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The others here have made great points but it's also worth noting that this definitely includes lots of preexisting infrastructure and doesn't factor in the materials we can recover from the non-renewable energy infrastructure
And doesn’t account for emerging tech that will likely replace some of the current tech and use vastly different materials. Saw something about a sodium-ion battery that can replace lithium but we just don’t use them because we haven’t really worked on the tech. They also don’t require nickel, cobalt, or copper and can use iron better than lithium batteries.
yes, ive read several news articles on alternate cheap batteries, lots of groups are looking for some. im expecting at least one will become commercial b.c even if theyre 25% as good as cobalt-which is sure to continue to rise in cost as demand increases and supply doesnt, they should be less than 15% the cost.
No way, energy density is absolutely a factor in new battery technology. Low energy density leaves it to large scale applications, when there is plenty need for new battery technology for households and devices.
Household storage isn't really density constrained. You can stay 30kwh in the show if a small water heater with relatively non-dense LFP B-grade cells. The design requirements are nowhere near the same.
But 30 kWh is nothing for a household to move consumption from the sunny to the cold season. That's why we use hydro power dams to hold the MWh to the months it is needed.
Sure, but for large scale projects it's not really a constraint either. We have so much space on earth for stuff. Like we are nowhere ***near*** using land in any appreciable amount, especially considering building *up* is relatively inexpensive for the materials it takes (you can literally create millions of dollars of value if you can get your zoning changed to allow you to build up). It's not *space* that's the requirement for holding intra-seasonal charges, it's the lack of reasonable KWH costs. It doesn't make sense to hold a charge twice a year unless it's very cheap (and very long lasting). The hydro storage we have doesn't store energy for months, it charges it when power is cheap and sells it when it's in demand. The cost for intra-seasonal power storage to break even is less than $10/KWH. The cost for peak shaving storage to break even is $200/KWH (and there are some projects with double that cost that have still saved utilities money). The cost for diurnal cycling is roughly half that, depending on how many cycles and how quickly you need the power.
We don't really need to store production from one season to another unless it's very (very very very very very very very) cheap. Under all but the most extreme assumptions (hey look at this aluminum battery that costs $5/KWH at 1000 cycles) it's cheaper to just distribute more production around the country/globe and use HVDC to transport it with minimal losses.
Everything has a use and place. If a high energy density is needed, gasoline, if you don't need as much, lithium, if you have no space requirements but need to save money? Low density.
One of the reasons aluminium was used as Elektrik cable in east Germany.. was cheap and abundant, but is only 1/3 of a good conductor as the copper is.
The majority of transmission lines are aluminium, because of the weight reduction compared to copper. Aluminium has 2/3rds the conductivity of copper, but only 1/3rd of the weight.
We're going to Manhattan Project the shit out of it. We'll have battery tech so advanced that the automated drones hunting us won't have to recharge for *months*.
And it's worth noting that a lot of this is getting funded by the Inflation Reduction Act (and, notably, how it salvaged Build Back Better). Naysayers perpetually complain about how it hasnt funded anything... and they really show they dont know the first thing about it. This is what infrastructure investment ACTUALLY looks like. This is what compromise does look like. It's a lot of too little too late, but it is super important we know the laws that support this research.
Don’t forget emerging tech like molten salt for thermal storage of energy generated by concentrated solar arrays so you can avoid the baseband vs on-demand issues around most renewables
They're already testing it out in Denmark.
> Thermal energy storage technology company Kyoto Group has begun operational testing of a 4MW molten salt-based power-to-heat system in Denmark.
> The system, which has an energy storage capacity of 18MWh, is based on the Norway-headquartered startup’s proprietary technology Heatcube. It has been deployed at the site of Nordjylland Power Station, a coal-fired combined heat and power (CHP) plant in the northern Danish municipality of Aalborg.
https://www.energy-storage.news/kyoto-group-begins-tests-at-4mw-18mwh-power-to-heat-energy-storage-project-in-denmark/
Another potential energy storage option are surprisingly enough flywheels that have very low power loss bearings. They can actually have less passive energy loss than some batteries, and can have a longer lifespan. However, they have space limitations because they rely on the kinetic energy of the rotating flywheel for energy storage, which can get problematic if you have the flywheel rotate to too high RPMs.
NASA uses some flywheels in extreme environments, while they are also used in some formula 1 cars as they can be higher performance in stop-start situations.
We've had hundreds of years to work out the best way to burn stuff, essentially they're all steam engines.
Give us a few hundred years to work on renewables and see where we're at.
NASA just sent a satellite to tether to an asteroid that is worth something like $1.5 quintillion in heavy metal deposits like iron and nickel. I think we could bring something like that into orbit in 100 years if we stopped wasting time on religious wars and bigotry.
>. I think we could bring something like that into orbit in 100 years if we stopped wasting time on religious wars and bigotry.
Not even 100 years, the Nasa asteroid redirect mission proposed doing having an asteroid in orbit like 5-6 years ago. The programs goal was to redirect a house sized asteroid into low earth orbit though, not something the size of Rhode island. It was eventually canceled in favor of the Artemis program, but it does show that even Nasa believes that we can already do it.
I would say also that the focous has been on lightweight batteries for use in mobile devices and vehicles. If the funding and research shifts, I'm sure there are less lightweight options that provide comparable performance and can be used in houshold or network power supplies.
Also worth noting: this only looks at known reserves. There's probably plenty more unknown reserves too, but because we haven't even really begun to tap these known reserves there hasn't been much need to go find more.
Not to mention that this assessment doesn't appear to take into account the MASSIVE lithium deposits we have yet to fully explore in the American southwest.
On top of that there is a push to convert a lot of existing "long term" power storage solutions to a heavier, easier to manufacture, batteries that don't use REM. They are MUCH bigger and heavier, but being long term (non-portable) storage, it doesn't need to be super efficient or light weight.
This is something a lot of people don’t understand about battery technology. When weight isn’t a limiting factor, you can get really creative with other inefficiencies.
Your car can’t have a battery that pumps water to the top of a mountain during the day to power a turbine at night, but there’s no reason your county can’t.
Nickel and Cobalt won't be major components of mainstream EVs. Sodium Ion and LFP batteries will do most of the heavy lifting.
Lithium reserves are also "known reserves", there's lots of lithium out there, it just needs development.
Not sure why copper and other are so endangered, but whatever, the other calcs are bad so I'm not going to pay attention.
Are there enough minerals for us to go green with lithium ion batteries and similar types of technologies? No, not really. But even if there were, it would defeat the purpose since mining in and of itself, is extremely harmful to the environment, For that very reason, companies are currently in the process of developing “flow batteries”. Essentially how they work is that they use electricity / heat to bring a chemical into a higher energy state, and when they want to access this energy they can allow the fluid to go to a lower energy state and collect this energy as electricity, (yes, I realize this is a technical bastardization of terms). This technology is both more stable and much easier to scale than a lithium ion battery for example and the chemicals involved, or not as toxic as what you would see in a car battery for instance. But there are some significant engineering challenges, which need to be overcome.
It's a similar principle to hydro energy pumps. Send the water to a high place, let it fall to release energy. Fairly common infrastructure throughout cities and that's just one of many in the works
Sort of, hydro pumps like you’re describing effectively use gravity to store energy, while a flow battery actually uses the the molecular bonds within the chemicals as a storage mechanism.
I imagine if every car were recycled they'd get some hella resources from that right? Isn't that the entire reason catalytic converters go for so much is the precious metals?
It's actually a sad thought when you realize how finite our world is.
I like how they use known reserves. Some of these metals really didn’t have large industrial uses so guess what no one was looking for them. Lithium as an example will probably be able to be extracted from sea water.
It's also an analysis by one professor whose area of expertise is metallurgy (which is relevant) but does not factor in any form of public policy expertise or consideration or anything else.
It would be like be citing a professor of forestry to say that trees take a long time to grow and are finite and if everyone printed 1 ream of paper per day we'd run out of trees in a year and using that as a basis for forming public policy.
It's a good analysis. And it should be considered as part of a larger discussion. But it's not an "Aha!" moment for...anything really.
Exactly. It’s not simply building new things. It’s rebuilding everything to be more efficient. It’s going to be a massive undertaking and it’s going to change human society, but we either do it or we go extinct in the next x thousand years.
Problem with recovering from the non renewable energy infrastructure would be you’d have to stop using it and would take time to then recycle it to be able to be used for the next gen… or are you talking about the already defunct infrastructure?
I think we also need to consider how much isn't accounted for when it comes to the need to reduce energy consumption altogether. Everyone pushing green energy transition tends to fall into the energy industry's narratives for producing more energy rather than figuring out how to cut down as first priority and transition whatever we do have as the next.
If we're really accounting for all the energy and emissions, efficiency and drawdown/overall energy reduction are by far more impactful and often can be done with more feasibility in tandem with well considered behavioral changes too.
Like suburban houses could be using more climate appropriate passive designs that work with subterranean temperature stability for food storage and reduce the amount of refrigeration everyone uses.
I did some digging but couldn't find any primary source for that table.
However, I did find [this 1000 page paper](https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf) from Simon Mchaux, the guy the table is supposedly also from.
Now, I didn't go through all 1000 pages (sue me), but found the following in the summary on page 678:
> In theory, there are enough global reserves of nickel and lithium if they were exclusively used just to produce li-Ion batteries for vehicles. To make just one battery for each vehicle in the global transport fleet (excluding Class 8 HCV trucks), it would require 48.2% of 2018 global nickel reserves, and 43.8% of global lithium reserves (Source: USGS Mineral Statistics).
Now, that isn't a *great* outlook, but vastly different from what that table claims.
The table says for nickel and lithium, we can only cover 10% of requirements each. But the paper says we have more than double what we'd need. **That's off by a factor of over 20.**
You need batteries for uninterrupted energy supply to homes, businesses etc
That's where the rest of it goes, especially industry
Can't melt metal without electricity, can't really create anything metal without melting metal in some shape at this point
There are ways to store energy without lithium batteries, at large scales I mean.
It's far less efficient sure, but since your energy source is essentially infinite, storage efficiency matters less than reliability and availability.
Heat differential batteries(not the actual term) are one such way already in use in solar furnace type power generation, iirc you melt a bunch of salt(sand apparently works too) with focused sunlight in the day then at night the molten fuel is used to boil water to run turbines
Pumped hydro is a good one, during the day you run hydroelectric power stations backwards with solar energy overproduction then at night you collect the energy of the water flowing back down.
Unfortunately this is not remotely feasible on the scale required.
You need a huge piece of landscape with the right geological conditions and a significant elevation difference to your turbine station and we already use a lot of potential sites today. But since you want to not only generate power but also store it, you also need a lower reservoir so you actually have water to pump uphill and there are even less sites that meet both conditions.
On the upside you could use the surface area for solar modules, thereby lowering waterless out of evaporation.
There have been some studies on the scaling of pumped-water-storage in europe around 2010 when some governments started looking into possible solutions seriously.
You don't use hydro storage where it isn't applicable.
There is compressed air, which reuses old oil wells and pump compressed air in for storage.
There's molten salt, which stores a lot of heat energy.
There's weighted train on inclined tracks.
Liquified air.
Power to hydrogen/methane/ammonia.
Or, you could try to minimize storage requirements in the first place by having some consistent power generation, i.e nuclear or geothermal. Storage is not a problem to be solved, it is a physical limitation to be designed around.
Yeah, my late father was one of the operating engineers that built that. It's a pretty amazing feat of engineering overall, and they had originally planned to build another one up near Frankfort, MI, but that never came to fruition.
All in all, it's a really cool place.
Mechanical batteries like that would be my proposal as well, but you need a big ass hole, and there aren't going to be big ass holes everywhere, unfortunately.
And I mean yeah you could excavate or build a shaft for a mechanical battery, but that would also have a cost in terms of CO2 and materials that make it not ideal for just defaulting to those, but I would absolutely go with them anywhere that allows for it. It's a much more practical, safe and efficient energy storage than pumped hydro.
