More Data: Less Mining from Renewable Transition

New data, same story. Less mining with a renewable transition.

Hannah Ritchie in Sustainability by the Numbers:

Back in January, I published a post looking at the amount of minerals that were required for the low-carbon energy transition. This came from projections in the International Energy Agency (IEA)’s The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions.

It projected that the world would need to produce between 27 million tonnes in its Sustainable Development Scenario, and 43 million tonnes in its Net-Zero scenario by 2040. Those scenarios did not include steel. But including them doesn’t change things significantly: we’re talking about tens to hundreds of millions of tonnes.

Sounds big, until you compare it to the 15 billion tonnes of fossil fuels that we dig out of the earth every year.

But we need to make another comparison – not only comparing the total amount of material that’s used, but the amount of ore that needs to be mined, or rock that needs to be moved. Some of these minerals are in rocks at very low concentrations – that means that to get 43 million tonnes, we’d need to extract a lot more than that.

In this post, I’ll take a look at several studies that do this adjustment.

A few key conclusions emerge:

• The total quantities of rock moved for low-carbon technologies are much higher than the final amount we use. Billions, rather than tens or hundreds of millions of tonnes.
• These quantities are still lower than current mining requirements for fossil fuels. In other words, the energy transition will reduce total material requirements.
• The story for electricity and transport is different: material requirements for electricity will go down, but without improved recycling and more efficient material use, they’ll go up for vehicles

How do we adjust mineral requirements for total material requirements?

Researchers tend to use the term ‘total material requirements’ for the total amount of material that is moved – the minerals we finally use in our solar panels and electric cars, and the amount of waste rock that’s shifted.

The difference between these numbers – mineral use and material requirements – can be very big, because minerals are often present in rocks at very low concentrations.

There are two metrics we might want to consider here: the total amount of ore that’s mined. And the amount of material that’s moved.

The Energy Transitions Commission (ETC) shows this graphic in their Material and Resource Requirements for the Energy Transition report.

It shows how much ore is mined, or material moved to get one kilogram of a given commodity. To get one kilogram of copper, 160 kilograms of ore needs to be mined, and 510 kilograms of rock needs to be moved. This checks out because the concentration of copper in ores is around 0.6%.1

As you can see, the differences are very big.

Another example of this adjustment is shown in a recent paper by Nijnens et al. (2023).

Ore extraction for solar and wind is 9 to 13 times higher than mineral requirement. For batteries in electric cars, it’s 56 times higher.

Material requirements for low-carbon technologies will increase substantially, but they will still be lower than fossil fuel extraction

Let’s look at a few studies that have quantified the mining requirements for the energy transition.

First, we’ll start with a recent paper by Joey Nijnens and colleagues.2 It looks at the total ore extraction needed in the International Energy Agency’s Net Zero Scenario to 2050. This results in a very fast deployment of solar, wind, electric vehicles, and other low-carbon technologies. In this sense, it’s possibly the most ambitious and mineral-hungry scenario we could expect.

It compares this to coal extraction.3

Note that this looks at the amount of ore that is extracted, not waste rock. However, as we’ll see later, including this doesn’t change the overall message.

The results are shown in the chart.

The energy transition significantly reduces mining requirements. The amount needed for electricity production – as shown by solar and wind – drops a lot.

The amount of materials needed for electric vehicles is substantial, and as we’ll see later, will outstrip the reduced demand for oil.

As you can see on the right, improving recycling methods would reduce this demand even more.

You’ll notice that oil and gas are not included here – if they were, the gap between fossil fuel demand and low-carbon mineral demand would be even higher.

There’s quite a bit more at the link.