I wonder about something else: all mining is done with fossil fuels. All regenerative energy is helped by fossil fuels, for instance for building, maintaining, transport, which is done with cars, trains etc. None of these are yet electric and so on. So it's not either, but both in any case.
Also: don't forget Jevons Paradox: the more efficiently we do something, the more we do it. Instead of doing it less to achieve at the same output, we do even more and have even more output. So since we started to move into "regenerative energy" we have INCREASED our consumption of fossil energy as well.
Also, what about EROI ( ➜ energy return on (energy) invested): in mining for whatever, we get less and less back because the deposits are harder to come by. If we fall under certain EROI aggregate sum for our society energy needs, we'll not be able to maintain our current level of consuming, as being said in "How everything can collapse" by Savigny/Stevens.
There is no point around us, individually and as a society, starting to decrease our (energy) consumption. I see no sign of that, not even a discussion beginning.
UK electricity consumption has gone down steadily over the past ~20 years despite increased electrification, and is not to my knowledge correlated to price. Whilst we may increase our use of things as they become cheaper, it does not necessarily hold that this increase meets or exceeds the efficiency savings, as some or all of the savings may be reallocated elsewhere.
The EROI comment seems empirically suspect too. Costs of commodities have gone down significantly over time due to improved technology having a greater effect than increased extraction complexity. There is even a famous bet about this.
> Let’s look at an example. Imagine it’s the mid-1700s and you live three miles from the meadow where you work the soil. It takes you an hour to walk there along a rough path. Now fast-forward two hundred years. The rough path has been replaced with a smooth highway, and now it takes only ten minutes to drive to the same point by car. Surely you’ve saved 50 minutes? Maybe you can relax in that time, read poetry and smell flowers.
> But that’s not what happens. In our actual system the technology will be enlisted to expand and accelerate everything. Your meadow will be paved over and replaced with a mall, and you’ll now live in the suburbs of a metropolis. You’re still going to travel for an hour to work, but you’ll now drive at 30mph for 30 miles, instead of walking at 3mph for three. You don’t get to liberate time for yourself by holding your geographic scale constant while your speed increases. No, your geographic scale will expand as your speed does, and this is how mega-cities like Los Angeles develop. They’re catalyzed, or unleashed, by cars.
EROIs: what do you mean? The number of 12..13 to cover all energy needs for our current civilization (including travel, entertainment etc.) is from Jessica G. Lambert et all., "Energy, EROI and quality of life", in Energy Policy 64, 2014: 153-67.
The other EROIs for different regenerative energy forms come from several articles mentioned in Servigne/Stevens book. That book is about how to prepare for a collapse of our current society, it is not about how to ignore what different types of collapse await us and generally just go on the way we did. In any case, I could give you the references of all the articles, but then by foto (which can't be done in comments) or you go and read the book yourself and follow its references.
Yes, 'we' are using more energy, but the people included in 'we' are expanding. Approximately 3 billion people live in energy poverty, in the past most people gaining more wealth consume more materials and emit more CO2. However, many wealthier nations have reduced per capita CO2 emissions since 1990, with many countries also reducing total emissions in the past 2 decades. https://ourworldindata.org/energy
The challenge will be electrifying in places where fossil fuels are currently scarce, and the falling price of electrification will help. Eventually though, we will need to have a falling price (or tax) on carbon so that oil and gas is left in the ground because production costs are too high (us shale fracking $73/barrel equivalent Russian arctic $100, Saudi Oil #3/barrel to produce) otherwise people somewhere will use those fuels to improve their daily lives even while diminishing the collective.... just as we (myself included) do in the USA.
Hmmmm. In any case, it is of no interest for the planet whether we decreased our AVERAGE CO2 output. The atmosphere changes on our OVERALL CO2 output by heating up.
Also, all the humans living in energy poverty means they consume about 1-2 metric tonnes of CO2 per year. Us rich Europeans, even having slightly decreased energy consumption, hover around 11-12 metric tonnes CO2 per person per year, and you North Americans at about 13-15 metric tonnes CO2 per year.
Earth natural systems, if left unbothered to do their thing, would take up about 3 tonnes of CO2 per person per year of our producing too much CO2. Yet we damage these same systems, and we Europeans / North Americans systematically produce as much as 4x times as much CO2 per person per year. And I mean systematically, because even if you try not producing any CO2 at all, living in the woods or whatever, eating roots or thumbnails, would mean that about 8 tonnes of CO2 are produced for you within the industries and infrastructure of your country.
