Toxic rare earth mining industry at the heart of the green energy transition
globalwitness.org
globalwitness.org
The phrase "green energy transition" is mentioned only in the headline, and is completely irrelavent to the point being made in article, which is that unregulated mining in poor developing countries is bad.
> unregulated mining in poor developing countries
that's the worst part of the chain, it's the processing of concentrates.
With, say, lithium for batteries a great deal of the mining takes place in Australia and that mining produces a spodumene concentrate which is shipped onwards for processing - which creates acid lakes in holding dams and low level radioactive waste as a by product.
This has recently occured on location in countries such as China and Malaysia :
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/3242368/mal...
https://apnews.com/article/malaysia-australia-mining-lynas-r...
but has recently expanded to locations in Australia and (soon) Texas and other US states.
I am genuinely worried about the squeeze we are in now between conserving and protecting nature and transitioning away from fossil fules. I am active in the green party i Norway where we are fighting to wind down our oil production in a responsible and controlled maner.
But alot of the new non-fossil energy production is now added to the existing energy mix, not replacing fossil fuels.
Close by where I live (45 min drive), Google is building a huge server park that will require approximately 5% of Norways total electricity production. The region does not have enough power and energy companies are now in a frenzy to build solar parks along the delicate norwegian coastline in the south. This will mostly go to cover the needs of Googles new datacenter, not replace fossil fuels in any way.
Just because someone calls something "green" does not automatically make it so.
I agree completely. Global CO2 output is still increasing, afaik, despite all the work on alternatives so far.
We need much more emphasis on using less energy.
Happily, the most effective way to use less energy is to electrify with renewables, which is a major part of the green transition
That are often somewhat fungible. Using less is always good.
This might be self-sabotaging in that it helps climate change deniers get elected. Politicians have finite political capital and degrowth is unpopular. Better use political capital for sustainable growth and accelerating renewables. Win-win narratives are the only thing that work politically.
Plus I don't think degrowth is even necessary. There isn't a zero-sum tradeoff between growth and emissions.
Google data centers are not examples of a "green energy transition".
Like for many other inventions, it is likely that commercial iron nitride magnets would have appeared only if the original patent holders, who do not seem able to solve whatever technological problems exist that prevent their use, would have published which are the problems that block them and would have been willing to license the patents in advantageous terms to those able to solve such problems.
From the little published information it is not clear whether the iron nitride material is too difficult to produce or whether the crystalline structure is unstable in time, leading to a short lifetime.
Do you know how replacement and phase out works in the real world? Hint, you don't just immediately install 100% new capacity and then rip out the still working old capacity.
The situation may be somewhat unusual here in Norway, since basically all electricity is generated by hydro dams (~90%). We have made large strides the last two decades regarding energy savings (LED lighting, heat pumps and better insulation), and this has largely made it possible for us to transition rapidly from fossil cars to EVs while keeping our use of electricity quite stable.
What we are seeing now is a rapid expansion of mega datacenters that lays claim to extreme amount of electricity, more than these regions can steadily supply. This means that we need even more electricity on top of the hydro we have. This again means rapid expansion of solar parks and the destruction of vulnerable nature. Just the one Google datacenter now being built in my region will lay claim to ~5% of Norways energy use!
This worries me, and makes me doubt the "green" label on these projects.
You shouldn't be, as pretty much the biggest thing you can do to conserve and protect nature is to transition away from fossil fuels.
Which you maybe already know since your example of a new data center has nothing to do with the transition from fossil fuels, and would only be much, much worse if their plan to power it was to burn fossil fuels.
This is a really good point that worries me quite a bit as well. Energy is essentially fungible so any energy used by wasteful and pointless endeavors such as cryptocurrency mining or model training is energy that's not going toward reducing our use of fossil fuels. Worse it's energy that still has externalities associated with production and storage such as mining for solar/batteries destroying natural areas and hydroelectric impacting river ecosystems.
Fossil fuels should be phased out ASAP and the way to do that is to stop increasing energy usage and to ensure renewable energy is used only for activities that are actually necessary such as food production and heating/cooling.
As someone working in the "cloud computing" industry I see companies spending huge amounts of energy to index non-production logs they'll never look at. I see developers wasting huge amounts of energy to create useless models for generating content nobody will ever look at. I see companies leaving huge infrastructures running 24/7 just in case someone might want to get an Ad served at 3am. And I see the enormous grey data center housing all that junk that now sits nearby where there used to be a pristine forest full of wildlife.
