A Fossil Fuel Economy Requires 535x More Mining Than a Clean Energy Economy | Hacker News Reader

A Fossil Fuel Economy Requires 535x More Mining Than a Clean Energy Economy

distilled.earth

24 pointsepistasis23 comments

Bad data. The 28 million tons cited for clean energy is for processed minerals. But just a pound of cobalt could require literally mining tons of ore. The numbers are off by an order of magnitude.

Furthermore, having now looked at the underlying report, I am even more skeptical.

https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in...

Some of these 2040 scenarios are insanely optimistic - like global nickel and cobalt production more than doubling in a 10 year period! And nearly all of it reliant on China.

Bad example. Most cobalt is a byproduct of mining for nickel or copper, which are the primary metals. Any cobalt sales have been bonuses.

What numbers do you estimate? I can't find a source that says that it takes a thousand pounds of mining to produce, say, a pound of iron. But nobody ever complains about steel needing to have mined minerals, and the amount of steel in an EV is several order of magnitude larger than the metals in the batteries.

Pounds?

What is this, Ye Olde Englande?

     just a year ago Fortescue removed 106.7 million tonnes of over burden while delivering 43.8 million tonnes of iron ore ...

-- from: https://www.afr.com/companies/mining/fortescue-metals-group-...

Although iron ore is a poor example as current mining sites (W.Australia, elsewhere) are extracting from high density high grade sites so there is relatively little waste.

The great issue with EV type tech is the amount of post processing of mined concentrates to extract usable materials - eg: you might want to look at the low level radioactive wastes and required long term storage that's a byproduct of lithium at Lynas sites in Malaysia.

If you're (seriously) after current global mining data, try: https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...

( warning: everything is stored as metric, although there is likely the ability to convert to hogsheads and chains for the three or so non metric countries )

Clean energy doesn't exists, you always transform something to extract 'energy' to inject it into a consumer device. You can recycle, optimise but as we have an history of much 'cleaner' economy with renewable energy consumption i can say, as a concervatory aproach. If you are 500 time less demanding on resources, you will also be 500 times less productive.

Recycling can reduce the pressure, counterbalancing diminishing density and ore grade. No fossil fuel can be recycled.

When efficiency (gain/impacts, net energy gain...) declines being able to use a then-better substitute is key. This becomes more and more true for renewables, not for fossil fuels.

I doubt it.... lithium is nasty business, also.

How much nastier than coal, or iron, or copper?

I would say those are nasty. Nobody can ever tell me how lithium is supposed to be nasty, other than the media runs lots of articles on it without any comparison to other mining.

This is a very earnest question, I'd love to find an answer to this, but have not found out yet, despite hours of research!

(As far as your doubt, which numbers are you doubting?)

> (As far as your doubt, which numbers are you doubting?)

535x

The "nastiness" also usually lumps in phony, pearl clutching concerns about human rights abuses, as if those issues aren't inherently capitalistic and present in the existing fossil fuel extraction, processing and use life cycle. One example is the "epic" Joe Rogan clip that was making the rounds late last year.

I'm sure lithium production is "nasty" but it can almost certainly be done more responsibly (especially on the labor front) and it can also be recycled once it has been extracted. This narrative reeks of big oil propaganda.

> The "nastiness" also usually lumps in phony, pearl clutching concerns about human rights abuses, as if those issues aren't inherently capitalistic and present in the existing fossil fuel extraction, processing and use life cycle. One example is the "epic" Joe Rogan clip that was making the rounds late last year.

I dont care about human right abuses in this case as it was not the subject. If anything, killing humans would probably be a benefit from an environmental standpoint (at least on Earth)...

I'm all ears, what is nasty about Lithium.

With the Salton sea works planned to start within a few yeas, it would appear that Lithium can be extracted from geothermal power station water.

Let alone the gradual growth of Sodium batteries.

> I'm all ears, what is nasty about Lithium.

production process

Say more. I've looked up the production process, not sure why I should be more upset than the far great amount of iron that gets used everyday.

It's a matter of scale. A Tesla has about 8kg of lithium. My Honda Fit has burned about 5000 gallons of gasoline over 150k miles. That means, in order to run my little passenger car they needed to mine/pump/drill about 33 thousand kilos of crude oil.

Have you also looked at the production process of lithium? Quantity used of the final product isn't everything.

Actual disposal method of used batteries also could be considered...

I might forget other factors

EV batteries are not being disposed in a landfill. The relatively few that have failed are mostly stored right now as the processes to recycle their materials are brought into production. The volumes are too low right now for a full industrial build out but pilot plants exist and can be built into full industrial recycling facilities as the need grows.

https://electrek.co/2022/10/14/us-increases-ev-battery-recyc...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35513612

https://blog.ucsusa.org/jessica-dunn/are-ev-batteries-recycl...

I don't expect there will be much of a disposal issue with lithium batteries. We already recycle the daylights out of them. I expect they will have a similar pattern to lead acid batteries.

https://www.epa.gov/hw/lithium-ion-battery-recycling#:~:text....

That's not quite equivalent though. It takes about 400kg of ore to create 1 kg of lithium. You're also not factoring in the resources to create/transmit the electricity for the Tesla which would be factored into the gas for the Fit.

Or the resources to drill, extract, refine, distribute, and deliver the gasoline, hunh?

That's true, which is probably why they said 535x instead of 4125x.

If you go look at the report they are citing, the could tell that it's only a measure of processed materials.

To produce 8kg of lithium you would need to mine about 100kg of Spodumene. Spodumene is about 6% of the mined ore in the top ten lithium mines meaning you will need to mine about 1700kg of material. This means that you will need to pump roughly 20x as much oil as raw rock from a lithium mine to run a Honda Fit instead of a Tesla.

However, after the lifespan of a vehicle, you will then start recycling. You will get the lithium back, but the oil will need to be pumped again and again.

This is only automotive too. This isn't including grid scale power generation.

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