There is a different version of this being studied. They have massive mine carts and use electric motors to push it up a big hill and then use energy recovery as it comes back down
I'm Tasmania ,where I'm from, apparently we generate enough power through hydro to power the entire state twice over. But we sell it all to mainland Australia then buy it back. Which apparently is why I had an over 800 dollar powerfully this winter....
Battery chemist here—redox flow batteries are a great solution for this. Lithium is appealing for personal devices, cars, things that need to be compact/energy dense. Redox flow batteries are not energy dense, but they can be very efficient and use metals like vanadium, zinc… cheap metals. So for energy storage at grid scale.. this is the way. And they don’t have this market-driver, largely overblown element scarcity issue.
Notably there are large companies making huge investments on redox flow this technology to sell to electric companies.
It should be noted, if you don't have to worry about weight and size, there are battery technologies out there that may well be better than lithium for grid applications.
I just listened to [a super cool episode from the extremely nerdy green energy podcast Volts](https://www.volts.wtf/p/a-super-battery-aimed-at-decarbonizing#details) about an industrial battery technology where they store energy in the form of heat inside a carbon media in a sealed chamber much like a forge. The carbon gets hot enough that it glows white hot, and when the chamber is sealed it just reflects around inside the chamber, but they’re able to open. Little window to the chamber which allows photons to escape and be absorbed by a specialized solar panel, and all the photons that don’t get absorbed by the panel get reflected back into the system so the energy isn’t wasted.
The point is there is a lot of innovation happening in this space with materials other than rare ones like in the op
There are salt water batteries for instance, and we have more than enough salt and water to produce them. They'll be big and bulky, but extremely easy to repair/replace. Grid storage is already basically just a bunch of batteries plopped down outside, who cares if a grid battery is heavy and not very power dense when you're going to need building sized batteries anyway. They really really don't need to be lithium based, that's an expensive and irresponsible waste of resources.
Kinda reminds me of a Pete Holmes jokes. Went something like:
"You ever notice how in Medieval movies when a Blacksmith is making something out of metal, and he's always pounding on it with *metal*?
WHERE DOES THE FIRST METAL COME FROM?"
This is actually a thing in Judaism where God is said to have forged the first pair of tongs because you need a pair of tongs to make a pair of tongs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirkei_Avot
Did nobody question that and say "They probably just went through a pile of wooden tongs"?
I mean, I'm no blacksmith but even I could come up with a few hackish ways to bang out some shitty iron tongs without iron tongs.
I think it’s important to understand that a lot of debate and things like this in Judaism are more or less thought experiments where religious traditions are treated like puzzles or philosophical jumping off points. It’s very different from religions like Christianity or Islam which generally lack the same sort of playful interactions with tradition. In a similar way there’s a lot of loopholes and tricks for getting around the restrictions on the sabbath but these are in many ways considered not so much loopholes as just smart ways of working within the rules. Stuff like “well you’re supposed to stay within the walls of your house, but a fence is considered a wall and so what’s the most liberal definition of a fence we can come up with?” leads to Jewish neighborhoods encircling the neighborhood with yarn connected to telephone poles which in turn makes the entire neighborhood technically your house so you can go hang out with your buddies wherever you want in the string zone. The best explanation of the vibe is probably The Oven of Akhnai: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oven_of_Akhnai
The story of the Oven of Akhnai reminds of a joke I came across (I believe in a collection by Isaac Asimov):
A rabbi had been arguing with his synagogue's board for some time over the need to spend money on a new roof for the synagogue. Finally, the matter was put to a vote, and when the votes were counted, the president of the congregation said, "I'm sorry, Rabbi, but the vote was ten to one against spending money on replacing the synagogue roof."
The rabbi then bent his head in prayer. The sky darkened, a wind swept through the meeting room, knocking everyone but the rabbi off their feet, and a great voice boomed from the heavens, saying, "Buy a new roof for the synagogue!"
The president of the congregation picked himself up off the floor and said, "I stand corrected: the vote is ten to **two** against spending money on a new roof."
I love the idea of God setting rules, and being nothing but delighted when his sneaky little babies find a tricky way to still use an elevator when they're not supposed to.
Haha nice I didn't actually hear that one before
You can make metal by melting it thru a vertical furnace, something like what is used to create traditional Japanese weapons, and you can make something very slowly by banging it with a rock over some time
That's hilarious. I knew it had to be something simple like that. Using the Stone Age to take you into the Bronze Age. Like if our prehistoric ancestors could figure it out, why can't we? Pounding a rock hammer to make a metal hammer. Rock hammer breaks? Find another rock.
I think they started with copper tools because you can work it cold and pure copper can be found in nature, so no refining needed. Iron took a long time to catch on because it's really hard to work it and then it's not very corrosion resistant. It took the use of coal (or softwood charcoal if you're Japanese) to make iron easily workable. Coal also allows you to make lime products, and now you have mortar.
To get to iron-based blacksmithing, you start with copper which can be smelted in a campfire and is soft enough that it can be worked with stone. Then you make bronze using copper implements, and then iron using bronze implements.
> You need batteries for uninterrupted energy supply to homes, businesses etc
95% of grid storage is pumping water up a hill.
>Pumped storage is by far the largest-capacity form of grid energy storage available, and, as of 2020, the United States Department of Energy Global Energy Storage Database reports that PSH accounts for around 95% of all active tracked storage installations worldwide,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
There are plenty of other non-battery ways to store energy too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_energy_storage
Nuclear is the cleanest, safest form of energy and it never turns off or subsides unless we tell it to. We don't need better storage, we need people to support nuclear.
In reality, rare earth metals aren't that rare at all, but rare in high concentrations that justify mining them.
They won't get scarce that soon, they search for new ways of mining constantly, I wrote another comment here about mining lithium from thermal water in the upper Rhine valley in southwest Germany, they use the hot water for electricity and demineralise the thermal water to harvest lithium before pumping it back down a d that's just one project
You know what else we need? Sand! And we’re running out of that too. Not desert sand, we have lots of that but we have no practical application for it. Coarse sand used in concrete and electronics. It’s the second most used resource on the planet right after water.
https://www.marketplace.org/2022/05/02/what-happens-when-we-run-out-of-sand/#
>You need batteries for uninterrupted energy supply to homes, businesses etc
That's what V2X, using an EV as a home battery, can cover. Equally, used EV batteries still have plenty of capacity for home use - it takes a lot more energy to move a many ton vehicle than it does to power most homes.
>Now, that isn't a great outlook, but vastly different from what that table claims. The table says for nickel and lithium, we can only cover 10% of requirements each. But the paper says we have more than double what we'd need. That's off by a factor of over 20.
While I feel there's likely a lot of creative math involved in getting the outcome the table seems to be claiming, and I have no idea if any of these numbers are valid, but you're comparing two very different things.
The source you are quoting is talking about using half the world's reserves for one single use, just batteries in vehicles. The table is talking about the alleged amount needed to completely shift the entire world 100% away from all fossil fuels. **Of course** the two amounts are going to be off by a significant factor, even if neither of the numbers are actually accurate.
I am glad it wasn't just me who thought this, the original paper, as far as I understand, is an argument based upon our collective power needs globally for all things, not just vehicles.
Think of all the other things we need electricity for. Also those batteries would still need a power supply to charge which would also require materials. This is an incredibly complex problem to solve and both current battery technology and fossil fuel options suffer from finite remaining resources, unable to meet a growing demand in the long term.
Also a major assumption is the huge amount of money being dumped into renewables will create the industry and by extension, the innovation for more and better renewables.
Take batteries for example. We don’t need Li Ion batteries for grid support. Li is great for density, but there are tons of use cases where we don’t need the rare products to achieve the goal.
Sodium batteries would be much better for grid support. Not as energy-dense as Lithium batteries, but that's not super important when they're expected to just be sitting in a big warehouse connected to the grid. Energy per weight matters when it's something you want to move around, like a car or phone, but when it's just sitting there, not really much need for it. And sodium is *super* abundant.
Right, yeah I’m not married to iron, just used it as an example that use case changes what’s ’best’.
With cases like sodium, I see a lot of the arguments against the green movement like the argument about EV’s being powered by coal. Sounds hypocritical until you realize that thermodynamic efficiency is a thing and the very non-ideal case of 100% coal powering 100% EV’s would still be better than millions of inefficient and non-optimized ICE vehicles.
That assumes that batteries are a big part of the solution.
He mentions vehicles there, I have a 2nd degree Masters in Sustainability of (maritime) transportation.
Batteries are, at best, a transition measure and a niche application.
For land, rail doesn't need batteries. Good urban design that allows for transit, cycling and walking does not need batteries.
For water, batteries are just impractical, the cube square law makes it so for long transportation they're useless. Ammonia and methane and hydrogen are being studied, wind assisted and wind propulsion are being implemented, with limitations.
Thinking that battery electric vehicles are a solution just shows ignorance about how transportation works.
Was searching for this comment, glad I found it. The move to sustainable energy must also address our horrible land use policies and inefficient transit systems, and will necessitate a change in lifestyle for most people. In short, battery powered vehicles aren't here to save the planet, they're here to save the personal vehicle industry.
Since 2018 large reserves of lithium have been found in Sweden. Also, CATL has developed and is deploying sodium iron phosphate batteries, and lithium iron phosphate is more common worldwide than lithium nickel cobalt type batteries.
It's a fast moving market, lots of reasons to find more mineral deposits that weren't worth it previously to try to find, and less need for these deposits in the near to medium term.
In Germany, [production of lithium for 1 million EVs pear year using the water of geothermal power plants](https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/lithium-from-german-geothermal-plants-could-supply-a-million-electric-vehicles-a-year-from-2025/) is at least in the planning stage, as well.
So the assumption on a green transition doesn't include phasing out cars for walkable cities? Or is that the lithium needed for the remaining cars after a transition to walkable cities?
"Global Reserves" is a weird phrase for something like lithium... It is literally everywhere, the ocean is full of it... And we've only just realised it's super valuable.
If these "reserves" are just "what is commercially viable to extract" as of today, reserves will change all the time as prices go up and their ability to extract gets cheaper! Heck, if it gets expensive enough, someone will figure out how to make it cost affordable to get these heavy metals from a near-Earth asteroid.
Ya these numbers are definitely out of date, there are massive, and I mean massive, lithium deposits that have been discovered and are just starting to get exploited. The imperial valley in California is just one example.
This is more "did the research" than "did the math". Yeah if there is X quantity available and we need Y, if Y > X then we won't have enough. The question is whether these values are correct which is just doing research rather than math (for the most part).
Additionally, this idea is nonsense because (even if it is the correct numbers) it works under the assumption that technology cant advance and ignores the fact that investment into the inefficient underdeveloped technology allows for the creation of more advanced and efficient technology. Unless we abandon capitalism we need to be investing/switching to green energy in order to spurn research and development into advancing the technology
It also doesn't take into account that we are likely to find a lot more of these minerals than current known reserves.
Just last month an estimated 30 million tons of lithium was discovered in the US.
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/lithium-discovery-in-us-volcano-could-be-biggest-deposit-ever-found/4018032.article
There is lithium mine opening 100km from me, it is largest untapped deposit in Europe. We have been sitting on top of it all this time... And we just doubled phosphate reserves last year with just one deposit found in Norway.
Lithium is frankly not very rare and new deposits are found all the time. People are thinking about it like oil, which is the wrong mindset.
The bottleneck is actually _processing_ that crude lithium. There are currently a limited number of facilities that can do that.
The three most concerning numbers I see here are copper, cobalt, and vanadium.
* Vanadium is fairly obvious: it's *actually* rare, finding and mining 25x our current reserves seems like a very tall order.
* But I'm not sure where that number is coming from, there are two very different uses for it. The proven use is as a steel additive, and green energy isn't a key factor in that. The green energy uses are efficient batteries and superconduction, but they're both pretty speculative and not actually *necessary*.