Is oil and gas extraction a legitimate comparison with ore extraction? While the total material requirements go down, with oil and gas there is a far lower geological 'disruption' than with mining extraction. I am making the assumption that once oil and gas is extracted, the remaining geological 'voids' have no significant detrimental impacts - and in reality isn't it the geological impact that needs to be measured, rather than the total material requirements? Obviously coal is different, but does the conclusion that low-carbon electricity will reduce material requirements still stand up if we remove oil and gas from the calculation?
I’m quite skeptical that fossil fuel demand will go down as much as this shows. All metals mining requires very large diesel engine powered equipment, as do all freight trains and mining trucks, and no one is working on electric versions of these. Mining is mostly done in remote, sparsely populated areas without electricity infrastructure. It probably also doesn’t account for South Asia and Africa developing in the next decades and increasing demand, and until fossil fuels cost more than the alternatives they will choose to use them.
Miners using renewables and electric trucks is the goal. That we start with fossil fuels is not evidence that they will fail, let alone that they already have. Remote mines are already using large amounts of solar and batteries - are some of the earliest adopters of renewable microgrids, to save energy costs.
Modular, transportable solar farms are a thing too, and popular already with smaller mines with short working lives, ie a permanent installation will outlast the mine. Electric trucks and machinery are already beginning to be used - they will be more reliable as well as reduce mining costs. I expect they will be useful for farming too - temporary solar farms to run large battery electric harvesting operations for example.
Those are interesting as press releases, but even so not nearly a solution. The electric mining truck made “several” 1 km loaded trips. The battery capacity or range were not specified and recharging time neither. A truck that works a few minutes a day isn’t useful for getting work done.
The train is also interesting but the press release states that it is meant to be hybrid used in conjunction either diesel locomotives so only reduces diesel use by 11%.
It’s nice that engineering is being done, but electric mining seems like it is in the distant future.
A good analogy for US readers is our landscaping services. Homeowners will easily switch from 2-cycle gas lawnmowers, chainsaws, leaf blowers etc to electric. However, professionals - largely immigrants who are motivated to work 12-14 hour days all summer while they continuously run these machines - will have no choice but to continue with gas for a very long time.
I think rail is very suited to electrification to support battery electric operations - strategic sections of electrification will allow battery charging to travel sections without it. This is actually something that has been done at small scales for a long time where it was cheaper than full track electrification. Then there are options for swappable dedicated battery rail cars
Nowhere in the article mentions the destination of sludge/tailing dams after all the mining process. Their overall volume will be proportional to the moved material plus water and a sea of chemicals that must be produced elsewhere. Currently those chemicals depends heavily on fossil fuels.
Since most of required materials will be mined on the Developing World, the increased demand for energy transition will create more of those ticking time-bombs.
I can´t see the point of "creating a better environmental future", pushing toxic waste onto the worlds most poor, makes any sense.
Isn’t is also important to take into consideration what happens directly after materials or fuels are extracted? I would agree with coal since it requires the same ecologically disruptive mining processes as precious metals but with oil and gas you transport it and use it for energy. The materials mined for batteries, EVs, and other renewable tech needs to go through extremely energy intensive processes after it took a ton of energy to mine all of it in the first place. This requires a higher energy payment upfront compared to fossil fuels so I still don’t think we should be jumping off the cliff of energy security and high standards of living.
Thank you for your analysis and particularly the inclusion of rock to mineral factors. However, I am not convinced that the comparison should be on mass per mass basis even with the waste rock volumes included. Is there any rigorous analysis of the energy requirements of mining for the energy transition?
Different minerals require different amounts of effort to get them out of the surrounding or over-laying materials. For example, copper must not only be dug up but also the ore must be crushed down to fine particles, cleaned by a flotation process and then smelted, whereas coal is usually easily mined, cleaned and used virtually as it. Their prices probably reflect the different amounts of effort - copper sells at about 8$/kg whereas coal is about 0.2$/kg, so copper requires 40 times as much effort as coal. Lithium over 100 times as much. Therefore, even though the energy transition will reduce mining requirements I suspect it will increase the effort, hence energy, requirements.
