I honestly despair when I see someone that should know better like Dennis Meadows hoodwinked by the likes of Simon Michaux. Honestly! Simon Michaux is a GEOLOGIST - not a renewable systems engineer - and his work on renewables breaks all the rules.
RULE 1: Geographic diversity: Professor Andrew Blakers is a renewables engineer. (Not just any engineer - he received the Queen Elizabeth Prize for engineering for inventing the PERC solar cell. That's the Nobel prize for engineers!) Blakers talks about spreading renewables risk by Overbuilding capacity across a large and diverse geographic area. To illustrate the importance of a wide area, he said that if Australian states tried to build their own independent renewable grids they would pay 5 TIMES MORE for storage than in an Australian-wide super-grid. https://reneweconomy.com.au/solars-stunning-journey-from-lab-curiosity-to-global-juggernaut-wiping-out-fossil-fuels/ My own state of NSW is twice the size of Germany. If it’s important for us to connect up to the whole, how much more important is it for Germany to connect into the super-grid plans of ENTSO-E. Blakers plan for Australia reduces storage down to 2 days. Australia is 21 TIMES bigger than Germany - but the ENTSO-E super-grid that Germany is a part of is 27 TIMES bigger than Germany itself. So why on earth does Michaux cherry-pick out rare studies into a hypothetical isolated German grid? It’s ridiculous!
Watch this 25 minute presentation by Blakers - it’s 3 years old but lays out the rules for renewables that I’ve seen repeated in different terminology in various studies. https://youtu.be/BIcwaXRN1Hs?t=105
RULE 2: Use batteries for a few hours, then Pumped Hydro Electricity Storage (PHES) for a few days. That’s it! But Michaux picked NMC batteries high in Critical Minerals - and pretended we needed 28 days of storage! He ignored sodium batteries even though they were commercially available before his study. Sodium batteries can come from sea-salt and bio-charred agri-waste (Hard Carbon). We’re NOT running out of either! They’re also 30% cheaper now, safer, and do not need any critical minerals or even copper.
RULE 3: PUMPED HYDRO: Michaux’s paper claimed PHES were limited, but did not cite a source. Then he revealed his source was a study into tiny flat Singapore where the highest hill is 15 m! Gee - I wonder why THEY had trouble finding PHES sites! (Facepalm!) https://youtu.be/LBw2OVWdWIQ?t=1342
What is the actual potential resource of PHES sites? Professor Blakers developed a satellite map of the earth. The OFF-RIVER sites are cheaper and faster to build, and the world has 100 TIMES what we need! https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/pumped_hydro_atlas/
MICHAUX’S OWN PAPER shows that if we just replace his NMC “batteries that ate the world” with sodium and PHES - there’s more than enough minerals! I did the math here. https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/michaux/
The one aspect of this energy 'transition' that seems to be invariably left out of the equation is the massive and significant destruction that would and is being wrought on the planet (and a planet with already very overloaded sinks). The scale of the mining and processing that is being considered (and requiring a gargantuan pulse of fossil fuel extraction and burning) would surely put us over (if it hasn't already) any tipping point from which our planet could recover from (let alone homo sapiens survive, or many other species for that matter). I've not seen anywhere a detailed consideration or analysis of this particular perspective; except to mostly dismiss it via omission of the issue.
Bcuz it's a subject wily politicised to the level of lethal toxicity, no sane honest researcher would touch it with a bargepole 😟
A minor point: the planet doesn't mind, it'll be ok in any event. Otoh, the survival of species incl us precious humans... welp, it's a whole 'nother ball game.
It seems that a certain number of people on this planet are planning the elimination of human beings. Which, from a certain viewpoint, would not be a bad thing. Personally, though, I disagree.
Sorry Steve Bull - but mining for the energy transition will NOT destroy the biosphere. The “Energy Transitions Commission” is a huge global think tank. They estimated the entire energy cost to mine and build the entire Energy Transition over the next decades. The total thing will release about 4.5 to 9 months of today’s global annual emissions. Once. Fossil fuel emissions will have stopped forever. (Figures here - but I converted to months equivalent CO2 emissions for ease of comparison.)
From the link above: “Between 2022–2050, the energy transition could require the production of 6.5 billion tonnes of end-use materials, 95% of which would be steel, copper and aluminium which the energy transition will require,”
Again - fossil fuels are 14 billion tons EVERY year.
Sure, a 'think tank' composed of people with very vested (financial) interests and focused on economic growth is guaranteed to be providing objective opinions based on very sound research and models.
It's a great (cognitive dissonance-reducing) narrative but given how far into ecological overshoot the human species has travelled, whether it is death by a 1000 cuts or 999 or even 900 is truly moot. Both are ultimately suicidal when sustaining 'growth' is the fundamental driver (even if it's not, maintaining the status quo is equally problematic given the amount of resource drawdown it requires).