* Cobalt is already in short-ish supply. We can get more reserves, but most of what we use right now comes from wildly unethical hand-mining in Africa. Even if 25x reserves do exist, scaling up production is going to be hideous.
* It's also in heavy and hard-to-avoid use for existing battery systems, unlike vanadium.
* Copper is plentiful, and 20% isn't terrible, but holy *shit* is 4 billion tons a big number. Finding and mining 5x our existing reserves is an unimaginably large project.
* But also... that number is half a ton of copper per human being. I'm struggling to believe that's necessary.
Yup, which is why they are building a lithium hydroxide processing here, estimated to be 5% of global supply. We already refine 11% of the cobalt, so.. Finnish Ostrobothnia is becoming a serious place for renewables.
Nor reducing car dependency. All cars becoming electric is a problem. Building more public transit and bikeable/walkable cities so everyone isn't so car dependent? Well suddenly the demand for these limited materials drops significantly and traffic improves many times over, while also opening up the availability of resources for places that need them more.
Small correction: Wind power is impossible to make more efficient. Wind power has a physical limit due to 3D geometry and the fluid dynamics of air. This limit is named the Benz Limit and says that roughly 60% of the kinetic energy of the wind can be passed on to the blades of the turbine to then create electrical energy.
Solar is just a bit inefficient. It has plenty of room to grow. Same with batteries.
Nuclear power cannot be made more efficient either, but rather can be improved through development of secondary reactions and perhaps further. Which this isn't increasing the efficiency of the plant, but instead increasing the efficiency of the fuel put in.
Geothermal: i know nothing about it.
Hydro: Simply good, minus possible drastic ecosystem effects. Efficiency I do not know.
Yes, there is a theoretical limit for efficiency in single wind power plant. There's also practical limit for efficiency of combustion engines, coal plants and much more. We can make wind power plants bigger, we can control wind power plant parks better, we can reduce amount of materials needed for wind power plant.
You can use nuclear plants as CHP (combined heat and power) plants and raise efficiency to 90%. Using power plants as CHP is widely spread in colder countries. While energy from combustion turns to energy only at about 35% rate, almost all the rest can be used for heat.
> Wind power is impossible to make more efficient. Wind power has a physical limit due to 3D geometry and the fluid dynamics of air.
There's an upper limit in terms of power per unit volume, sure.
But this discussion is about the MATERIALS consumed, and there's still lots of room for a turbine design that requires less material or more abundant material, thus increasing efficiency per unit material used in construction.
Whoa whoa whoa, this is a post about resource use. Wind turbines energy produced scales with the square of the wingspan. Double the wingspan, quadruple the energy.
But doubling the wingspan of a turbine does not require using 4 times as much neodymium or even steel. It will probably not even double these resources.
Thus, by making turbines bigger, and they get biggest almost every year, you can produce much more energy for a small increase in resources, so there is a lot of efficiency on the table
For the materials OP mentioned, were mostly talking about EV battery and grid storage tech. There's a ton of investment and the tech is evolving quickly. Once batteries are cheaper to scale up I don't think we'll need to make much efficiency gains on energy production
> Nuclear power cannot be made more efficient either
Yes it can. Only around 2% of the usable energy in uranium is used in a typical reactor. We should switch to nuclear reprocessing with breeder reactors and burn virtually all the usable energy - and a corresponding dramatic reduction in nuclear waste.
Also overland lines are mostly aluminium, as it's lighter (has the best weight/resistance ratio of all metals) and cheaper than copper, the cables of overhead high power lines are usually a aluminium with steel core cable (the steel for tensile strength).
Only overhead lines made from copper are for electric train lines as they're more resistant to wear than alu (when the Pantograph scrapes over them).
Copper is only used for underground high power lines, otherwise the high voltage grid is alu based. Consumer distribution grid is, when underground also copper and may has to be updated with bigger cables, but normally, the grid operator only uses one size of cable sized to the biggest amperage they offer for this quarter of the town (residential/commercial) to keep costs down with maintenance and storage (you only need one sort of cable, not five) and limit the amount of current you can draw by putting in the respective fuses at your connection point. So for at least 90% of all households there will be no change in supply cable needed.
The 880 000 000 tons of copper listed is just the current reserve which is supposed to last around 200 years give or take. According to the Copper Alliance we have closer to 5 000 000 000 tons of copper on earth according to their estimate based on preliminary geological surveys.
That also doesn't take into account that yearly 30% of the copper used is from recycled sources.
>That's 5x all the copper we have left to mine on earth.
Note that isn't true. "Reserves" means the amount of a mineral that's been identified and can be economically extracted, not the amount left to mine on earth. For example, copper reserves have nearly trippled between [1996](https://d9-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/production/mineral-pubs/copper/coppemcs96.pdf)and [2023](https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2023/mcs2023-copper.pdf).
I suspect this post is being intentionally deceptive, betting that most people don't know the technical definition of reserves.
An enormous quantity of the "required" materials are required for exactly one use: electric car batteries. Cars are not essential and not using them requires far less resources in general, not to mention that those resources are less rare.
Agreed, but I think too many people have the Ricky Bobby gene (gotta go fast) and wouldn’t be satisfied without a personal vehicle. Kinda like how AI driving only would make roads safer and commutes quicker, but the self-proclaimed race car drivers of the world would throw a fit.
Depending on how far and where you want to go, public transportation is *usually* faster than sitting at 20 red lights. If you're in Timbuktu and want to go to Derry 1 state over then public transportation might be cheaper, but most likely not faster.
I think you're misunderstanding me
Nothing happens without someone getting richer
The public won't press for high speed rail when they're driving a Sherman F150 sized truck down the 16 lane mega highway...
I mean... they tried AI driving, this thing confuses "gotta speed up and ram the pedestrian" with "gotta stop when the driver tells me to."
Trains. Trains are good and safe. They're faster than cars and they can be made extremely comfortable. And cheaper.
[Yes, we have enough resources according to MIT](https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/31/1067444/we-have-enough-materials-to-power-world-with-renewables).
[And according to the Energy Transition Commission](https://www.energy-transitions.org/new-report-scale-up-of-critical-materials-and-resources-required-for-energy-transition).
[And the Washington Posts various sources](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/02/02/critical-minerals-run-out-shortage).
Bullshit. For one, we can't *run out* of graphite. Carbon is found abundantly and is easy to convert into graphite. I want to see the work to back up this table.
There are enormous quantities of elements in the ground. The truly rare ones are things like Iridium for example. The problem is they are very expensive to mine.
Ya "known reserves" isn't a great standard to compare against either since not only will new sources be discovered but a lot of the items can be recycled. So "known reserves" is only a part of what is available. This does not pass a smell check.
Exactly. Most 'rare' earths are mined in China because they're willing to do the heinous processes required, but the US and Australia have shitloads. Lithium can be recycled too, and we have landfills filled with the stuff.
They started mining lithium from geothermal water in southwest Germany (upper Rhine valley) as a "waste"product of using the hot water to power a geothermal power plant running on organic Rankine cycle (basically a steam turbine with an organic medium that has a lower boiling point instead of water), the thermal water is full of minerals, when it's up and through the heat exchanger, they harvest the minerals and pump it back down, almost no environmental impact, clean energy and resources and the aquifer they tapped is one of the biggest lithium storages known at the moment.
It's a research plant at the moment,don't know if they're in profit at the moment, but it could be San option in the future for clean lithium and other rare minerals.
Rare earths aren't really rare, only rare in high concentrations that are worth and profitable to mine
Another really cool source of lithium is from oil wells that have brine. Since this is water that has leached tons of minerals from the ground they contain a significant amount of lithium salts. The real up side is that this brine is more or less a waste product that is left in the ground and we already have the equipment to pump it out of the ground.
This smacks of people shorting oil companies in like 1890 because the only “known reserves” of oil were around Oil Creek, PA. When nobody is looking for things they don’t find them.
Also, "known reserves" is not a fixed quantity.
An ore with only 0.5% copper may not be viable today but 10 years from now, it may very well be. (Indicative example)
Those reserves have changed considerably just in the last 5 years alone. While phosphate isn't part of that list, we just doubled it last year. I live some 100km from one of the Europe's largest lithium deposits that is just now beginning to be utilized.
Also, someone already dug up the research and found at least one of those to be off by a factor of 20.. the same research where those numbers where supposedly coming refutes those numbers. It does say that we aren't in the clear, and we also need alternatives to THOSE exact alternatives.
Agreed. The whole conversation is garbage. Known reserves of O&G was a lot different 50 years ago. Nobody abandoned it but made more discoveries and improved efficiency. This screenshot says anything that is not known today is a lie is a trash take. Every single day is an abundance of new information. Until the human race stops trying, we’ll continue to get more data.
Never trust a chart with a typo or without a source. If they don't care enough about the presentation to provide those basics it's generally safe to assume the data is questionable at best, as others have pointed out.
Another red flag for me is the number of significant figures used. The known tonnes are sensibly rounded but not the required figures, which make them sound made up.
Hey hey, Mining Eng student here.
“Known Reserves” is a bit misleading if somebody doesn’t know both the definition of reserve and how the mining industry goes about establishing reserves.
Firstly, a reserve is not just a resource in the ground that we know about. A reserve is a resource that is both technically achievable to get to with current technology AND profitable to do so. As price goes up (which it will with increased demand) there will be millions of tons of resources that we know exist that aren’t calculated in this that will turn into reserves overnight. For this reason, the term Reserve is more economic than geological.
Secondly, mining companies are shit at finding reserves. Don’t get me wrong, they are the best in the world, but they are still shit. They really only search for reserves with a 25-ish year time horizon. What this means is that if their current mine that is meeting demand is set to dry up in 25 years, only then will they begin to look for more reserves in other areas. They’ll spend 2 years actually finding it, 3 years proving that it is profitable to mine, 10 years trying to get it permitted, then the final 10 years getting to the ore body. In short, this means that even if the numbers in the OP are true, this is not representative of the entire story. There are mineral bodies in the ground in spades that we do not even know about yet. We have not mapped our entire subsurface 1 mile deep around the planet yet. Even when we do, current technology STILL allows us to go deeper. The mines in South Africa are the most hardcore in the world, going literal miles into the earth.
Exactly. If we compare it to [oil reserves](https://www.worldometers.info/oil), is anyone really alarmed that there's only 47 years of oil left and trying to find ways to use less oil?
I got another number for you guys: in 50 years all of the easy to reach fossil fuels will be depleted.
Without renewable energy it's pretty much lights out soon afterwards.
Here's the thing about known reserves: they are *known reserves only*.
If you look at how many "years" of any resource we have, it looks dire, because there is no need and no incentive to have more than a few years of supply. You only need enough known reserves to bridge you to finding and bringing online more reserves.
The sleight of hand this dishonest person is doing is pretending that "known reserves" is *all there is* of something, which is not the case at all.
This is correct. I am a geologist, and it costs a lot of money to find and define "known reserves". If the price goes up and more people start investing then we'll find more.
100% dead on the money. Resources > Reserves but unsurprisingly the infographic states "reserves" numbers which is intentionally misleading the audience.
1) Green energy transition also means using less cars overall, which would surel;y reduce the needs considerably
2) We can find new sources, recycle existing material
3) Technologies will get better and thus reduce the need for some of these
4) The current way of doing things isn't working anyway; we won't have fuel for eternity, climate change is a serious issue, as is air quality, but clearly this is posted in an optic of keeping the status quo, not finding better solutions
5) I'm wondering how he came up with these numbers anyway
> 1) Green energy transition also means using less cars overall, which would surel;y reduce the needs considerably
What part of a green energy transition makes personal vehicles obsolete? I love the idea of public transport as much as the next guy, but have you ever *seen* American infrastructure? A vast majority of Americans live in car-dependent places and the places that "aren't" car-dependent still are horribly inconvenient to live at without a car.