Important point on these numbers likely representing the upper bound. Even if we don't know where the innovation is coming from, it has historically come pretty dependably.
Big fan of Hannah’s work, but I am not sure coal vs battery mining is a fair comparison. Batteries replace oil, not coal. And, as many people emphasize in the comments, it’s a long time before batteries replace the diesel used in 24-7 quasi-continuous mining operations.
Currently working on the question how the predicted increase in material / mineral demand translates into environmental degradation. Hit me up for more information. @ecoeconleo
When you’re already in ecological overshoot a hypothetical reduction in mining (aka hey, I’m doing a bit less destruction than the other guy) is meaningless…except maybe to help reduce your cognitive dissonance.
yes coal can require removal of overburden, but so does any above ground mine. And, except for oil sands, oil and gas are not "mined" and produce no waste. so the comparison - which had no data - doesn't hold up.
Your analysis seems to assume that all the minerals we need are out there just waiting to be mined, albeit at various grades. Would like to see how the total material demand compares to the total resources available in known and projected deposits. Do you assume we'll just keep finding more deposits as we need them, a common fallacy among folks not involved in the mineral exploration/extraction industry. Also, deposits that occur in first world countries are increasingly less likely to be developed because of widespread NIMBYism relegating most, if not all, mining to third world countries in the future. Here's a related article from last year: https://issues.org/environmental-economic-costs-minerals-solar-wind-batteries-mills/
Good post! I would be curious to see a comparison on the extraction processes and the associated emissions intensity including innovations, like recycling, and where they stand.
I wonder about something else: all mining is done with fossil fuels. All regenerative energy is helped by fossil fuels, for instance for building, maintaining, transport, which is done with cars, trains etc. None of these are yet electric and so on. So it's not either, but both in any case.
Also: don't forget Jevons Paradox: the more efficiently we do something, the more we do it. Instead of doing it less to achieve at the same output, we do even more and have even more output. So since we started to move into "regenerative energy" we have INCREASED our consumption of fossil energy as well.
Also, what about EROI ( ➜ energy return on (energy) invested): in mining for whatever, we get less and less back because the deposits are harder to come by. If we fall under certain EROI aggregate sum for our society energy needs, we'll not be able to maintain our current level of consuming, as being said in "How everything can collapse" by Savigny/Stevens.
There is no point around us, individually and as a society, starting to decrease our (energy) consumption. I see no sign of that, not even a discussion beginning.
Are we sure these are true?
UK electricity consumption has gone down steadily over the past ~20 years despite increased electrification, and is not to my knowledge correlated to price. Whilst we may increase our use of things as they become cheaper, it does not necessarily hold that this increase meets or exceeds the efficiency savings, as some or all of the savings may be reallocated elsewhere.
The EROI comment seems empirically suspect too. Costs of commodities have gone down significantly over time due to improved technology having a greater effect than increased extraction complexity. There is even a famous bet about this.
World energy use ➜ https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption shows we consume even more fossil fuels than before we started using regenerative energy.
Jevons' paradox ➜ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox was also recently mentioned by Brett Scott in ➜ https://brettscott.substack.com/p/tech-doesnt-make-our-lives-easier when he writes:
> Let’s look at an example. Imagine it’s the mid-1700s and you live three miles from the meadow where you work the soil. It takes you an hour to walk there along a rough path. Now fast-forward two hundred years. The rough path has been replaced with a smooth highway, and now it takes only ten minutes to drive to the same point by car. Surely you’ve saved 50 minutes? Maybe you can relax in that time, read poetry and smell flowers.
> But that’s not what happens. In our actual system the technology will be enlisted to expand and accelerate everything. Your meadow will be paved over and replaced with a mall, and you’ll now live in the suburbs of a metropolis. You’re still going to travel for an hour to work, but you’ll now drive at 30mph for 30 miles, instead of walking at 3mph for three. You don’t get to liberate time for yourself by holding your geographic scale constant while your speed increases. No, your geographic scale will expand as your speed does, and this is how mega-cities like Los Angeles develop. They’re catalyzed, or unleashed, by cars.
EROIs: what do you mean? The number of 12..13 to cover all energy needs for our current civilization (including travel, entertainment etc.) is from Jessica G. Lambert et all., "Energy, EROI and quality of life", in Energy Policy 64, 2014: 153-67.
