The world needs to move from fossil fuels to renewable ones, but the narrative pushed by powerful financial, political, and environmental institutions — that it’s necessary to massively scale up mining of “transition” or “critical” minerals to achieve this — is false, a new op-ed argues.
Not only do these minerals’ extraction cause countless environmental and community harms, the numbers cited about how they are used — and the number of new mines needed — don’t add up, a recent report has shown.
-“The vast majority [of critical minerals] are used in industries that are either unrelated — or in direct opposition — to the clean energy transition,” the author writes.
On renewable energy, it’s time to debunk the ‘transition minerals’ narrative (commentary)
Submitted 12 hours ago by solo@slrpnk.net to energy@slrpnk.net
Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 11 hours ago
Regarding those minerals, Li, Ni, Co and Mn play an important role in electrification, but they don’t have to. It’s just that in recent decades we’ve built the production chains necessary for producing LIBs (Li-ion batteries), and now we’re kinda stuck with that technology. Recently, NIBs (Na-ion batteries) started to become viable, and I really hope they manage to ramp up production quickly. Seems like the author of that article was thinking of LIBs all the time and forgot about NIBs. The problem is, it takes a long time to build the production capacity and production chains.
Then there’s also copper. It’s kinda hard to ignore that one, since we can’t really electrify things when the grid can’t handle the load. Also, electric motors require lots of copper, so I can imagine that the demand for copper will remain high in the coming decades.
spankysalmon@fedinsfw.app 10 hours ago
“The grid cannot handle the load” has always been BS. Full stop.
IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago
Depending on where you are, the grid can’t even hand current loads. There’s absolutely work that needs to be done to keep up.