>Close by where I live (45 min drive), Google is building a huge server park that will require approximately 5% of Norways total electricity production.
It's amazing how much these things consume and at the end of the day they aren't doing anything of value. Communities really need to come together to prevent new data centers and remove existing ones.
What OP is talking about is total impact of renewables. Just because renewables are the future and on paper are less polluting does not mean they are currently less polluting when everything is taken into account and people need to realize that. Transitions are messy, disrupting and during a period are less efficient than what they replace.
I challenge you to find a credible source that shows they are.
But we all know that will never stop :( Bribe a few pols and off we go. For context look at e-waste which is being dumped into poor countries. People there are working in the dumps striping the waste for valuable items like gold and living on the edge of starvation.
Until there is a worldwide enforceable environmental laws, we will see these mines popping up all over the place.
The green energy transition may be a more recent consumer.
It's still shit, but implying this wouldn't happen if we stuck with coal and nuclear is silly.
https://isnap.nd.edu/assets/255639/radioactivity_lecture_18....
While the International Energy Agency fully champion the use of renewables, they also take a vey pragmatic data based approach to global energy consumption and production and believe that nuclear power must compliment future energy creation more or less as it does today; providing some 20% of total electricity in advanced economies.
Saying nuclear is "effectively irrelevant" is numerically equivilant to saying the third child in a two parent family is "effectively irrelevant".
They acknowledge that AGW is real and they push for an optimal path forward through energy transition .. and they don't see a downside to maintaining existing reactors and maintaining current share.
Thank you for your opinion none the less.
The argument, as it has been for about 40 years now, is that the people saying it is not cost competitive tend to have high overlap with people who are changing regulations to ... make it very expensive. If the regulatory framework was sane, it'd be quite cost competitive.
The problem nuclear has is the economic learning curve has been inverted. That can only be caused by overregulation.
That reads like a creedal statement. We see the same effect in all regulatory jurisdictions, indicating the effect is instead intrinsic. A more fundamental observation is that the more we learn about building nukes, the more expensive they get.
Getting rid of coal (and natural gas, to lesser extent) should happen ASAP, and nuclear can be a part of the solution for the transition period.
The IEA WEO is infamous for its inaccurate solar capacity forecasts over the last 10-15 years. They repeatedly assumed annual solar additions would flatten out (i.e., future years will not see more additions than recent years), despite the roughly exponential growth that was obviously happening. After doing it 5 years in a row, you have to wonder what was going wrong…
That said, in some small assuage to your worry there are large sectors that are transitioning to replacement of fossil fuels.
Global scale mining operations, such as Australia's ~ one billion tonne per annum iron ore industry consume large quantities of fuel for trucks, trains, and electricity generation for shovels, loaders, crushers, conveyots, screens, etc.
https://fortescue.com/what-we-do/green-energy-research/green...
https://fortescue.com/news-and-media/news/2024/03/15/world-s...
https://reneweconomy.com.au/fortescue-starts-work-on-world-f...
Infinity Train: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuLrc1u43gU
CO2 reductions aren’t necessarily 1:1, but are usually very close.
So, adding renewable energy is replacing fossil fuels, even if the fossil plants don’t immediately shut down.
It’s a lot like replacing car trips with walking/biking/transit and then complaining that you still have a car.
What we see now is that the data center industry lays claim to a lot of power generated in many regions, increasing the demand for electricity at an alarming pace. The same seems to be happening other places in Europe. We keep needing and using more electricity, without really moving away from fossil sources. And the renewable energy sources are far from clean to produce, wind and batteries require a lot of minerals and extractive processes that is highly polluting and Co2 expensive in other parts of the world.
I do not know enough (yet) to be categorical in my claims, but I have started looking into the numbers, and from what I have seen so far, I'm only getting more worried about the path we are heading down.
But a few things to note:
- embedded CO2 in renewable gen is very low compared to fossil fuels
- lithium is abundant and cobalt/nickel are not needed in most battery applications (and lithium may be replaced in the future, too)
- waste from solar is trivial compared to things like municipal waste, coal ash. I think wind is similar, but I’m less sure - either way, recycling is improving
- (in the US, at least) we have plenty of land for renewables, especially compared to things like corn crops used for transportation ethanol (a silly thing in my opinion) and pasture used for beef cattle (something there will likely be a lot less of in the future)
Anything you find while looking into the numbers that disagrees with the above points is possibly outdated or just wrong.