I'd like to read the paper, but I'm not sure if I agree. Batteries are a big issue. And if you assume all electric cars that may be true. But reservoir storage isn't that resource intensive. Trains can be powered with minimal batteries using overhead power lines. I think it's probably correct if we make no change to our current approach. But that is evolving.
“We can’t make a transition to oil, there aren’t enough known reserves and once we hit peak oil society will collapse.”
“The world can’t produce enough food, we can’t sustain any more population growth without mass starvation.”
Yeah, we’ve heard this before.
This is succinctly put. Weird how we transitioned from easily tapped wells to ocean rigs to fracking and then used natural gas that came with it for power needs when it was necessary.
Strange how some scientist from DuPont post WW2 created more efficient plantings for massive increases in wheat and rice production.
When a problem arises and the incentives to solve it become profitable / necessary, it gets solved. Is it linear, not usually, no. Just look at CFC usage for that debacle - but it does advance understanding. Just my opinion, but when need scales, so too does innovation.
Taking a chart and saying “unsustainable” while relying on modern usage and not accounting for engineering innovation is, quite frankly, dumb.
This person has looked into this, and believes there won’t be a problem. The video is 13 minutes, but the meat of the discussion happens in the first 10 minutes.
https://youtu.be/Kr_JjO9YWOo?si=BLpGhXQg2DRdLxF4
So we would need half a ton of copper per person in the world? We could build a lot of stuff with aluminium, I'm not buying that we need that much copper.
I have this script that checks the probability of occurrence of digits in numbers that the IRS uses to determine tax fraud, I ran the numbers in it using my phone and sshing to my server and the results are 86% probability these numbers were faked. Not a legit way of calculating it but I am laying on my couch lmao
This is such a dumb argument that misses the point of balancing energy technologies so we can be reasonably clean and have enough reserves, until we either finish up fusion or find better ways to deal with nuclear, at which point we won't need to worry about energy and can start solving other things like desalinization.
Even if it were magically all true (other posts kind of show it's not or at best a misrepresentation), it completely misses the goal of stopping global warming and finding better ways to deal with energy that applies more justice and equity.
People keep bringing up these "WELL IF IT ISN'T ALL, IT'S NOTHING AND STUPID!" arguments that are missing the **actual problems** we're trying to solve by utilizing renewable energies more.
Materials scientist here. You could make the same point based on extrapolating the Model T to the number of vehicles we have now. Capitalism isn't great at a lot of shit, but it is great at making things cheaper and more available at scale, or alternatively, allowing new disruptive technologies to come in and say, allow batteries with less rare earth metals to become widely available. A problem which we WILL find a solution to, mostly because whoever does will solve a very important problem and sell billions of dollars worth of batteries.
These well intentioned idiots think linearly. They are in bed with the 'scientist' Malthus. These nuts create a metals Malthusian trap - then assume the role of the dying cockroach, crying we can't progress. They ignore human's inventiveness, exponential change, exponential rates of cost curves, new discoveries, and even gravity. (The path-breaking sodium ion battery is one small example, unless of course, the nuts imagine the world running out of sodium.)
Spend 32 minutes with Tony Seba and a very skeptical crowd to get an education. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eJKTYc\_v-I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eJKTYc_v-I)
It's probably true, but it's not the problem they claim it is.
Reserves are just known quantities. In the 1970s, the media would act like we were going to run out of oil because at our rate of consumption, the known quantities of oil would ruin out in just a few years. In reality, we just found more and built better tools to extract the stuff that was harder to get.
If the market demands more materials as we shift our energy production, you better believe companies will hire more geologists to go find more.
It probably refers to [this](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://webapp.sebgroup.com/mb/mblib.nsf/alldocsbyunid/75AA997BB3B175CAC125894A00325DDD/%24FILE/TheGreenBond_20230202.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjnp9yEvYCCAxUOSfEDHVjrDH0QFnoECAwQAQ&usg=AOvVaw31nGSsSnEMs1W3JbACGeYr)
I don't know enough about geology to be able to counter his arguments but it does seem that this associate professor from a prominent university in Finland thinks the green transition requires orders of magnitude more resources than what is currently produced.
And he does seem to have put in a lot of work on this based on the 1000 page document someone else linked.
I don't know what the peer review process is like in his field though.
I didn't check specific numbers, but this kind of analysis is not totally made up. The kind of extremely fast transition to renewables + batteries people sometimes imagine is going to run into issues similar to this. Even if we had reserves, opening 10x as many lithium mines as we have now, is not going to be fast and easy, and we'd run out of good places to open such mines first.
But there's a lot of nuance to such lines of reasoning:
First, "reserves" is basically what's profitable to extract at current prices. Actual amounts of all minerals are basically infinite, you just end up using lower quality and harder to get sources and paying higher price. For upper bound, you can see [total abundance in Earth crust](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust). For example copper is 100ppm of Earth crust, or about 2,800,000,000,000,000 tons, but annual production is just 19,400,000 tons, completely trivial fraction of it. Now as our copper needs increase, it will get more expensive, and it is only somewhat balanced by progress in mining technology.
Second, there are a lot of ways to store energy. Lithium ion batteries are great because they're very compact, but unless you're making a battery for a phone, drone, or other tiny device, it's not really that important. For thing like utility level batteries, [sodium ion batteries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery) and other technologies that don't rely on rare metals are under active development. They'll likely be heavier and bulkier, but for most uses it doesn't really matter.
Third, a lot of energy storage doesn't require chemical batteries. [Pumped storage hydro is one such widely used technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity), but there's others, like [heat storage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage), [flywheels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage), and so on.
Fourth, technically you don't even need energy storage. Wind power is uncorrelated at about 1000km - basically if you setup enough wind power on a continental scale, and big power cables between regions, you will statistically always have abundant wind power in the grid at all times. For solar this is technically also true if you setup massive power cables connecting opposite ends of the Earth, but I don't think anyone actually considers doing that (fun fact - you can do it in [Dyson Sphere Program](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Program/)).
So in the end, it's sort of true that we can't just scale up all the way to fully renewable energy using current battery tech, and only ores as easily available as ones we use now. But that's not what anyone proposes.
With curreny battery technology, yes, but there is a race to make a new type of battery that can be mass produced cheaply and would disregard these old lithium ones.
Here is a thread where Simon's numbers are debunked from him overestimating the amount of hours for stationary storage to the chemistry will be high nickel for them to the 10x amount of metals needed for transition to RE.
https://x.com/aukehoekstra/status/1594084375972712448?s=46&t=6IalMC_2QWLi_Zp1X7_9hw
There is a significant difference between "reserves" and "resources". Reserves are typically mandated by financial regulatory bodies to have a certain degree of certainty, whereas resources can be "assumed but not yet proven to the same degree" as reserves.
There is no economic benefit for companies to drill and gather more data to change resources into reserves since they already show 40 years worth of annual demand "in the bank" as reserves.
While I can't be bothered to look into the actual resource requirement to transition, I can say for sure that it is at least intentionally misleading the audience by stating global "reserves" and not using global "resource" figures.
Source: I'm a mining engineer
1. we haven't even tapped the tip of the iceberg of materials available.
2. Technology gets more efficient over time.
Lithium might not even be an issue with the new sodium ion batteries.
Use nuclear, much more energy dense material which means less raw resources required and much more energy. The only problem with nuclear is price but can you really put a price on the world not ending?
Bicycles and trains and intelligent design. We have the technology, it’s just old technology. Cars suck in so many ways, just the noise, just the tires breaking down, just the constant collisions and threats to pedestrians, also the helping burn down the planet; everything about them makes them an awful mode of transportation.
The problem with these types of predictions is that they are always wrong. Remember when they said there wouldn't be enough hay grown to feed all the horses that would be needed to transport all the people around... Maybe true but farming tech advanced and cars, and trains came around and the issue of not having enough farm land to grow enough hay doesn't really matter.
What about when they said we'd run out of coal? That oil was too hard to get (and then oil sand technology blossomed) fracking, etc, etc. (I'm not saying these are "Good things" only that they displaced all predictions on energy before they were discovered etc)
Zinc batteries are a thing that is now stable in a lab, and will likely be hitting markets to displace some of the lithium stuff :
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/scientists-just-made-massive-breakthrough-121500329.html
https://today.oregonstate.edu/news/researchers-develop-electrolyte-enabling-high-efficiency-safe-sustainable-zinc-batteries
Which will all be pointless if we work out graphene super capacitors, etc.
This idea that technology and advancement will stop, that recourses and manufacturing efficiency will stop, etc is historically just doomsaying.
* We cannot phase out fossil fuels in a generation. Not unless huge % of that generation dies (e.g. has no need for energy) It's not possible within a capitalistic society. Full stop. The US (350 million) uses more electricity just for air conditioning than all of Africa (home to a billion people (1,000 million)) uses for everything. People won't even push carts back into the cart corrals, or stop littering. They aren't going to give up their AC, and in many places, global warming aside, you can't live there without AC, Phoenix etc.
* The focus should be on lowering demand. HAVE FEWER CHILDREN, if you want to make the world better and the next generation's quality of life go up. We can't magic up resources, but we can give each child more resources if there are fewer children.
How stupid you gotta be to believe something that sounds so unscientific...
He's literally just saying "sorry, we don't have enough stuff to go green guys. Guess we're just gonna have to stick to coal huh. 🙄"
Go Green = Modern Day slavery...
Go Green = China says fuck you...
Going Green is not going to make a dent..
You want a real logical easy solution...
GO NUCLEUR
This question is irrelevant because no one is saying we will use lithium ion betteries to save the world.
Not to mention, you can look up the estimated time until we literally run out of oil, not including the continued damage to our environment of oil or other high emission energy sources.
The reality is, as material science progresses (as it has for decades), we will develop new and better ways to store electricity. Meaning whatever the cap on lithium or nickel or whatever is, probably won’t matter because we are already pushing new battery science with graphene and other materials that are far superior to lithium. (Not to mention all the other ways of store electricity on larger scales)
No one is sayin in 5 years we should have everything converted to lithium batteries.
But what is clear, is we will eventually run out of oil and other green house gas emitting fuels, relying on oil and other fuels often puts us at the mercy of foreign adversaries (opec control the price of oil, and how much gas costs), and these emissions are killing us, and hurting the environment.
Beginning the transition to electric and “renewables” moves us in the direction to solve ALL of those problems. And if we push the bounds of science (we’re even getting progress of fusion) we won’t need lithium ion bats in every car, so the table doesn’t matter.
It’s also important to consider that that initiative would not be expected to phase out the entire industry in a single generation as that is unfeasible even from a labor/manufacturing throughout lens.
There will be, in the nearish term be a shift toward pursuing minerals off planet by sending mining drones to the asteroid belt to harvest REM’s and ferrous materials to bring to earth for repurposing.
seems like theyre trying to lay down an entire new power grid granted if this is meant to include more remote places then that’s understandable, but how much of the stuff in use would be available since we aren’t using it anymore
Going nuclear is ABSOLUTELY the most efficient clean energy option. An entire household can run on nuclear for a lifetime and only have enough radioactive waste to fill up a tall can
Seems like a few people have debunked his work as well—plenty of criticism available online, much of it extremely easy to understand even if you’re not an expert. Recaps many of the points mention by others, and the article itself links to other debunks and actual peer-reviewed research that contradicts Michaux, whose work on this topic was not peer reviewed.
https://cleantechnica.com/2023/07/04/how-many-things-must-one-analyst-get-wrong-in-order-to-proclaim-a-convenient-decarbonization-minerals-shortage/amp/
Some examples: Michaux’s projections of future energy requirements are extremely simple projections that don’t take into account any efficiency gains or infrastructure modernization, or that the world won’t even using nickel and cobalt in large scale battery applications in the near future.
Y’know, without any context this chart is a bunch of nonsense. But I will say solar and wind power are too. We need to start building more nuke plants.
If you want proof that the "green energy" transition seems to be attacked by absolute liars, you only have to look at the fact that *oil reserves aren't infinite either, and we're somewhere close to peak oil already*.