The most appropriate path would be to attempt to reduce (significantly) all our complex technologies (along with other things like population) rather than attempt to carry on with business as usual via non-renewable, renewable energy-based industrial products.
THE MINING WILL LIKE DESTROY THE ENIVRONMENT - MAN!
Climate deniers love to shout something like… “Mining for wind and solar is going to be like SO MUCH more mining that it will destroy the very environment you greenies are trying to save, man!” But then the climate denier takes all the other metals and fossil fuel minerals we mine out of the same environment for granted. They drive their GASOLINE powered METAL car down a BITUMEN highway over a STEEL bridge into a STEEL skyscraper city, all of which they have no problem with. But see a few wind turbines on the way and it’s the end of the biosphere from all the mining!
So the following article looks at all the extra metals we’ll need for the Energy Transition - all the material we need to build billions of solar panels and wind turbines and Electric Vehicles and retrofit today’s diesel mining trucks into electric mining trucks, etc. It expresses that as a percentage increase of the TOTAL metals we mine for everything else we take for granted in our daily lives in this steel and bitumen industrial civilisation.
Here are the raw numbers. To build fast enough to limit to 1.5 degrees of warming we will have to increase aluminium mining by 17% of the total aluminium we mine today, cement 2%, copper 14%, nickel 6%, and steel (iron ore) a whopping 5%! https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/minerals-for-electricity
(Second graph down, BLUE bars for 1.5 degrees.)
Note I said iron ore is a whopping 5%? That’s because we live in a steel civilisation. We mine a total of 3 BILLION tonnes of iron ore a year. It’s 94% of ALL the metals we mine! Everything else - from aluminium to copper to rare earths for special batteries and special electronics - it’s all in the other non-iron group of 6%. Even a tiny increase in iron ore is a large increase in mining. EG: 5% of 3 billion tons of iron ore a year is 150 MILLION tonnes more ore each year. That's 2.4 times more iron ore than the TOTAL aluminium we mine today. Aluminium only rises 17% of 63 million tonnes - which is 10.7 million tonnes. Together iron ore and aluminium make up over 160 million tonnes - the majority of the extra metals. If you want to get more weights of metals use the percentages above on the tonnages from this link - a fascinating read! https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-metals-we-mined-in-one-visualization/
Which sounds like a lot, but the non-ice area of land is 134 MILLION km2. (Add the habitable land and barren land - many mines are in deserts after all - and you get the total non-ice surface of land.) https://ourworldindata.org/land-use That’s only 0.04% of the land on earth. To meet the increased metals mining for the energy transition, will existing mines go deeper? Some new mines surely must open. But here’s the thing. That 0.04% of land includes FOSSIL FUELS which is 14 BILLION tons of mining each year! As we mine more metals and the energy transition unfolds, we’ll gradually mine less and less fossil fuels each year. Total mining will decline from what is ALREADY a tiny fraction of the earth’s surface!
So what is the real threat to ecosystems? Climate change and livestock grazing. Go back to the land use graph. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use Livestock grazing is about a THIRD of the habitable land on earth. The energy transition will take care of climate change - but what about livestock as 2 billion more people join us by mid century? Now we’re breaking down various aspects of the generic threat of “Overshoot” into specific questions we can start to analyse.
OVERSHOOT
William Rees gave us the very concept of "Overshoot". But something in his thinking makes him want to hate on renewable energy systems - the very cure for climate change - and ends up sometimes accidentally giving climate deniers more fodder against the solution we need for ONE of our Overshoot problems! I find that awfully ironic that the likes of William Rees and Simon Michaux so hate on renewables they give CLIMATE DENIERS more talking points!
Anyway, William Rees published a paper with Siebert against renewable energy in a peer-reviewed journal. Marco Raugei gives us the history of the debate between the energy transition and the renewable sceptics. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41247-023-00113-9
The bottom line? The peer-reviewed energy experts would comprehensively and scientifically answer all the old objections about EROEI, mineral requirements, how to mine and smelt stuff without oil - etc - but Rees just answered "Overshoot" like a hex against their scientifically valid responses. It got so bad that the Editor of the journal published an apology, defending their journal’s history of publishing sound science and apologising for having published what was CLEARLY an “opinion paper” - not a REVIEW paper. Siebert and Rees lacked basic scientific method, made blunt assertions from Overshoot to try and debunk the viability of the Energy Transition, etc. As the Editor concluded:
“What is unacceptable in the S&R paper is not their insistence on the overshoot but the fact that they do not consider any other facet of the much more complex issue of enacting a transition to “sustainable” development: they simply insist on the need for a “prosperous way down” a’ la Odum, and even suggest to set a limit to the world population so as to avoid overshoot… an unfortunate echo of Malthusianism that is surely not even conceivable today.”