The other EROIs for different regenerative energy forms come from several articles mentioned in Servigne/Stevens book. That book is about how to prepare for a collapse of our current society, it is not about how to ignore what different types of collapse await us and generally just go on the way we did. In any case, I could give you the references of all the articles, but then by foto (which can't be done in comments) or you go and read the book yourself and follow its references.
Yes, 'we' are using more energy, but the people included in 'we' are expanding. Approximately 3 billion people live in energy poverty, in the past most people gaining more wealth consume more materials and emit more CO2. However, many wealthier nations have reduced per capita CO2 emissions since 1990, with many countries also reducing total emissions in the past 2 decades. https://ourworldindata.org/energy
The challenge will be electrifying in places where fossil fuels are currently scarce, and the falling price of electrification will help. Eventually though, we will need to have a falling price (or tax) on carbon so that oil and gas is left in the ground because production costs are too high (us shale fracking $73/barrel equivalent Russian arctic $100, Saudi Oil #3/barrel to produce) otherwise people somewhere will use those fuels to improve their daily lives even while diminishing the collective.... just as we (myself included) do in the USA.
Hmmmm. In any case, it is of no interest for the planet whether we decreased our AVERAGE CO2 output. The atmosphere changes on our OVERALL CO2 output by heating up.
Also, all the humans living in energy poverty means they consume about 1-2 metric tonnes of CO2 per year. Us rich Europeans, even having slightly decreased energy consumption, hover around 11-12 metric tonnes CO2 per person per year, and you North Americans at about 13-15 metric tonnes CO2 per year.
Earth natural systems, if left unbothered to do their thing, would take up about 3 tonnes of CO2 per person per year of our producing too much CO2. Yet we damage these same systems, and we Europeans / North Americans systematically produce as much as 4x times as much CO2 per person per year. And I mean systematically, because even if you try not producing any CO2 at all, living in the woods or whatever, eating roots or thumbnails, would mean that about 8 tonnes of CO2 are produced for you within the industries and infrastructure of your country.
Is oil and gas extraction a legitimate comparison with ore extraction? While the total material requirements go down, with oil and gas there is a far lower geological 'disruption' than with mining extraction. I am making the assumption that once oil and gas is extracted, the remaining geological 'voids' have no significant detrimental impacts - and in reality isn't it the geological impact that needs to be measured, rather than the total material requirements? Obviously coal is different, but does the conclusion that low-carbon electricity will reduce material requirements still stand up if we remove oil and gas from the calculation?
I’m quite skeptical that fossil fuel demand will go down as much as this shows. All metals mining requires very large diesel engine powered equipment, as do all freight trains and mining trucks, and no one is working on electric versions of these. Mining is mostly done in remote, sparsely populated areas without electricity infrastructure. It probably also doesn’t account for South Asia and Africa developing in the next decades and increasing demand, and until fossil fuels cost more than the alternatives they will choose to use them.
Miners using renewables and electric trucks is the goal. That we start with fossil fuels is not evidence that they will fail, let alone that they already have. Remote mines are already using large amounts of solar and batteries - are some of the earliest adopters of renewable microgrids, to save energy costs.
Modular, transportable solar farms are a thing too, and popular already with smaller mines with short working lives, ie a permanent installation will outlast the mine. Electric trucks and machinery are already beginning to be used - they will be more reliable as well as reduce mining costs. I expect they will be useful for farming too - temporary solar farms to run large battery electric harvesting operations for example.
mining equipment - https://www.caterpillar.com/en/news/corporate-press-releases/h/caterpillar-succesfully-demonstrates-first-battery-electric-large-mining-truck.html
freight trains - https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/transportation/full-steam-ahead-for-electric-freight-trains
Those are interesting as press releases, but even so not nearly a solution. The electric mining truck made “several” 1 km loaded trips. The battery capacity or range were not specified and recharging time neither. A truck that works a few minutes a day isn’t useful for getting work done.
The train is also interesting but the press release states that it is meant to be hybrid used in conjunction either diesel locomotives so only reduces diesel use by 11%.
It’s nice that engineering is being done, but electric mining seems like it is in the distant future.
