We all understand that fossil fuels need to be phased out and the sooner the better.
A recent report by Prof Kevin Anderson from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University, found that wealthy countries such as the UK, US and Australia had until 2034 to stop all oil and gas production to give the world a 50% chance of preventing devastating climate breakdown, while the poorest nations that are also heavily reliant on fossil fuels should be given until 2050.
To do this and replace fossil fuels with renewables requires huge quantities of metals/minerals and the quantities required are turning out to be much larger than first thought. In fact the amounts required are quite possibly unachievable. Current mining production of the required minerals/metals doesn’t even come close to meeting demand and as it stands, the best estimates of resources available to be mined in the future, will not be enough.
Professor Simon Michaux
Simon P Michaux, former Australian Mining Engineer and Associate Research Professor of Geometallurgy in Finland has researched and analysed what would be required to phase out fossil fuels. As buffer systems are crucial to handle the intermittent nature of solar and wind power, apart from using a fossil fuel such as gas as a buffer, Michaux maintains the huge amounts of minerals/metals required in the manufacture of storage batteries required for a buffer may well not be available. In other words there just aren’t the minerals/metals to go round.
Hornsdale Power Reserve
Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia – the Elon Musk project with a 100-megawatt capacity – is being used by the EU as an example of the standard buffer system. Globally, over 15.5 million Hornsdale-type stations will need to be built across the planet and then connected to the power grid system just to meet a 4-week buffer system. That’s going to require a lot of very big batteries.
Tesla EV Truck
Added to this are the estimates for the global EV fleet, i.e. cars, trucks, rail, shipping and aviation. All these compete for the same finite amount of resources and there is a serious shortfall. For example: Copper has reserves of only 20% of the projected requirements; Nickel has reserves of only 10%; Lithium 10%, Graphite 3.75% and the list goes on. It seems that current mineral reserves are not adequate to resource metal production to manufacture the next generation of renewable energy technology. Added to which is the fact that each renewable technology has a life cycle of 8 to 25 years after which they will need to be replaced.
Copper Mine
When Michaux presented this basic information to EU analysts, it came as a surprise. They had assumed, using guesstimates, the metals would be available. Michaux’ research is the first time an attempt had been made to do an accurate stocktake of the resources necessary for the change to renewables.
Michaux compares our past use of energy as “An industrial ecosystem of unprecedented size and complexity that took more than a century to build with the support of (oil) the cheapest energy the world has ever known in abundant quantities with easily available credit and unlimited mineral resources”.
He goes on to offer this warning about the present day …
“We now seek to build an even more complex system with very expensive energy, a fragile finance system saturated in debt, not enough minerals, and an unprecedented human population embedded in a deteriorating environment”.
Article by Pru Colville