That is - if your fridge and the accompanying cold-chain opens up a vast new array of fresh foods and medicines to you - don't turn around and complain that it does not also cook your meal! There's a whole different set of tools for that job. If the energy transition saves us from peak fossil fuels, petro-dictators and climate change - I say be grateful. Then let us get to work on the next big threat to both ourselves and the natural world - our livestock. Let's encourage the seaweed farmers who could feed us all the protein we want from 2% of the oceans while RESTORING ocean ecosystems. Dry it as a powder and add it to everything like soy is in everything from bread to milk and protein bars - and we can replace soy agriculture and a lot of livestock grazing! https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/seaweed/
Or what about putting some of all that solar and wind power to growing Precision Fermentation (PF)? This is a way of brewing up ALL the proteins and fats we could eat, from factories across a tiny area - the size of Greater London. They use solar panels to split water, and then feed hydrogen to special bacteria. This stuff ferments and then food techs turn it into analogues for chicken tenders and bacon strips and palm oil. See George Monbiot - 6 minutes: https://youtu.be/6eaTIe_TBZA In terms of land use, Monbiot says PF uses 138,000 TIMES less land than beef. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/24/green-technology-precision-fermentation-farming It’s actually just 10 times more land efficient when you count the solar panels it takes to run the factories - but the solar panels divorce our protein and fat production from arable land. They can sit on rooftops, float on fresh water reservoirs and some calmer archipelago oceans, and in our deserts. If we could just HALVE our livestock by substituting with seaweed, PF, insect-burger patties, Impossible Burgers, etc etc... we would return 15% of the habitable land back to nature, regrow 1.5 TRILLION trees - and soak up about HALF our historical CO2 emissions. Or if PF turns out as good as Tony Seba predicts, PF will bankrupt ALL livestock grazing, return 34% of the habitable land on earth to nature, and soak up all historical emissions as 3 TRILLION trees regrow and ecosystems and soil recovers.
A REAL OVERSHOOT EXPERT CELEBRATES ENERGY TRANSITION
If anyone understands Overshoot - it’s Johan Rockstrom of the Potsdam Institute. You may have seen him in Time Magazine or the Netflix Series “Breaking Boundaries” analysing how close we are to breaking the 9 Planetary Boundaries. He’s a hero of mine! Being a climatologist who has recently presented on why we absolutely CANNOT risk going past 1.5 degrees - he gets it! But even he has hope in the energy transition. Why? Because after decades of subsidies, wind and solar are finally so cheap that he talks about how they are now on a doubling curve of every 4 years. It's happening. We still need to fight big oil and gas and coal, and REALLY work on Conservation, recycling, walkable New Urban town plans, and all that. But if Johan says there is hope in the energy transition, there is hope in the energy transition. https://youtu.be/7KfWGAjJAsM?t=1191
He’s also a co-author and contributor to the Earth4All project run by the Club of Rome, Potsdam Institute, and others. They predict that as we create a Bright Green civilisation running on renewables and give everyone everything they need - we can bring on an earlier demographic transition and see the global population back to 6 billion by 2100!
💬 In the transition to a renewable energy system, we can adapt, reduce demand, improve efficiency, deploy new technologies, and simply be happy with a more limited supply of energy 👌
Bullseye! 🙂 The lengthy Ahmed’s quote holds much truth as well. As Tim Morgan doesn’t tire to intone: we can run our economy on renewables—just *not* on the scale & complexity of the current.
To sum up, technology rides the energy coattails, and slaves to the laws of physics. Thermodynamics rulez. No technological process can *gainfully convert diffuse energy into concentrated form* 🤷
Speaking of slaves, check out a highly illuminating & educating & entertaining beautifully drawn & worded fabulous comic strip featuring a quite peculiar protagonist --> stuartmcmillen.com/comic/energy-slaves 👌😉
🗨 About 60 pounds of batteries are needed to store the energy equivalent to that in one pound of hydrocarbons. Meanwhile, 50–100 pounds of various materials are mined, moved, and processed for one pound of battery produced.
🗨 In rough terms, it requires the energy equivalent of about 100 barrels of oil to fabricate a quantity of batteries that can store a single barrel of oil-equivalent energy.
But one barrel of oil is gone after it is burned, whereas the batteries will last for a long time. Cycle them a hundred times, and you are even in terms of energy processed. Even the old lead batteries could be cycled hundreds of times, the current lithium ones will last thousands of cycles -- then they can be recycled -- oil cannot be recycled. And consider that the energy coming from a barrel of oil can be used at best with about 30% efficiency, whereas batteries typically have efficiency of the order of 95%. There are always different points of view to evaluate the same facts
Ok then, whence does the energy come to feed the batteries? There're always ways to conveniently omit the crucial points, and go the distraction route 😏
Again, energy density is the cipher key. Give this Manhattan treatise an honest try 🙂
🗨 The dissipative-landfill system, and its consumerism corollary, are choices, made possible by the availability of *abundant dense* energy.
