Minerals and the clean-energy transition: the basics

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk in the energy world about the minerals needed by clean-energy technologies and whether mineral supply problems might pose a threat to the clean-energy transition.

To hold warming beneath 1.5°C over pre-industrial levels, the world must cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. To do that, it must radically ramp up production of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, electric vehicles (EVs), electrolyzers for hydrogen, and power lines.

Those technologies are far more mineral-intensive than equivalent fossil fuel technologies. “A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car,” writes the International Energy Agency (IEA), “and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a gas-fired plant of the same capacity.” (The IEA report uses the word minerals to refer to the entire mineral and metal value chain from mining to processing operations, and I do the same here.)

Power transmission and distribution require aluminum and copper. Batteries and EVs require cobalt, lithium, and nickel. Wind turbines require rare earth elements. And so on.

In its encyclopedic 2021 report on the subject, IEA estimates that “a concerted effort to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement would mean a quadrupling of mineral requirements for clean energy technologies by 2040. An even faster transition, to hit net-zero globally by 2050, would require six times more mineral inputs in 2040 than today.”

Some individual minerals will see particularly sharp jumps. The World Bank says, “graphite and lithium demand are so high that current production would need to ramp up by nearly 500 percent by 2050 under a [2 degree scenario] just to meet demand.”

A clean-energy transition sufficient to hit 1.5° will mean an enormous rise in demand for these minerals.

This fact has been seized on by a variety of people to raise questions about the speed and sustainability of the clean-energy transition. Are we just trading one resource curse for another?

So I looked into it. It’s a complicated subject — each of these minerals poses its own specific challenges, with its own specific suppliers, supply lines, customers, and possible pain points. There’s no neat single story here.

Nonetheless, I’ll try to summarize what I found, starting at the end, with what I think are the key big-picture lessons. In the next post, we’ll get into specific technologies and minerals.

The clean-energy transition will be an environmental boon

Yes, it is true that demand for minerals will rise and that several of those minerals are currently produced in environmentally and socially problematic ways. This is a real problem — or rather, a whole nest of problems, which warrant concern and concerted action.

That being said, it’s important to keep in mind that, even under the grimmest environmental prognostications, the transition to clean energy will be a boon for humans and ecosystems alike.

It will certainly involve lower greenhouse gas emissions. The World Bank says that, under a 2 degree scenario, through 2050, renewable energy and storage would contribute approximately 16 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) greenhouse gases, “compared with almost 160 GtCO2e from coal and approximately 96 GtCO2e from gas.”

If the concern is material intensity, energy researcher Saul Griffith has done some back-of-the-envelope calculations that put the transition in perspective. Here’s what he told me:

Assigning all 328 million Americans equal share of our fossil fuel use, every American burns 1.6 tons of coal, 1.5 tons of natural gas, and 3.1 tons of oil every year. That becomes around 17 tons of carbon dioxide, none of which is captured. It is all tossed like trash into the atmosphere.

The same US lifestyle could be achieved with around 110 pounds each of wind turbines, solar modules, and batteries per person per year, except that all of those are quite recyclable (and getting more recyclable all the time) so there is reason to believe it will amount to only 50-100 pounds per year of stuff that winds up as trash.

That is a huge difference: 34,000 pounds of waste for our lifestyles the old way versus 100 pounds the new, electrified way.

These are only illustrative figures, but they show that the scale of resource extraction in a decarbonized world will be vastly, vastly smaller than what’s required to sustain a fossil-fueled society. Close to 40 percent of all global shipping is devoted to moving fossil fuels around, a gargantuan source of emissions (and strain on the ocean) that clean energy will almost wipe out. In a net-zero economy, there will be, on net, less digging, less transporting, less burning, less polluting.

The fact is, fossil fuels are a wildly destructive and inefficient way to power a society. Two thirds of the energy embedded in them ends up wasted.

That inefficiency has been rendered invisible by fossil fuels’ ubiquity and the lack of alternatives. Now that alternatives are coming into view, it’s clear that any shift away from mining, drilling, transporting, and combusting fossil fuels will dramatically ease human pressure on the biosphere and the atmosphere.

Again — I can not emphasize enough — this is no reason to ignore or gloss over the very real environmental impacts of mineral mining, processing, and transport. Though overall environmental pressure will ease in a clean-energy world, it will be concentrated in new places, among people who may not necessarily enjoy the benefits of the transition.

There are ugly and cruel ways to go about an energy transition, and there are sustainable and equitable ways to go about it. I’m strongly in favor of the latter and encourage everyone to do what they can to bring that about.

Nonetheless, either way, the broader cause is environmentally righteous.

These minerals are not rare and there’s no shortage of them

Another common misconception is that the clean-energy transition could fall short because there simply isn’t enough of certain minerals — this especially comes up around the somewhat misleadingly named rare earth elements (REEs).

It’s not true. Known reserves of all these minerals, including REEs, are much higher than demand, and “despite continued production growth over the past decades, economically viable reserves have been increasing for many energy transition minerals,” IEA writes. Reserves will rise further with new exploration and detection methods.

Currently, demand is forecast to grow much faster than supply. As that happens, there are bound to be chokepoints and price fluctuations.

But those stresses will be temporary, especially if policymakers anticipate and prepare for them. New caches of minerals will be found and recycling will increase in scope and effectiveness. There will be supply problems, but there is no Supply Problem, no global scarcity of any mineral that will put a hard limit on the transition.

Minerals do pose risks to the transition

Temporary minerals shortages or disruptions could result in “more expensive, delayed, or less efficient [ene