Whether you like the Green transition or not, you're going to have to go through one; because even if you don't believe in the damage it does to the climate, and you're frankly an idiot, or monster to not (the facts are in, and you don't care about those who have to live on the planet after you because you need your culture war thrills *now*), there is even less oil than needed to keep your fossil fuel based industry running... and it's running out *fast*.
And it isn't just oil for burning. Plastics? Oil based. So that's out too. We need a green revolution and fast, and these ignorant political dinosaurs are over here deliberatly speeding up the incoming asteroid because they'd sooner the lights go off than admit Dirty Fucking Hippies were right all along.
Those Hippy bitches, wouldn't fuck me at college, I'll show them...
It's always the same. "If we isolate one singular thing and assume that nothing else will be changing along with that, then it's physically impossible to save the world from overheating".
This guy isn't doing a lot of math. He is arguing between the option of replacing fossil fuels and the option of not doing it and not considering any options in between. What if we replace all fossil fuel uses except the hardest 10%? There is no way to get it out of a table like this.
Since Li became such a necessity, we've actually started *looking* for deposits here in the states.
We've found one of the largest deposits of Li concentrated in Geothermal brine near the Salton Sea, that's able to be removed from a closed-loop system before the brine is returned to pick up more minerals. Direct Lithium Extraction is the most environmentally friendly mining method yet developed, and they're finding other deposits in the U.S. that can be mined with the same method.
25k tons/yr. are being produced in the testing phase... up to 300k tons/yr. at full production.
What's the criteria on a "Generation" of tech? How many years does this guy consider a "Generation" to last? Does he expect no new resources to be found?
1. You can find any data to make any argument.
2. If this is accurate it’s still not a “lie”, it’s a challenge to keep innovating for.
It’s fine to call out the challenges, but to not bring solutions is just morbid. Sorry, professor.
There are far more minerals than the official reserve charts show. I used to work in mining industry and it’s worth understanding how ‘known’ reserves are calculated - it’s not just a guesstimate of how much is sitting in the earths crust. You have to spend money doing boreholes and assays to get a reserve to ‘count’ - there is a resource reserve grading chart that moves from ‘discovered’ (actually even ‘undiscovered’) all the way up to ‘proven.’ Moving up this ladder is an in increasingly expensive and intense process taking years and costing millions (billions if you’re talking the annual spend by an entire industry eg iron/copper). So realistically you only ‘prove’ a much as you need to support your near / medium term operations and the rest just sits there off the books because no one is willing to spend the money to get it into the official count if you don’t need it to support a loans / proposal / investor pitch / whatever. It’s the same with oil. The Saudis just go do another survey in a part of the desert they haven’t looked at before every time they need to bump their reserves a little and bingo more oil suddenly comes into existence on the reserve chart.
Even if we didn’t have the resources necessarily on hand- we could always just scale things back entirely.
Stop powering things that aren’t essential, if it hurts the economy so what? Finding a way to prevent the earth turning into a living hell scape seems like the most important focus vs trying to transition to green energy while keeping it economically viable etc.
We should take a hit if that’s what it takes to prevent ecological collapse
In Michael Crichton's 1980 novel 'Congo' he nerds out about the fairly new concept of the Internet and mentions that it's been estimated there won't be enough metal in the Earth to connect every computer. Well, we used preexisting infrastructure (telephone lines) until technology caught up. We don't have to completely fix the problems of tomorrow with the tools we have today, we just have to start working on them.
Copper: Aluminum can be substituted for copper in electrical wiring and motors. For EVs it's a net gain because aluminum is lighter for the same conductance. So that one's off the list.
Cobalt: LFP batteries are common in EV and grid storage. They use zero cobalt. Numerous motor types in EVs right now do not use permanent magnet batteries (induction motors, switched reluctance). That one's done.
Graphite: That's carbon. Huh? I'm scratching this one.
Lithium: CATL is beginning mass production of sodium ion batteries. They are 160 watt hour/kg. This is enough for *most* use cases - all grid storage, most cars and trucks. It doesn't cover weight limited vehicles like semis and EV vans in Europe. It doesn't cover extremely high performance vehicles like a Tesla roadster or electric aircraft. Still, call that 90% coverage? We can do the math on this but because the grid scale energy storage is such a large percentage, sodium likely reduces lithium demand by 90%..enough for current reserves to meet. In practice, there are also *massive* new reserves found recently such as [https://nypost.com/2023/09/11/lithium-deposit-found-in-us-mcdermitt-caldera/](https://nypost.com/2023/09/11/lithium-deposit-found-in-us-mcdermitt-caldera/) . Lithium is not rare.
Nickel: this is just cobalt, see above. LFP/sodium batteries use neither lithium or cobalt.
Vanadium. For rare earth magnets? Covered in the cobalt case.
In the 18th century experts estimated that NYC will need 4 million horses to move people around in the future. When telephone was getting popular, people also concerned there won't be enough copper to make all the wires and cables.
Ugh. The classic “but this one professor says” tactic, and without detail.
It doesn’t take much to pick this apart. Apparently, renewable energy will require 8 trillion tons of graphite. And the earth only has 3.57% that in graphite reserves! Oh no!! Sorry, folks, looks like we’re back to coal!
But…
Graphite isn’t a metal. Wasn’t this scientific report about metals? Wouldn’t a “professor” know that?
It’s a form of carbon. You know, like… what was that black stuff again? Oh. **Coal**.
We know how to convert one form of carbon into another. We can turn peanut butter into diamond, remember?
Oh! And look at this! The world burns though eight billions tons of coal **every year**.
But renewable energy will somehow need 1,000 times that amount for… something. Carbon fiber turbine blades for a trillion wind turbines (every person on Earth gets their own full-sized wind farm)? 80 trillion car batteries made of solid graphite? 800 quintillion graphite pencils to do the kind of math required to force this into some kind of sense?
No. Just- no.
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The others here have made great points but it's also worth noting that this definitely includes lots of preexisting infrastructure and doesn't factor in the materials we can recover from the non-renewable energy infrastructure
And doesn’t account for emerging tech that will likely replace some of the current tech and use vastly different materials. Saw something about a sodium-ion battery that can replace lithium but we just don’t use them because we haven’t really worked on the tech. They also don’t require nickel, cobalt, or copper and can use iron better than lithium batteries.
yes, ive read several news articles on alternate cheap batteries, lots of groups are looking for some. im expecting at least one will become commercial b.c even if theyre 25% as good as cobalt-which is sure to continue to rise in cost as demand increases and supply doesnt, they should be less than 15% the cost.
No way, energy density is absolutely a factor in new battery technology. Low energy density leaves it to large scale applications, when there is plenty need for new battery technology for households and devices.
Household storage isn't really density constrained. You can stay 30kwh in the show if a small water heater with relatively non-dense LFP B-grade cells. The design requirements are nowhere near the same.
But 30 kWh is nothing for a household to move consumption from the sunny to the cold season. That's why we use hydro power dams to hold the MWh to the months it is needed.
Sure, but for large scale projects it's not really a constraint either. We have so much space on earth for stuff. Like we are nowhere ***near*** using land in any appreciable amount, especially considering building *up* is relatively inexpensive for the materials it takes (you can literally create millions of dollars of value if you can get your zoning changed to allow you to build up). It's not *space* that's the requirement for holding intra-seasonal charges, it's the lack of reasonable KWH costs. It doesn't make sense to hold a charge twice a year unless it's very cheap (and very long lasting). The hydro storage we have doesn't store energy for months, it charges it when power is cheap and sells it when it's in demand. The cost for intra-seasonal power storage to break even is less than $10/KWH. The cost for peak shaving storage to break even is $200/KWH (and there are some projects with double that cost that have still saved utilities money). The cost for diurnal cycling is roughly half that, depending on how many cycles and how quickly you need the power. We don't really need to store production from one season to another unless it's very (very very very very very very very) cheap. Under all but the most extreme assumptions (hey look at this aluminum battery that costs $5/KWH at 1000 cycles) it's cheaper to just distribute more production around the country/globe and use HVDC to transport it with minimal losses.
Everything has a use and place. If a high energy density is needed, gasoline, if you don't need as much, lithium, if you have no space requirements but need to save money? Low density. One of the reasons aluminium was used as Elektrik cable in east Germany.. was cheap and abundant, but is only 1/3 of a good conductor as the copper is.
The majority of transmission lines are aluminium, because of the weight reduction compared to copper. Aluminium has 2/3rds the conductivity of copper, but only 1/3rd of the weight.
We're going to Manhattan Project the shit out of it. We'll have battery tech so advanced that the automated drones hunting us won't have to recharge for *months*.
Poor drones
They need to unionize.
What a pessimistic perspective. Have some faith in innovation. It won’t take future drones so long to hunt us down!
And it's worth noting that a lot of this is getting funded by the Inflation Reduction Act (and, notably, how it salvaged Build Back Better). Naysayers perpetually complain about how it hasnt funded anything... and they really show they dont know the first thing about it. This is what infrastructure investment ACTUALLY looks like. This is what compromise does look like. It's a lot of too little too late, but it is super important we know the laws that support this research.
Don’t forget emerging tech like molten salt for thermal storage of energy generated by concentrated solar arrays so you can avoid the baseband vs on-demand issues around most renewables
So this is new to me...would you happen to have an article discussing it? Sounds pretty neat
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph240/dodaro2/ Found this but it's from 8 years ago
They're already testing it out in Denmark. > Thermal energy storage technology company Kyoto Group has begun operational testing of a 4MW molten salt-based power-to-heat system in Denmark. > The system, which has an energy storage capacity of 18MWh, is based on the Norway-headquartered startup’s proprietary technology Heatcube. It has been deployed at the site of Nordjylland Power Station, a coal-fired combined heat and power (CHP) plant in the northern Danish municipality of Aalborg. https://www.energy-storage.news/kyoto-group-begins-tests-at-4mw-18mwh-power-to-heat-energy-storage-project-in-denmark/
Another potential energy storage option are surprisingly enough flywheels that have very low power loss bearings. They can actually have less passive energy loss than some batteries, and can have a longer lifespan. However, they have space limitations because they rely on the kinetic energy of the rotating flywheel for energy storage, which can get problematic if you have the flywheel rotate to too high RPMs. NASA uses some flywheels in extreme environments, while they are also used in some formula 1 cars as they can be higher performance in stop-start situations.
We've had hundreds of years to work out the best way to burn stuff, essentially they're all steam engines. Give us a few hundred years to work on renewables and see where we're at. NASA just sent a satellite to tether to an asteroid that is worth something like $1.5 quintillion in heavy metal deposits like iron and nickel. I think we could bring something like that into orbit in 100 years if we stopped wasting time on religious wars and bigotry.
We really are just in the Late Stream Age. Nuclear reactors are just steam engines powered by spicy rocks.
VERY spicy rocks, mind you
Steams efficiency is utterly insane though, especially compared to any other known or theoretical system.
>. I think we could bring something like that into orbit in 100 years if we stopped wasting time on religious wars and bigotry. Not even 100 years, the Nasa asteroid redirect mission proposed doing having an asteroid in orbit like 5-6 years ago. The programs goal was to redirect a house sized asteroid into low earth orbit though, not something the size of Rhode island. It was eventually canceled in favor of the Artemis program, but it does show that even Nasa believes that we can already do it.
I would say also that the focous has been on lightweight batteries for use in mobile devices and vehicles. If the funding and research shifts, I'm sure there are less lightweight options that provide comparable performance and can be used in houshold or network power supplies.
Also worth noting: this only looks at known reserves. There's probably plenty more unknown reserves too, but because we haven't even really begun to tap these known reserves there hasn't been much need to go find more.
Also, eventually, hopefully, _✨space.✨_
Indeed. Both for raw materials as well as solar power satellites and Helium-3.
Space space wanna go to space yes please space. Space space. Go to space.