🗨 the scale of the production process is determined by the density of the initial energy input.[... I]n short, if the density of energy inputs is reduced, the resulting economy is smaller.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
🗨 “sustainable growth”, something which would only be possible if technological ingenuity could repeal the laws of physics
🗨 material limits, a concept which extends from finite energy and other natural resources to finite environmental tolerance of economic activities
Nope again. Economy is an energy system; period, full stop. Finance is just a proxy, and quite ingenious at manipulative maths at that. Dig deeper how your delicious EROI is calculated, with a keen eye on what's [conveniently] overlooked 🙂
Density does not matter - work achieved does. If we electrify everything in mining and smelting and transport and our homes - solar and wind are perfect. Australia’s industrial giants - worth a full THIRD of our entire stock-market - have a plan to Electrify Everything to provide industrial heat to mine and smelt steel, copper, aluminium etc. They’re going to build their own energy supplies to be immune from future world energy crisis - and are big names like BHP, Bluescope steel, etc. They plan to build 3 TIMES Australia’s 2020 electricity grid in capacity just for the domestic market (by 2050) - and another 3 TIMES that amount of electricity for all the green exports! 6 TIMES the grid! All possible now renewables are 1/4 nuclear’s LCOE (Lazard) and still falling. From p 45 of their Feb 2023 PDF https://energytransitionsinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Pathways-to-Industrial-Decarbonisation-report-Updated-August-2023-Australian-Industry-ETI.pdf
"No technological process can *gainfully convert diffuse energy into concentrated form* 🤷"
What are you talking about? If someone has solar panels on their roof and an EV in the driveway, it's like having an oil refinery on their roof. Actually it's BETTER! Install the solar panels once every 30 years instead of shipping oil from the other side of the planet and driving down the highway every week. THEN instead of BURNING OIL for 20% of the energy to become forward motion - WASTING 80% of the energy(!) - the electric car turns 80% of the solar energy into forward motion! So what's this 'energy dense' mantra you've inherited? OF COURSE oil and coal and gas HAD to be energy dense - because they're so dreadfully wasteful it's the only way they would have worked! We're fighting the laws of thermodynamics when we burn stuff for electricity or forward motion! But if we Electrify Everything, we find we're working WITH thermodynamics - electricity to electricity is just more efficient.
Watch a MOSTLY electric 240 TON hybrid MINING truck drive twice the speed of the diesel truck going UP HILL while charging from hydropower on catenary lines in Canada! Does this going twice the speed mean mines will need less trucks to move the same amount of ore? Watch 60 seconds here: https://youtu.be/6TxMeHRq1mk?t=213
Which math? I don't dismiss the paper. I went through it, although not in depth. But it seemed to me that it said nothing I didn't already know.
I honestly despair when I see someone that should know better like Dennis Meadows hoodwinked by the likes of Simon Michaux. Honestly! Simon Michaux is a GEOLOGIST - not a renewable systems engineer - and his work on renewables breaks all the rules.
RULE 1: Geographic diversity: Professor Andrew Blakers is a renewables engineer. (Not just any engineer - he received the Queen Elizabeth Prize for engineering for inventing the PERC solar cell. That's the Nobel prize for engineers!) Blakers talks about spreading renewables risk by Overbuilding capacity across a large and diverse geographic area. To illustrate the importance of a wide area, he said that if Australian states tried to build their own independent renewable grids they would pay 5 TIMES MORE for storage than in an Australian-wide super-grid. https://reneweconomy.com.au/solars-stunning-journey-from-lab-curiosity-to-global-juggernaut-wiping-out-fossil-fuels/ My own state of NSW is twice the size of Germany. If it’s important for us to connect up to the whole, how much more important is it for Germany to connect into the super-grid plans of ENTSO-E. Blakers plan for Australia reduces storage down to 2 days. Australia is 21 TIMES bigger than Germany - but the ENTSO-E super-grid that Germany is a part of is 27 TIMES bigger than Germany itself. So why on earth does Michaux cherry-pick out rare studies into a hypothetical isolated German grid? It’s ridiculous!
