[MCN] Renewable Energy Needs Huge Mineral Supply

[Lance Olsen]

Climate Central  November 2, 2013
Renewable Energy Needs Huge Mineral Supply

By Tim Radford, Climate News Network <http://www.climatenewsnetwork.net/2013/10/renewables-need-huge-mineral-supply/>
<<https://climatenewsnetwork.net/2013/10/renewables-need-huge-mineral-supply/ <https://climatenewsnetwork.net/2013/10/renewables-need-huge-mineral-supply/>>>

EXCERPTS

LONDON – Humankind could be about to exchange one kind of energy crisis for another. The switch from the finite store of fossil fuels to renewable sources could involve a huge additional demand for the world’s equally finite store of metals and minerals <http://www.climatenewsnetwork.net/2013/01/are-we-doomed-it-all-depends/>.

Three French CRNS scientists – Olivier Vidal and Nicholas Arndt of the University of Grenoble and Bruno Goffé of Aix-Marseille University – issue the warning in Nature Geoscience <http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n11/full/ngeo1993.html>.

They say that to match the power generated by fossil fuels or nuclear power stations, the construction of solar energy farms and wind turbines will gobble up 15 times more concrete, 90 times more aluminum and 50 times more iron, copper and glass. Right now wind and solar energy meet only about 1 percent of global demand; hydroelectricity meets about 7 percent.

The trio argue that if the contribution from wind turbines and solar energy to global energy production is to rise from the current 400 terawatt hours to 12,000 terawatt hours in 2035, and 25,000 terawatt hours in 2050, that will require 3,200 million tons of steel, 310 million tons of aluminum and 40 million tons of copper to construct state-of-the-art generating systems.

And, they say, right now 10 percent of the world’s energy budget is spent in digging up and processing mineral resources. Unless something astounding happens, this fraction will get larger as high quality ores become harder to find, and more difficult to extract.

“Humanity faces a tremendous challenge to make more rational use of the Earth’s non-renewable raw materials,” they conclude. “The energy transition to renewables can only work if all the resources are managed simultaneously, as part of a global, integral whole.”

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“A new area of study is the field that some of us are beginning to call social traps. The term refers to situations in society that contain traps formally like a fish trap, where men or whole societies get themselves started in some direction or some set of relationships that later prove to be unpleasant or lethal and that they see no easy way to back out of or to avoid."

John Platt. Social Traps. American Psychologist, August 1973

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