A good analogy for US readers is our landscaping services. Homeowners will easily switch from 2-cycle gas lawnmowers, chainsaws, leaf blowers etc to electric. However, professionals - largely immigrants who are motivated to work 12-14 hour days all summer while they continuously run these machines - will have no choice but to continue with gas for a very long time.
I think rail is very suited to electrification to support battery electric operations - strategic sections of electrification will allow battery charging to travel sections without it. This is actually something that has been done at small scales for a long time where it was cheaper than full track electrification. Then there are options for swappable dedicated battery rail cars
Nowhere in the article mentions the destination of sludge/tailing dams after all the mining process. Their overall volume will be proportional to the moved material plus water and a sea of chemicals that must be produced elsewhere. Currently those chemicals depends heavily on fossil fuels.
Those dams will be a ethernal cost burden on mining operators, with serious environmental consequences if slopply managed, like Brumadinho dam failed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brumadinho_dam_disaster).
Since most of required materials will be mined on the Developing World, the increased demand for energy transition will create more of those ticking time-bombs.
I can´t see the point of "creating a better environmental future", pushing toxic waste onto the worlds most poor, makes any sense.
Isn’t is also important to take into consideration what happens directly after materials or fuels are extracted? I would agree with coal since it requires the same ecologically disruptive mining processes as precious metals but with oil and gas you transport it and use it for energy. The materials mined for batteries, EVs, and other renewable tech needs to go through extremely energy intensive processes after it took a ton of energy to mine all of it in the first place. This requires a higher energy payment upfront compared to fossil fuels so I still don’t think we should be jumping off the cliff of energy security and high standards of living.
Thanks. You have also written useful analyses comparing the safety, emissions, and land use of different energy sources.
To complete the picture it would be vary helpful to have an comparison of different energy sources regarding
(1) the costs for electricity generation that include the costs with dealing with intermittency.
(2) the energy return on energy invested, taking into account intermittency.
(3) the time taken to reduce emissions using nuclear versus renewables.
Thank you for your analysis and particularly the inclusion of rock to mineral factors. However, I am not convinced that the comparison should be on mass per mass basis even with the waste rock volumes included. Is there any rigorous analysis of the energy requirements of mining for the energy transition?
Different minerals require different amounts of effort to get them out of the surrounding or over-laying materials. For example, copper must not only be dug up but also the ore must be crushed down to fine particles, cleaned by a flotation process and then smelted, whereas coal is usually easily mined, cleaned and used virtually as it. Their prices probably reflect the different amounts of effort - copper sells at about 8$/kg whereas coal is about 0.2$/kg, so copper requires 40 times as much effort as coal. Lithium over 100 times as much. Therefore, even though the energy transition will reduce mining requirements I suspect it will increase the effort, hence energy, requirements.
Important point on these numbers likely representing the upper bound. Even if we don't know where the innovation is coming from, it has historically come pretty dependably.
Big fan of Hannah’s work, but I am not sure coal vs battery mining is a fair comparison. Batteries replace oil, not coal. And, as many people emphasize in the comments, it’s a long time before batteries replace the diesel used in 24-7 quasi-continuous mining operations.
Currently working on the question how the predicted increase in material / mineral demand translates into environmental degradation. Hit me up for more information. @ecoeconleo
A very informative and interesting article Hannah. Backed up by some very interesting discourse and points of view in the comments. Thank you.
When you’re already in ecological overshoot a hypothetical reduction in mining (aka hey, I’m doing a bit less destruction than the other guy) is meaningless…except maybe to help reduce your cognitive dissonance.
hmm, re mining waste from electric requirements:
yes coal can require removal of overburden, but so does any above ground mine. And, except for oil sands, oil and gas are not "mined" and produce no waste. so the comparison - which had no data - doesn't hold up.
Your analysis seems to assume that all the minerals we need are out there just waiting to be mined, albeit at various grades. Would like to see how the total material demand compares to the total resources available in known and projected deposits. Do you assume we'll just keep finding more deposits as we need them, a common fallacy among folks not involved in the mineral exploration/extraction industry. Also, deposits that occur in first world countries are increasingly less likely to be developed because of widespread NIMBYism relegating most, if not all, mining to third world countries in the future. Here's a related article from last year: https://issues.org/environmental-economic-costs-minerals-solar-wind-batteries-mills/
Good post! I would be curious to see a comparison on the extraction processes and the associated emissions intensity including innovations, like recycling, and where they stand.