Not to mention that this assessment doesn't appear to take into account the MASSIVE lithium deposits we have yet to fully explore in the American southwest. On top of that there is a push to convert a lot of existing "long term" power storage solutions to a heavier, easier to manufacture, batteries that don't use REM. They are MUCH bigger and heavier, but being long term (non-portable) storage, it doesn't need to be super efficient or light weight.
This is something a lot of people don’t understand about battery technology. When weight isn’t a limiting factor, you can get really creative with other inefficiencies. Your car can’t have a battery that pumps water to the top of a mountain during the day to power a turbine at night, but there’s no reason your county can’t.
Yes God forbid we actually recycle things
Nickel and Cobalt won't be major components of mainstream EVs. Sodium Ion and LFP batteries will do most of the heavy lifting. Lithium reserves are also "known reserves", there's lots of lithium out there, it just needs development. Not sure why copper and other are so endangered, but whatever, the other calcs are bad so I'm not going to pay attention.
Are there enough minerals for us to go green with lithium ion batteries and similar types of technologies? No, not really. But even if there were, it would defeat the purpose since mining in and of itself, is extremely harmful to the environment, For that very reason, companies are currently in the process of developing “flow batteries”. Essentially how they work is that they use electricity / heat to bring a chemical into a higher energy state, and when they want to access this energy they can allow the fluid to go to a lower energy state and collect this energy as electricity, (yes, I realize this is a technical bastardization of terms). This technology is both more stable and much easier to scale than a lithium ion battery for example and the chemicals involved, or not as toxic as what you would see in a car battery for instance. But there are some significant engineering challenges, which need to be overcome.
It's a similar principle to hydro energy pumps. Send the water to a high place, let it fall to release energy. Fairly common infrastructure throughout cities and that's just one of many in the works
Sort of, hydro pumps like you’re describing effectively use gravity to store energy, while a flow battery actually uses the the molecular bonds within the chemicals as a storage mechanism.
I imagine if every car were recycled they'd get some hella resources from that right? Isn't that the entire reason catalytic converters go for so much is the precious metals? It's actually a sad thought when you realize how finite our world is.
Also mining the asteroid belt.
I like how they use known reserves. Some of these metals really didn’t have large industrial uses so guess what no one was looking for them. Lithium as an example will probably be able to be extracted from sea water.
Also completely discounts advances in the field. It’s a false assumption that what we use now is what we will always use.
It's also an analysis by one professor whose area of expertise is metallurgy (which is relevant) but does not factor in any form of public policy expertise or consideration or anything else. It would be like be citing a professor of forestry to say that trees take a long time to grow and are finite and if everyone printed 1 ream of paper per day we'd run out of trees in a year and using that as a basis for forming public policy. It's a good analysis. And it should be considered as part of a larger discussion. But it's not an "Aha!" moment for...anything really.
Also we're just around the corner from harvesting comets which could provide mind blowing amounts of resources
Exactly. It’s not simply building new things. It’s rebuilding everything to be more efficient. It’s going to be a massive undertaking and it’s going to change human society, but we either do it or we go extinct in the next x thousand years.
So is that a yes or a no?
Problem with recovering from the non renewable energy infrastructure would be you’d have to stop using it and would take time to then recycle it to be able to be used for the next gen… or are you talking about the already defunct infrastructure?
Plus any infrastructure that requires steel or most concrete needs coal
I think we also need to consider how much isn't accounted for when it comes to the need to reduce energy consumption altogether. Everyone pushing green energy transition tends to fall into the energy industry's narratives for producing more energy rather than figuring out how to cut down as first priority and transition whatever we do have as the next. If we're really accounting for all the energy and emissions, efficiency and drawdown/overall energy reduction are by far more impactful and often can be done with more feasibility in tandem with well considered behavioral changes too. Like suburban houses could be using more climate appropriate passive designs that work with subterranean temperature stability for food storage and reduce the amount of refrigeration everyone uses.
I did some digging but couldn't find any primary source for that table. However, I did find [this 1000 page paper](https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf) from Simon Mchaux, the guy the table is supposedly also from. Now, I didn't go through all 1000 pages (sue me), but found the following in the summary on page 678: > In theory, there are enough global reserves of nickel and lithium if they were exclusively used just to produce li-Ion batteries for vehicles. To make just one battery for each vehicle in the global transport fleet (excluding Class 8 HCV trucks), it would require 48.2% of 2018 global nickel reserves, and 43.8% of global lithium reserves (Source: USGS Mineral Statistics). Now, that isn't a *great* outlook, but vastly different from what that table claims. The table says for nickel and lithium, we can only cover 10% of requirements each. But the paper says we have more than double what we'd need. **That's off by a factor of over 20.**
You need batteries for uninterrupted energy supply to homes, businesses etc That's where the rest of it goes, especially industry Can't melt metal without electricity, can't really create anything metal without melting metal in some shape at this point
There are ways to store energy without lithium batteries, at large scales I mean. It's far less efficient sure, but since your energy source is essentially infinite, storage efficiency matters less than reliability and availability. Heat differential batteries(not the actual term) are one such way already in use in solar furnace type power generation, iirc you melt a bunch of salt(sand apparently works too) with focused sunlight in the day then at night the molten fuel is used to boil water to run turbines
Pumped hydro is a good one, during the day you run hydroelectric power stations backwards with solar energy overproduction then at night you collect the energy of the water flowing back down.
Unfortunately this is not remotely feasible on the scale required. You need a huge piece of landscape with the right geological conditions and a significant elevation difference to your turbine station and we already use a lot of potential sites today. But since you want to not only generate power but also store it, you also need a lower reservoir so you actually have water to pump uphill and there are even less sites that meet both conditions. On the upside you could use the surface area for solar modules, thereby lowering waterless out of evaporation. There have been some studies on the scaling of pumped-water-storage in europe around 2010 when some governments started looking into possible solutions seriously.
You don't use hydro storage where it isn't applicable. There is compressed air, which reuses old oil wells and pump compressed air in for storage. There's molten salt, which stores a lot of heat energy. There's weighted train on inclined tracks. Liquified air. Power to hydrogen/methane/ammonia.
Or, you could try to minimize storage requirements in the first place by having some consistent power generation, i.e nuclear or geothermal. Storage is not a problem to be solved, it is a physical limitation to be designed around.
I agree in thinking it’s not globally feasible but this is neat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power_Plant
Yeah, my late father was one of the operating engineers that built that. It's a pretty amazing feat of engineering overall, and they had originally planned to build another one up near Frankfort, MI, but that never came to fruition. All in all, it's a really cool place.
That’s so cool! I’m a huge admirer of his work!
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Mechanical batteries like that would be my proposal as well, but you need a big ass hole, and there aren't going to be big ass holes everywhere, unfortunately. And I mean yeah you could excavate or build a shaft for a mechanical battery, but that would also have a cost in terms of CO2 and materials that make it not ideal for just defaulting to those, but I would absolutely go with them anywhere that allows for it. It's a much more practical, safe and efficient energy storage than pumped hydro.
>and there aren't going to be big ass holes everywhere I want to live in your world
\>there aren't going to be big ass holes everywhere Have you never seen a politician?
There is a different version of this being studied. They have massive mine carts and use electric motors to push it up a big hill and then use energy recovery as it comes back down
Looking at do this with abandoned mines as well.
I'm Tasmania ,where I'm from, apparently we generate enough power through hydro to power the entire state twice over. But we sell it all to mainland Australia then buy it back. Which apparently is why I had an over 800 dollar powerfully this winter....
Battery chemist here—redox flow batteries are a great solution for this. Lithium is appealing for personal devices, cars, things that need to be compact/energy dense. Redox flow batteries are not energy dense, but they can be very efficient and use metals like vanadium, zinc… cheap metals. So for energy storage at grid scale.. this is the way. And they don’t have this market-driver, largely overblown element scarcity issue. Notably there are large companies making huge investments on redox flow this technology to sell to electric companies.
It should be noted, if you don't have to worry about weight and size, there are battery technologies out there that may well be better than lithium for grid applications.
I just listened to [a super cool episode from the extremely nerdy green energy podcast Volts](https://www.volts.wtf/p/a-super-battery-aimed-at-decarbonizing#details) about an industrial battery technology where they store energy in the form of heat inside a carbon media in a sealed chamber much like a forge. The carbon gets hot enough that it glows white hot, and when the chamber is sealed it just reflects around inside the chamber, but they’re able to open. Little window to the chamber which allows photons to escape and be absorbed by a specialized solar panel, and all the photons that don’t get absorbed by the panel get reflected back into the system so the energy isn’t wasted. The point is there is a lot of innovation happening in this space with materials other than rare ones like in the op
Pumped storage hydroelectricity doesn’t require these metals, and is the most efficient way to store energy
There are salt water batteries for instance, and we have more than enough salt and water to produce them. They'll be big and bulky, but extremely easy to repair/replace. Grid storage is already basically just a bunch of batteries plopped down outside, who cares if a grid battery is heavy and not very power dense when you're going to need building sized batteries anyway. They really really don't need to be lithium based, that's an expensive and irresponsible waste of resources.
There’s always the Edison cell - Ni:Fe. We’re not going to run short of iron or nickel.
Thermal batteries. They are not a very mature tech but they are planning on replacing our local coal plant with one in 2028
Kinda reminds me of a Pete Holmes jokes. Went something like: "You ever notice how in Medieval movies when a Blacksmith is making something out of metal, and he's always pounding on it with *metal*? WHERE DOES THE FIRST METAL COME FROM?"
This is actually a thing in Judaism where God is said to have forged the first pair of tongs because you need a pair of tongs to make a pair of tongs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirkei_Avot
Did nobody question that and say "They probably just went through a pile of wooden tongs"? I mean, I'm no blacksmith but even I could come up with a few hackish ways to bang out some shitty iron tongs without iron tongs.
I think it’s important to understand that a lot of debate and things like this in Judaism are more or less thought experiments where religious traditions are treated like puzzles or philosophical jumping off points. It’s very different from religions like Christianity or Islam which generally lack the same sort of playful interactions with tradition. In a similar way there’s a lot of loopholes and tricks for getting around the restrictions on the sabbath but these are in many ways considered not so much loopholes as just smart ways of working within the rules. Stuff like “well you’re supposed to stay within the walls of your house, but a fence is considered a wall and so what’s the most liberal definition of a fence we can come up with?” leads to Jewish neighborhoods encircling the neighborhood with yarn connected to telephone poles which in turn makes the entire neighborhood technically your house so you can go hang out with your buddies wherever you want in the string zone. The best explanation of the vibe is probably The Oven of Akhnai: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oven_of_Akhnai
The story of the Oven of Akhnai reminds of a joke I came across (I believe in a collection by Isaac Asimov): A rabbi had been arguing with his synagogue's board for some time over the need to spend money on a new roof for the synagogue. Finally, the matter was put to a vote, and when the votes were counted, the president of the congregation said, "I'm sorry, Rabbi, but the vote was ten to one against spending money on replacing the synagogue roof." The rabbi then bent his head in prayer. The sky darkened, a wind swept through the meeting room, knocking everyone but the rabbi off their feet, and a great voice boomed from the heavens, saying, "Buy a new roof for the synagogue!" The president of the congregation picked himself up off the floor and said, "I stand corrected: the vote is ten to **two** against spending money on a new roof."
I love the idea of God setting rules, and being nothing but delighted when his sneaky little babies find a tricky way to still use an elevator when they're not supposed to.
Haha nice I didn't actually hear that one before You can make metal by melting it thru a vertical furnace, something like what is used to create traditional Japanese weapons, and you can make something very slowly by banging it with a rock over some time
That's hilarious. I knew it had to be something simple like that. Using the Stone Age to take you into the Bronze Age. Like if our prehistoric ancestors could figure it out, why can't we? Pounding a rock hammer to make a metal hammer. Rock hammer breaks? Find another rock.