Watch this 25 minute presentation by Blakers - it’s 3 years old but lays out the rules for renewables that I’ve seen repeated in different terminology in various studies. https://youtu.be/BIcwaXRN1Hs?t=105
RULE 2: Use batteries for a few hours, then Pumped Hydro Electricity Storage (PHES) for a few days. That’s it! But Michaux picked NMC batteries high in Critical Minerals - and pretended we needed 28 days of storage! He ignored sodium batteries even though they were commercially available before his study. Sodium batteries can come from sea-salt and bio-charred agri-waste (Hard Carbon). We’re NOT running out of either! They’re also 30% cheaper now, safer, and do not need any critical minerals or even copper.
RULE 3: PUMPED HYDRO: Michaux’s paper claimed PHES were limited, but did not cite a source. Then he revealed his source was a study into tiny flat Singapore where the highest hill is 15 m! Gee - I wonder why THEY had trouble finding PHES sites! (Facepalm!) https://youtu.be/LBw2OVWdWIQ?t=1342
What is the actual potential resource of PHES sites? Professor Blakers developed a satellite map of the earth. The OFF-RIVER sites are cheaper and faster to build, and the world has 100 TIMES what we need! https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/pumped_hydro_atlas/
MICHAUX’S OWN PAPER shows that if we just replace his NMC “batteries that ate the world” with sodium and PHES - there’s more than enough minerals! I did the math here. https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/michaux/
Also try: Michael Barnard: an actual renewables engineer with experience in the industry. https://cleantechnica.com/2023/07/04/how-many-things-must-one-analyst-get-wrong-in-order-to-proclaim-a-convenient-decarbonization-minerals-shortage/
Nafeez M Ahmed: investigative journalist and tech writer https://ageoftransformation.org/energy-transformation-wont-be-derailed-by-lack-of-raw-materials/
International Energy Agency:
https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions/mineral-requirements-for-clean-energy-transitions
Data Scientist Hannah Ritchie: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/minerals-for-electricity
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/energy-transition-materials
It would seem we need to destroy our ecological systems to save them...hmmmmmm.
I am always in favor of creative disruption. It is the very concept of "Seneca Cliff," normally followed by a "Seneca Rebound"
With a sad caveat the Good Doctor has pointed at: it must be not that much fun to be creatively disrupted 😉
The one aspect of this energy 'transition' that seems to be invariably left out of the equation is the massive and significant destruction that would and is being wrought on the planet (and a planet with already very overloaded sinks). The scale of the mining and processing that is being considered (and requiring a gargantuan pulse of fossil fuel extraction and burning) would surely put us over (if it hasn't already) any tipping point from which our planet could recover from (let alone homo sapiens survive, or many other species for that matter). I've not seen anywhere a detailed consideration or analysis of this particular perspective; except to mostly dismiss it via omission of the issue.
Bcuz it's a subject wily politicised to the level of lethal toxicity, no sane honest researcher would touch it with a bargepole 😟
A minor point: the planet doesn't mind, it'll be ok in any event. Otoh, the survival of species incl us precious humans... welp, it's a whole 'nother ball game.
It seems that a certain number of people on this planet are planning the elimination of human beings. Which, from a certain viewpoint, would not be a bad thing. Personally, though, I disagree.
Sorry - it HAS been studied and the results are fine!
Sorry Steve Bull - but mining for the energy transition will NOT destroy the biosphere. The “Energy Transitions Commission” is a huge global think tank. They estimated the entire energy cost to mine and build the entire Energy Transition over the next decades. The total thing will release about 4.5 to 9 months of today’s global annual emissions. Once. Fossil fuel emissions will have stopped forever. (Figures here - but I converted to months equivalent CO2 emissions for ease of comparison.)
https://www.energy-transitions.org/new-report-scale-up-of-critical-materials-and-resources-required-for-energy-transition/
But it will create too much mining?
From the link above: “Between 2022–2050, the energy transition could require the production of 6.5 billion tonnes of end-use materials, 95% of which would be steel, copper and aluminium which the energy transition will require,”
Again - fossil fuels are 14 billion tons EVERY year.
What about all the raw rock and ore crunched to extract all those metals? It’s still not as bad as fossil fuels. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/energy-transition-materials
We will have to agree to disagree.
Sure, a 'think tank' composed of people with very vested (financial) interests and focused on economic growth is guaranteed to be providing objective opinions based on very sound research and models.
It's a great (cognitive dissonance-reducing) narrative but given how far into ecological overshoot the human species has travelled, whether it is death by a 1000 cuts or 999 or even 900 is truly moot. Both are ultimately suicidal when sustaining 'growth' is the fundamental driver (even if it's not, maintaining the status quo is equally problematic given the amount of resource drawdown it requires).
The most appropriate path would be to attempt to reduce (significantly) all our complex technologies (along with other things like population) rather than attempt to carry on with business as usual via non-renewable, renewable energy-based industrial products.
THE MINING WILL LIKE DESTROY THE ENIVRONMENT - MAN!
