Source: What you need to know about minerals and the clean… | Canary Media
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 to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels, the world must cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and reach net-zero emissions by 2050. To do that, it must radically ramp up production of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, electric vehicles, electrolyzers for hydrogen, and power lines.
Those technologies are far more mineral-intensive than are the 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 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 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.
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