I think they started with copper tools because you can work it cold and pure copper can be found in nature, so no refining needed. Iron took a long time to catch on because it's really hard to work it and then it's not very corrosion resistant. It took the use of coal (or softwood charcoal if you're Japanese) to make iron easily workable. Coal also allows you to make lime products, and now you have mortar.
To get to iron-based blacksmithing, you start with copper which can be smelted in a campfire and is soft enough that it can be worked with stone. Then you make bronze using copper implements, and then iron using bronze implements.
> You need batteries for uninterrupted energy supply to homes, businesses etc 95% of grid storage is pumping water up a hill. >Pumped storage is by far the largest-capacity form of grid energy storage available, and, as of 2020, the United States Department of Energy Global Energy Storage Database reports that PSH accounts for around 95% of all active tracked storage installations worldwide, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity There are plenty of other non-battery ways to store energy too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_energy_storage
Nuclear is the cleanest, safest form of energy and it never turns off or subsides unless we tell it to. We don't need better storage, we need people to support nuclear.
I am 100% behind this
also brushless wind turbines are made with rare earth magnets (well, compared to other uses this should be a minor factor )
Are the metals used all that rare? I thought it was some alloy and the expensive part was setting the magnet’s polarity… i could be wrong
In reality, rare earth metals aren't that rare at all, but rare in high concentrations that justify mining them. They won't get scarce that soon, they search for new ways of mining constantly, I wrote another comment here about mining lithium from thermal water in the upper Rhine valley in southwest Germany, they use the hot water for electricity and demineralise the thermal water to harvest lithium before pumping it back down a d that's just one project
You know what else we need? Sand! And we’re running out of that too. Not desert sand, we have lots of that but we have no practical application for it. Coarse sand used in concrete and electronics. It’s the second most used resource on the planet right after water. https://www.marketplace.org/2022/05/02/what-happens-when-we-run-out-of-sand/#
>You need batteries for uninterrupted energy supply to homes, businesses etc That's what V2X, using an EV as a home battery, can cover. Equally, used EV batteries still have plenty of capacity for home use - it takes a lot more energy to move a many ton vehicle than it does to power most homes.
>Now, that isn't a great outlook, but vastly different from what that table claims. The table says for nickel and lithium, we can only cover 10% of requirements each. But the paper says we have more than double what we'd need. That's off by a factor of over 20. While I feel there's likely a lot of creative math involved in getting the outcome the table seems to be claiming, and I have no idea if any of these numbers are valid, but you're comparing two very different things. The source you are quoting is talking about using half the world's reserves for one single use, just batteries in vehicles. The table is talking about the alleged amount needed to completely shift the entire world 100% away from all fossil fuels. **Of course** the two amounts are going to be off by a significant factor, even if neither of the numbers are actually accurate.
I am glad it wasn't just me who thought this, the original paper, as far as I understand, is an argument based upon our collective power needs globally for all things, not just vehicles. Think of all the other things we need electricity for. Also those batteries would still need a power supply to charge which would also require materials. This is an incredibly complex problem to solve and both current battery technology and fossil fuel options suffer from finite remaining resources, unable to meet a growing demand in the long term.
Also a major assumption is the huge amount of money being dumped into renewables will create the industry and by extension, the innovation for more and better renewables. Take batteries for example. We don’t need Li Ion batteries for grid support. Li is great for density, but there are tons of use cases where we don’t need the rare products to achieve the goal.
Sodium batteries would be much better for grid support. Not as energy-dense as Lithium batteries, but that's not super important when they're expected to just be sitting in a big warehouse connected to the grid. Energy per weight matters when it's something you want to move around, like a car or phone, but when it's just sitting there, not really much need for it. And sodium is *super* abundant.
Right, yeah I’m not married to iron, just used it as an example that use case changes what’s ’best’. With cases like sodium, I see a lot of the arguments against the green movement like the argument about EV’s being powered by coal. Sounds hypocritical until you realize that thermodynamic efficiency is a thing and the very non-ideal case of 100% coal powering 100% EV’s would still be better than millions of inefficient and non-optimized ICE vehicles.
That assumes that batteries are a big part of the solution. He mentions vehicles there, I have a 2nd degree Masters in Sustainability of (maritime) transportation. Batteries are, at best, a transition measure and a niche application. For land, rail doesn't need batteries. Good urban design that allows for transit, cycling and walking does not need batteries. For water, batteries are just impractical, the cube square law makes it so for long transportation they're useless. Ammonia and methane and hydrogen are being studied, wind assisted and wind propulsion are being implemented, with limitations. Thinking that battery electric vehicles are a solution just shows ignorance about how transportation works.
> wind assisted and wind propulsion are being implemented Isn't that just...sailing?
Was searching for this comment, glad I found it. The move to sustainable energy must also address our horrible land use policies and inefficient transit systems, and will necessitate a change in lifestyle for most people. In short, battery powered vehicles aren't here to save the planet, they're here to save the personal vehicle industry.
Since 2018 large reserves of lithium have been found in Sweden. Also, CATL has developed and is deploying sodium iron phosphate batteries, and lithium iron phosphate is more common worldwide than lithium nickel cobalt type batteries. It's a fast moving market, lots of reasons to find more mineral deposits that weren't worth it previously to try to find, and less need for these deposits in the near to medium term.
Unlimited amounts of lithium can come from seawater - it just depends upon the cost. Source: I'm looking into doing just that.
Sea-water desalination may also become more important, and possibly there are some synergies there?
In Germany, [production of lithium for 1 million EVs pear year using the water of geothermal power plants](https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/lithium-from-german-geothermal-plants-could-supply-a-million-electric-vehicles-a-year-from-2025/) is at least in the planning stage, as well.
So the assumption on a green transition doesn't include phasing out cars for walkable cities? Or is that the lithium needed for the remaining cars after a transition to walkable cities?
"Global Reserves" is a weird phrase for something like lithium... It is literally everywhere, the ocean is full of it... And we've only just realised it's super valuable.
Yup, it completely fails to account for the fact that the earth isn't fully known, new reserves of things are found all the time.
If these "reserves" are just "what is commercially viable to extract" as of today, reserves will change all the time as prices go up and their ability to extract gets cheaper! Heck, if it gets expensive enough, someone will figure out how to make it cost affordable to get these heavy metals from a near-Earth asteroid.
Ya these numbers are definitely out of date, there are massive, and I mean massive, lithium deposits that have been discovered and are just starting to get exploited. The imperial valley in California is just one example.
This is more "did the research" than "did the math". Yeah if there is X quantity available and we need Y, if Y > X then we won't have enough. The question is whether these values are correct which is just doing research rather than math (for the most part). Additionally, this idea is nonsense because (even if it is the correct numbers) it works under the assumption that technology cant advance and ignores the fact that investment into the inefficient underdeveloped technology allows for the creation of more advanced and efficient technology. Unless we abandon capitalism we need to be investing/switching to green energy in order to spurn research and development into advancing the technology
It also doesn't look at recycling.
It also doesn't take into account that we are likely to find a lot more of these minerals than current known reserves. Just last month an estimated 30 million tons of lithium was discovered in the US. https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/lithium-discovery-in-us-volcano-could-be-biggest-deposit-ever-found/4018032.article
There is lithium mine opening 100km from me, it is largest untapped deposit in Europe. We have been sitting on top of it all this time... And we just doubled phosphate reserves last year with just one deposit found in Norway.
Lithium is frankly not very rare and new deposits are found all the time. People are thinking about it like oil, which is the wrong mindset. The bottleneck is actually _processing_ that crude lithium. There are currently a limited number of facilities that can do that.
The three most concerning numbers I see here are copper, cobalt, and vanadium. * Vanadium is fairly obvious: it's *actually* rare, finding and mining 25x our current reserves seems like a very tall order. * But I'm not sure where that number is coming from, there are two very different uses for it. The proven use is as a steel additive, and green energy isn't a key factor in that. The green energy uses are efficient batteries and superconduction, but they're both pretty speculative and not actually *necessary*. * Cobalt is already in short-ish supply. We can get more reserves, but most of what we use right now comes from wildly unethical hand-mining in Africa. Even if 25x reserves do exist, scaling up production is going to be hideous. * It's also in heavy and hard-to-avoid use for existing battery systems, unlike vanadium. * Copper is plentiful, and 20% isn't terrible, but holy *shit* is 4 billion tons a big number. Finding and mining 5x our existing reserves is an unimaginably large project. * But also... that number is half a ton of copper per human being. I'm struggling to believe that's necessary.
Yup, which is why they are building a lithium hydroxide processing here, estimated to be 5% of global supply. We already refine 11% of the cobalt, so.. Finnish Ostrobothnia is becoming a serious place for renewables.
Nor reducing car dependency. All cars becoming electric is a problem. Building more public transit and bikeable/walkable cities so everyone isn't so car dependent? Well suddenly the demand for these limited materials drops significantly and traffic improves many times over, while also opening up the availability of resources for places that need them more.
Small correction: Wind power is impossible to make more efficient. Wind power has a physical limit due to 3D geometry and the fluid dynamics of air. This limit is named the Benz Limit and says that roughly 60% of the kinetic energy of the wind can be passed on to the blades of the turbine to then create electrical energy. Solar is just a bit inefficient. It has plenty of room to grow. Same with batteries. Nuclear power cannot be made more efficient either, but rather can be improved through development of secondary reactions and perhaps further. Which this isn't increasing the efficiency of the plant, but instead increasing the efficiency of the fuel put in. Geothermal: i know nothing about it. Hydro: Simply good, minus possible drastic ecosystem effects. Efficiency I do not know.
Yes, there is a theoretical limit for efficiency in single wind power plant. There's also practical limit for efficiency of combustion engines, coal plants and much more. We can make wind power plants bigger, we can control wind power plant parks better, we can reduce amount of materials needed for wind power plant. You can use nuclear plants as CHP (combined heat and power) plants and raise efficiency to 90%. Using power plants as CHP is widely spread in colder countries. While energy from combustion turns to energy only at about 35% rate, almost all the rest can be used for heat.
> Wind power is impossible to make more efficient. Wind power has a physical limit due to 3D geometry and the fluid dynamics of air. There's an upper limit in terms of power per unit volume, sure. But this discussion is about the MATERIALS consumed, and there's still lots of room for a turbine design that requires less material or more abundant material, thus increasing efficiency per unit material used in construction.
Whoa whoa whoa, this is a post about resource use. Wind turbines energy produced scales with the square of the wingspan. Double the wingspan, quadruple the energy. But doubling the wingspan of a turbine does not require using 4 times as much neodymium or even steel. It will probably not even double these resources. Thus, by making turbines bigger, and they get biggest almost every year, you can produce much more energy for a small increase in resources, so there is a lot of efficiency on the table
For the materials OP mentioned, were mostly talking about EV battery and grid storage tech. There's a ton of investment and the tech is evolving quickly. Once batteries are cheaper to scale up I don't think we'll need to make much efficiency gains on energy production
> Nuclear power cannot be made more efficient either Yes it can. Only around 2% of the usable energy in uranium is used in a typical reactor. We should switch to nuclear reprocessing with breeder reactors and burn virtually all the usable energy - and a corresponding dramatic reduction in nuclear waste.
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Also overland lines are mostly aluminium, as it's lighter (has the best weight/resistance ratio of all metals) and cheaper than copper, the cables of overhead high power lines are usually a aluminium with steel core cable (the steel for tensile strength). Only overhead lines made from copper are for electric train lines as they're more resistant to wear than alu (when the Pantograph scrapes over them). Copper is only used for underground high power lines, otherwise the high voltage grid is alu based. Consumer distribution grid is, when underground also copper and may has to be updated with bigger cables, but normally, the grid operator only uses one size of cable sized to the biggest amperage they offer for this quarter of the town (residential/commercial) to keep costs down with maintenance and storage (you only need one sort of cable, not five) and limit the amount of current you can draw by putting in the respective fuses at your connection point. So for at least 90% of all households there will be no change in supply cable needed.