Climate deniers love to shout something like… “Mining for wind and solar is going to be like SO MUCH more mining that it will destroy the very environment you greenies are trying to save, man!” But then the climate denier takes all the other metals and fossil fuel minerals we mine out of the same environment for granted. They drive their GASOLINE powered METAL car down a BITUMEN highway over a STEEL bridge into a STEEL skyscraper city, all of which they have no problem with. But see a few wind turbines on the way and it’s the end of the biosphere from all the mining!
So the following article looks at all the extra metals we’ll need for the Energy Transition - all the material we need to build billions of solar panels and wind turbines and Electric Vehicles and retrofit today’s diesel mining trucks into electric mining trucks, etc. It expresses that as a percentage increase of the TOTAL metals we mine for everything else we take for granted in our daily lives in this steel and bitumen industrial civilisation.
Here are the raw numbers. To build fast enough to limit to 1.5 degrees of warming we will have to increase aluminium mining by 17% of the total aluminium we mine today, cement 2%, copper 14%, nickel 6%, and steel (iron ore) a whopping 5%! https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/minerals-for-electricity
(Second graph down, BLUE bars for 1.5 degrees.)
Note I said iron ore is a whopping 5%? That’s because we live in a steel civilisation. We mine a total of 3 BILLION tonnes of iron ore a year. It’s 94% of ALL the metals we mine! Everything else - from aluminium to copper to rare earths for special batteries and special electronics - it’s all in the other non-iron group of 6%. Even a tiny increase in iron ore is a large increase in mining. EG: 5% of 3 billion tons of iron ore a year is 150 MILLION tonnes more ore each year. That's 2.4 times more iron ore than the TOTAL aluminium we mine today. Aluminium only rises 17% of 63 million tonnes - which is 10.7 million tonnes. Together iron ore and aluminium make up over 160 million tonnes - the majority of the extra metals. If you want to get more weights of metals use the percentages above on the tonnages from this link - a fascinating read! https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-metals-we-mined-in-one-visualization/
So it is more mining - but unlike fossil fuels it is all recyclable. And even at the height of that mining it’s still less than fossil fuels. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/energy-transition-materials
HOW MUCH EXTRA LAND DOES THIS IMPACT?
Satellite maps show mines right now impact 57,277 km2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-00624-w
Which sounds like a lot, but the non-ice area of land is 134 MILLION km2. (Add the habitable land and barren land - many mines are in deserts after all - and you get the total non-ice surface of land.) https://ourworldindata.org/land-use That’s only 0.04% of the land on earth. To meet the increased metals mining for the energy transition, will existing mines go deeper? Some new mines surely must open. But here’s the thing. That 0.04% of land includes FOSSIL FUELS which is 14 BILLION tons of mining each year! As we mine more metals and the energy transition unfolds, we’ll gradually mine less and less fossil fuels each year. Total mining will decline from what is ALREADY a tiny fraction of the earth’s surface!
So what is the real threat to ecosystems? Climate change and livestock grazing. Go back to the land use graph. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use Livestock grazing is about a THIRD of the habitable land on earth. The energy transition will take care of climate change - but what about livestock as 2 billion more people join us by mid century? Now we’re breaking down various aspects of the generic threat of “Overshoot” into specific questions we can start to analyse.
OVERSHOOT
William Rees gave us the very concept of "Overshoot". But something in his thinking makes him want to hate on renewable energy systems - the very cure for climate change - and ends up sometimes accidentally giving climate deniers more fodder against the solution we need for ONE of our Overshoot problems! I find that awfully ironic that the likes of William Rees and Simon Michaux so hate on renewables they give CLIMATE DENIERS more talking points!
Anyway, William Rees published a paper with Siebert against renewable energy in a peer-reviewed journal. Marco Raugei gives us the history of the debate between the energy transition and the renewable sceptics. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41247-023-00113-9
The bottom line? The peer-reviewed energy experts would comprehensively and scientifically answer all the old objections about EROEI, mineral requirements, how to mine and smelt stuff without oil - etc - but Rees just answered "Overshoot" like a hex against their scientifically valid responses. It got so bad that the Editor of the journal published an apology, defending their journal’s history of publishing sound science and apologising for having published what was CLEARLY an “opinion paper” - not a REVIEW paper. Siebert and Rees lacked basic scientific method, made blunt assertions from Overshoot to try and debunk the viability of the Energy Transition, etc. As the Editor concluded:
“What is unacceptable in the S&R paper is not their insistence on the overshoot but the fact that they do not consider any other facet of the much more complex issue of enacting a transition to “sustainable” development: they simply insist on the need for a “prosperous way down” a’ la Odum, and even suggest to set a limit to the world population so as to avoid overshoot… an unfortunate echo of Malthusianism that is surely not even conceivable today.”
