would very much welcome any input from people who actually know what they are talking about.

In a more general sense, I think this sort of problem seems to apply to everything from Co in DRC to clothing manufacture in Asia and iPhones in China, so perhaps it is too big for people to respond to in a blog post.

In short, I suppose, my question is that if there is a country getting an income from being horribly exploited, what is the best way stopping the exploitation?

@ steven t Johnson 55

If you don’t mind, I have a quick question from someone who is ignorant in this area?

Given that all the grants, major funding proposals (e.g H2020, H2030, etc.), big-think pieces (EU commission directives, circular economy studies, etc.) that I am aware of say Co and (to a lesser extent) Ni are CRMs and their use should be minimised or eliminated, why do you (seem to) imply that the EU is on a massive binge to recolonise Africa and set up a new imperium?

I mean, I’m not disagreeing (I don’t know enough about geopolitics to comment), it is just from the perspective of someone who gets told what resources we should look to research it doesn’t seem to square. Could you maybe point me in the direction of some resources so I could look into this myself?

Apologies to everyone for the tangent, but I would welcome the chance to educate myself a bit better.

Another significant example of the issue raised in the original post regarding the impact on the environment and people where the extractive activities occur that are required for “sustainable” technologies is the Atacama desert in Chile. This recent article in Bloomberg gives a good overview: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-06-11/saving-the-planet-with-electric-cars-means-strangling-this-desert.

Big machines fuelled by petrol drive up, a lot of them. Then miners turn up. In cars. They dig, using petrol fuelled diggers and other machines. Then the materials are shipped on petrol using vans or lorries to petrol/diesel using ships or planes whereupon they are unpacked into petrol using trucks which take them to factories, (built by mainly fossil fuelled machines and vehicles) where…well you get the idea. Finally they are used to make Teslas (or whatever) which are transferred by showrooms (brightly lit, using mainly fossil-fuel produced electricity) by petrol using lorries and…well you get the rest of the idea.

The quantitative approach to measuring these indirect petroleum dependencies is called life cycle analysis. A life cycle analysis of GHG emissions associated with electricity from wind or solar farms includes the fossil fuels burned in mining, manufacturing, transporting, and installing the hardware. Per the IPCC’s 2014 “Global warming potential of selected electricity sources,” life cycle analysis indicates that displacing fossil-generated electricity with wind or solar reduces emissions by more than 90% when displacing natural gas, and more than 95% when displacing coal. That includes the petroleum fueled industrial activity indirectly required for the solar or wind farms.

Carbon dioxide is built into our civilisation. De-carbonising will not be easy: at all. The easiest way to do it is to leave the fossil fuels in the ground, which means:

consume less, build less, buy less.

This is easily stated; easily achieved, not so much. It’s hard to get a high enough compliance rate to be effective across large populations. There are states and countries where emissions trends have been reversed by changing the technologies of energy use and production. I don’t know of any equivalent region where those trends have been reversed by voluntary reductions in consumption. Involuntary reductions in consumption associated with societal breakdown can be deep and swift. Post-Soviet Russia saw a dramatic decrease in CO2 emissions during the 1990s. But that had tremendous costs in human suffering and premature deaths.

Intervening to change the behavior of emissions-intensive businesses is effective and more easily achieved by legislation than changing lifestyles.

Californians consume the most electricity in the summer, for cooling. They would consume less electricity and maintain the same indoor temperatures if every building with air conditioning were retrofitted to state of the art insulation standards, but that requires expensive changes to millions of already-built structures. Millions of Californians could use less electricity immediately if they tolerated significantly higher indoor temperatures, but that hasn’t happened in the past 20 years and I have my doubts that it will happen today.

The approach that California has instead taken is to displace demand for gas-fired electricity with solar and wind power. Demand for gas-fired power in the month of August on the CAISO grid peaked in 2012 at a monthly-averaged demand of 15346 megawatts. It has decreased every year since and was down to 10722 megawatts in 2018. Over the same period, August generation from non-hydro renewables grew from 3030 megawatts to 8001 megawatts. Total electricity consumption in the month of August grew slightly even as fossil-generated power declined significantly. Legislative changes affecting a handful of key companies are more effective in practice than urging masses of people to voluntarily act in a coordinated fashion.