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/3/889
GETTING RID OF GRAZING?
That is - if your fridge and the accompanying cold-chain opens up a vast new array of fresh foods and medicines to you - don't turn around and complain that it does not also cook your meal! There's a whole different set of tools for that job. If the energy transition saves us from peak fossil fuels, petro-dictators and climate change - I say be grateful. Then let us get to work on the next big threat to both ourselves and the natural world - our livestock. Let's encourage the seaweed farmers who could feed us all the protein we want from 2% of the oceans while RESTORING ocean ecosystems. Dry it as a powder and add it to everything like soy is in everything from bread to milk and protein bars - and we can replace soy agriculture and a lot of livestock grazing! https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/seaweed/
Or what about putting some of all that solar and wind power to growing Precision Fermentation (PF)? This is a way of brewing up ALL the proteins and fats we could eat, from factories across a tiny area - the size of Greater London. They use solar panels to split water, and then feed hydrogen to special bacteria. This stuff ferments and then food techs turn it into analogues for chicken tenders and bacon strips and palm oil. See George Monbiot - 6 minutes: https://youtu.be/6eaTIe_TBZA In terms of land use, Monbiot says PF uses 138,000 TIMES less land than beef. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/24/green-technology-precision-fermentation-farming It’s actually just 10 times more land efficient when you count the solar panels it takes to run the factories - but the solar panels divorce our protein and fat production from arable land. They can sit on rooftops, float on fresh water reservoirs and some calmer archipelago oceans, and in our deserts. If we could just HALVE our livestock by substituting with seaweed, PF, insect-burger patties, Impossible Burgers, etc etc... we would return 15% of the habitable land back to nature, regrow 1.5 TRILLION trees - and soak up about HALF our historical CO2 emissions. Or if PF turns out as good as Tony Seba predicts, PF will bankrupt ALL livestock grazing, return 34% of the habitable land on earth to nature, and soak up all historical emissions as 3 TRILLION trees regrow and ecosystems and soil recovers.
A REAL OVERSHOOT EXPERT CELEBRATES ENERGY TRANSITION
If anyone understands Overshoot - it’s Johan Rockstrom of the Potsdam Institute. You may have seen him in Time Magazine or the Netflix Series “Breaking Boundaries” analysing how close we are to breaking the 9 Planetary Boundaries. He’s a hero of mine! Being a climatologist who has recently presented on why we absolutely CANNOT risk going past 1.5 degrees - he gets it! But even he has hope in the energy transition. Why? Because after decades of subsidies, wind and solar are finally so cheap that he talks about how they are now on a doubling curve of every 4 years. It's happening. We still need to fight big oil and gas and coal, and REALLY work on Conservation, recycling, walkable New Urban town plans, and all that. But if Johan says there is hope in the energy transition, there is hope in the energy transition. https://youtu.be/7KfWGAjJAsM?t=1191
He’s also a co-author and contributor to the Earth4All project run by the Club of Rome, Potsdam Institute, and others. They predict that as we create a Bright Green civilisation running on renewables and give everyone everything they need - we can bring on an earlier demographic transition and see the global population back to 6 billion by 2100!
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/27/world-population-bomb-may-never-go-off-as-feared-finds-study
Pessimists are going to have to come up with something more detailed than “It just can’t work because of Overshoot - man!”
💬 In the transition to a renewable energy system, we can adapt, reduce demand, improve efficiency, deploy new technologies, and simply be happy with a more limited supply of energy 👌
Bullseye! 🙂 The lengthy Ahmed’s quote holds much truth as well. As Tim Morgan doesn’t tire to intone: we can run our economy on renewables—just *not* on the scale & complexity of the current.
To sum up, technology rides the energy coattails, and slaves to the laws of physics. Thermodynamics rulez. No technological process can *gainfully convert diffuse energy into concentrated form* 🤷
Speaking of slaves, check out a highly illuminating & educating & entertaining beautifully drawn & worded fabulous comic strip featuring a quite peculiar protagonist --> stuartmcmillen.com/comic/energy-slaves 👌😉
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PS The "New Energy Economy": An Exercise in Magical Thinking is a highly recommended longread --> https://www.manhattan-institute.org/green-energy-revolution-near-impossible. Admirably well reasoned, with imperial tons of apt pics, analogies, and numerical examples. At the very least, skim its executive summary 😇 [Alternatively, nicely formatted downloadable pdf --> https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/R-0319-MM.pdf]
To whet the apettite ↓↓ 😊
🗨 About 60 pounds of batteries are needed to store the energy equivalent to that in one pound of hydrocarbons. Meanwhile, 50–100 pounds of various materials are mined, moved, and processed for one pound of battery produced.
🗨 In rough terms, it requires the energy equivalent of about 100 barrels of oil to fabricate a quantity of batteries that can store a single barrel of oil-equivalent energy.
But one barrel of oil is gone after it is burned, whereas the batteries will last for a long time. Cycle them a hundred times, and you are even in terms of energy processed. Even the old lead batteries could be cycled hundreds of times, the current lithium ones will last thousands of cycles -- then they can be recycled -- oil cannot be recycled. And consider that the energy coming from a barrel of oil can be used at best with about 30% efficiency, whereas batteries typically have efficiency of the order of 95%. There are always different points of view to evaluate the same facts
Ok then, whence does the energy come to feed the batteries? There're always ways to conveniently omit the crucial points, and go the distraction route 😏
Again, energy density is the cipher key. Give this Manhattan treatise an honest try 🙂
With a POU EROI of more than 40, we use PV panels. Plenty of energy available. Energy density is not the "cipher key" -- EROI is
You might want to overhaul the foundational structure of your beliefs wrt how economy functions 🙂 --> surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2023/08/16/260-known-knowns (cogent & lucid succinct picture drawn straight from first principles 🔥👌).
🗨 The dissipative-landfill system, and its consumerism corollary, are choices, made possible by the availability of *abundant dense* energy.
🗨 the scale of the production process is determined by the density of the initial energy input.[... I]n short, if the density of energy inputs is reduced, the resulting economy is smaller.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
🗨 “sustainable growth”, something which would only be possible if technological ingenuity could repeal the laws of physics
🗨 material limits, a concept which extends from finite energy and other natural resources to finite environmental tolerance of economic activities
Nope again. Economy is an energy system; period, full stop. Finance is just a proxy, and quite ingenious at manipulative maths at that. Dig deeper how your delicious EROI is calculated, with a keen eye on what's [conveniently] overlooked 🙂
Here is how EROI should be correctly calculated:
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/12/7098.
EROI is not a financial concept, it is a physical concept.
Sorry, you're right 😊 About EROI's physicality that is, not about correct calculation for renewables 🫢
I still retain hope you'll read my above link closely. We all know hopes' stubborn attitude towards dying 🤸
Density does not matter - work achieved does. If we electrify everything in mining and smelting and transport and our homes - solar and wind are perfect. Australia’s industrial giants - worth a full THIRD of our entire stock-market - have a plan to Electrify Everything to provide industrial heat to mine and smelt steel, copper, aluminium etc. They’re going to build their own energy supplies to be immune from future world energy crisis - and are big names like BHP, Bluescope steel, etc. They plan to build 3 TIMES Australia’s 2020 electricity grid in capacity just for the domestic market (by 2050) - and another 3 TIMES that amount of electricity for all the green exports! 6 TIMES the grid! All possible now renewables are 1/4 nuclear’s LCOE (Lazard) and still falling. From p 45 of their Feb 2023 PDF https://energytransitionsinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Pathways-to-Industrial-Decarbonisation-report-Updated-August-2023-Australian-Industry-ETI.pdf
"No technological process can *gainfully convert diffuse energy into concentrated form* 🤷"
What are you talking about? If someone has solar panels on their roof and an EV in the driveway, it's like having an oil refinery on their roof. Actually it's BETTER! Install the solar panels once every 30 years instead of shipping oil from the other side of the planet and driving down the highway every week. THEN instead of BURNING OIL for 20% of the energy to become forward motion - WASTING 80% of the energy(!) - the electric car turns 80% of the solar energy into forward motion! So what's this 'energy dense' mantra you've inherited? OF COURSE oil and coal and gas HAD to be energy dense - because they're so dreadfully wasteful it's the only way they would have worked! We're fighting the laws of thermodynamics when we burn stuff for electricity or forward motion! But if we Electrify Everything, we find we're working WITH thermodynamics - electricity to electricity is just more efficient.
When we Electrify Everything including we’ll only need to replace 40% of the original thermal energy in fossil fuels! https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-energy-efficiency
Watch a MOSTLY electric 240 TON hybrid MINING truck drive twice the speed of the diesel truck going UP HILL while charging from hydropower on catenary lines in Canada! Does this going twice the speed mean mines will need less trucks to move the same amount of ore? Watch 60 seconds here: https://youtu.be/6TxMeHRq1mk?t=213
💬 Models may be perfectly correct
Nope. Your assumptions are wrong on this one—by the very definition of what a model is 😝
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ETA Back into serious mode, let's compare notes with SEEDS model's Tim Morgan ↓↓ 🙂
🗨 As it applies to economics,[...] what will happen is a great deal clearer than when it will happen.
A little recursive as a criticism. Don't you think so?
Sure I do: hence the fooling-around emoji 😏 And ETA to further explain, for that matter.
😝