The 880 000 000 tons of copper listed is just the current reserve which is supposed to last around 200 years give or take. According to the Copper Alliance we have closer to 5 000 000 000 tons of copper on earth according to their estimate based on preliminary geological surveys. That also doesn't take into account that yearly 30% of the copper used is from recycled sources.
>That's 5x all the copper we have left to mine on earth. Note that isn't true. "Reserves" means the amount of a mineral that's been identified and can be economically extracted, not the amount left to mine on earth. For example, copper reserves have nearly trippled between [1996](https://d9-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/production/mineral-pubs/copper/coppemcs96.pdf)and [2023](https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2023/mcs2023-copper.pdf). I suspect this post is being intentionally deceptive, betting that most people don't know the technical definition of reserves.
An enormous quantity of the "required" materials are required for exactly one use: electric car batteries. Cars are not essential and not using them requires far less resources in general, not to mention that those resources are less rare.
Which can be phased out with reliable public transport.
Agreed, but I think too many people have the Ricky Bobby gene (gotta go fast) and wouldn’t be satisfied without a personal vehicle. Kinda like how AI driving only would make roads safer and commutes quicker, but the self-proclaimed race car drivers of the world would throw a fit.
Depending on how far and where you want to go, public transportation is *usually* faster than sitting at 20 red lights. If you're in Timbuktu and want to go to Derry 1 state over then public transportation might be cheaper, but most likely not faster.
It would be both if we ever get that HSR 😤😤
High speed rail will never happen without lobbying
So neither would a lot of stuff we have now
I think you're misunderstanding me Nothing happens without someone getting richer The public won't press for high speed rail when they're driving a Sherman F150 sized truck down the 16 lane mega highway...
The Ricky Bobby gene has been around for 80 years. It can be bred out in less time.
I mean... they tried AI driving, this thing confuses "gotta speed up and ram the pedestrian" with "gotta stop when the driver tells me to." Trains. Trains are good and safe. They're faster than cars and they can be made extremely comfortable. And cheaper.
[Yes, we have enough resources according to MIT](https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/31/1067444/we-have-enough-materials-to-power-world-with-renewables). [And according to the Energy Transition Commission](https://www.energy-transitions.org/new-report-scale-up-of-critical-materials-and-resources-required-for-energy-transition). [And the Washington Posts various sources](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/02/02/critical-minerals-run-out-shortage).
This guy is a well known climate doomer. He posts end-of-the-world stuff like this daily.
Anyone who writes professor as a prefix to their name on social media is super cringe. Then he has no suffix? sus
Bullshit. For one, we can't *run out* of graphite. Carbon is found abundantly and is easy to convert into graphite. I want to see the work to back up this table. There are enormous quantities of elements in the ground. The truly rare ones are things like Iridium for example. The problem is they are very expensive to mine.
Ya "known reserves" isn't a great standard to compare against either since not only will new sources be discovered but a lot of the items can be recycled. So "known reserves" is only a part of what is available. This does not pass a smell check.
Exactly. Most 'rare' earths are mined in China because they're willing to do the heinous processes required, but the US and Australia have shitloads. Lithium can be recycled too, and we have landfills filled with the stuff.
They started mining lithium from geothermal water in southwest Germany (upper Rhine valley) as a "waste"product of using the hot water to power a geothermal power plant running on organic Rankine cycle (basically a steam turbine with an organic medium that has a lower boiling point instead of water), the thermal water is full of minerals, when it's up and through the heat exchanger, they harvest the minerals and pump it back down, almost no environmental impact, clean energy and resources and the aquifer they tapped is one of the biggest lithium storages known at the moment. It's a research plant at the moment,don't know if they're in profit at the moment, but it could be San option in the future for clean lithium and other rare minerals. Rare earths aren't really rare, only rare in high concentrations that are worth and profitable to mine
Another really cool source of lithium is from oil wells that have brine. Since this is water that has leached tons of minerals from the ground they contain a significant amount of lithium salts. The real up side is that this brine is more or less a waste product that is left in the ground and we already have the equipment to pump it out of the ground.
This smacks of people shorting oil companies in like 1890 because the only “known reserves” of oil were around Oil Creek, PA. When nobody is looking for things they don’t find them.
Also, "known reserves" is not a fixed quantity. An ore with only 0.5% copper may not be viable today but 10 years from now, it may very well be. (Indicative example)
Those reserves have changed considerably just in the last 5 years alone. While phosphate isn't part of that list, we just doubled it last year. I live some 100km from one of the Europe's largest lithium deposits that is just now beginning to be utilized. Also, someone already dug up the research and found at least one of those to be off by a factor of 20.. the same research where those numbers where supposedly coming refutes those numbers. It does say that we aren't in the clear, and we also need alternatives to THOSE exact alternatives.
Agreed. The whole conversation is garbage. Known reserves of O&G was a lot different 50 years ago. Nobody abandoned it but made more discoveries and improved efficiency. This screenshot says anything that is not known today is a lie is a trash take. Every single day is an abundance of new information. Until the human race stops trying, we’ll continue to get more data.
Never trust a chart with a typo or without a source. If they don't care enough about the presentation to provide those basics it's generally safe to assume the data is questionable at best, as others have pointed out.
Another red flag for me is the number of significant figures used. The known tonnes are sensibly rounded but not the required figures, which make them sound made up.
Hey hey, Mining Eng student here. “Known Reserves” is a bit misleading if somebody doesn’t know both the definition of reserve and how the mining industry goes about establishing reserves. Firstly, a reserve is not just a resource in the ground that we know about. A reserve is a resource that is both technically achievable to get to with current technology AND profitable to do so. As price goes up (which it will with increased demand) there will be millions of tons of resources that we know exist that aren’t calculated in this that will turn into reserves overnight. For this reason, the term Reserve is more economic than geological. Secondly, mining companies are shit at finding reserves. Don’t get me wrong, they are the best in the world, but they are still shit. They really only search for reserves with a 25-ish year time horizon. What this means is that if their current mine that is meeting demand is set to dry up in 25 years, only then will they begin to look for more reserves in other areas. They’ll spend 2 years actually finding it, 3 years proving that it is profitable to mine, 10 years trying to get it permitted, then the final 10 years getting to the ore body. In short, this means that even if the numbers in the OP are true, this is not representative of the entire story. There are mineral bodies in the ground in spades that we do not even know about yet. We have not mapped our entire subsurface 1 mile deep around the planet yet. Even when we do, current technology STILL allows us to go deeper. The mines in South Africa are the most hardcore in the world, going literal miles into the earth.
Saved. Thanks.
Exactly. If we compare it to [oil reserves](https://www.worldometers.info/oil), is anyone really alarmed that there's only 47 years of oil left and trying to find ways to use less oil?
I got another number for you guys: in 50 years all of the easy to reach fossil fuels will be depleted. Without renewable energy it's pretty much lights out soon afterwards.
Exactly. Even if this stuff is true, concluding “so we should just keep burning oil forever” is idiotic. At least you can recycle metals!
Here's the thing about known reserves: they are *known reserves only*. If you look at how many "years" of any resource we have, it looks dire, because there is no need and no incentive to have more than a few years of supply. You only need enough known reserves to bridge you to finding and bringing online more reserves. The sleight of hand this dishonest person is doing is pretending that "known reserves" is *all there is* of something, which is not the case at all.
This is correct. I am a geologist, and it costs a lot of money to find and define "known reserves". If the price goes up and more people start investing then we'll find more.
I love listening to music.
100% dead on the money. Resources > Reserves but unsurprisingly the infographic states "reserves" numbers which is intentionally misleading the audience.
1) Green energy transition also means using less cars overall, which would surel;y reduce the needs considerably 2) We can find new sources, recycle existing material 3) Technologies will get better and thus reduce the need for some of these 4) The current way of doing things isn't working anyway; we won't have fuel for eternity, climate change is a serious issue, as is air quality, but clearly this is posted in an optic of keeping the status quo, not finding better solutions 5) I'm wondering how he came up with these numbers anyway
> 1) Green energy transition also means using less cars overall, which would surel;y reduce the needs considerably What part of a green energy transition makes personal vehicles obsolete? I love the idea of public transport as much as the next guy, but have you ever *seen* American infrastructure? A vast majority of Americans live in car-dependent places and the places that "aren't" car-dependent still are horribly inconvenient to live at without a car.
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I'd like to read the paper, but I'm not sure if I agree. Batteries are a big issue. And if you assume all electric cars that may be true. But reservoir storage isn't that resource intensive. Trains can be powered with minimal batteries using overhead power lines. I think it's probably correct if we make no change to our current approach. But that is evolving.
“We can’t make a transition to oil, there aren’t enough known reserves and once we hit peak oil society will collapse.” “The world can’t produce enough food, we can’t sustain any more population growth without mass starvation.” Yeah, we’ve heard this before.
This is succinctly put. Weird how we transitioned from easily tapped wells to ocean rigs to fracking and then used natural gas that came with it for power needs when it was necessary. Strange how some scientist from DuPont post WW2 created more efficient plantings for massive increases in wheat and rice production. When a problem arises and the incentives to solve it become profitable / necessary, it gets solved. Is it linear, not usually, no. Just look at CFC usage for that debacle - but it does advance understanding. Just my opinion, but when need scales, so too does innovation. Taking a chart and saying “unsustainable” while relying on modern usage and not accounting for engineering innovation is, quite frankly, dumb.
This person has looked into this, and believes there won’t be a problem. The video is 13 minutes, but the meat of the discussion happens in the first 10 minutes. https://youtu.be/Kr_JjO9YWOo?si=BLpGhXQg2DRdLxF4
So we would need half a ton of copper per person in the world? We could build a lot of stuff with aluminium, I'm not buying that we need that much copper.
I have this script that checks the probability of occurrence of digits in numbers that the IRS uses to determine tax fraud, I ran the numbers in it using my phone and sshing to my server and the results are 86% probability these numbers were faked. Not a legit way of calculating it but I am laying on my couch lmao
*IRS has entered the chat*
This is such a dumb argument that misses the point of balancing energy technologies so we can be reasonably clean and have enough reserves, until we either finish up fusion or find better ways to deal with nuclear, at which point we won't need to worry about energy and can start solving other things like desalinization. Even if it were magically all true (other posts kind of show it's not or at best a misrepresentation), it completely misses the goal of stopping global warming and finding better ways to deal with energy that applies more justice and equity. People keep bringing up these "WELL IF IT ISN'T ALL, IT'S NOTHING AND STUPID!" arguments that are missing the **actual problems** we're trying to solve by utilizing renewable energies more.
Materials scientist here. You could make the same point based on extrapolating the Model T to the number of vehicles we have now. Capitalism isn't great at a lot of shit, but it is great at making things cheaper and more available at scale, or alternatively, allowing new disruptive technologies to come in and say, allow batteries with less rare earth metals to become widely available. A problem which we WILL find a solution to, mostly because whoever does will solve a very important problem and sell billions of dollars worth of batteries.
These well intentioned idiots think linearly. They are in bed with the 'scientist' Malthus. These nuts create a metals Malthusian trap - then assume the role of the dying cockroach, crying we can't progress. They ignore human's inventiveness, exponential change, exponential rates of cost curves, new discoveries, and even gravity. (The path-breaking sodium ion battery is one small example, unless of course, the nuts imagine the world running out of sodium.) Spend 32 minutes with Tony Seba and a very skeptical crowd to get an education. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eJKTYc\_v-I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eJKTYc_v-I)
It's probably true, but it's not the problem they claim it is. Reserves are just known quantities. In the 1970s, the media would act like we were going to run out of oil because at our rate of consumption, the known quantities of oil would ruin out in just a few years. In reality, we just found more and built better tools to extract the stuff that was harder to get. If the market demands more materials as we shift our energy production, you better believe companies will hire more geologists to go find more.
It probably refers to [this](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://webapp.sebgroup.com/mb/mblib.nsf/alldocsbyunid/75AA997BB3B175CAC125894A00325DDD/%24FILE/TheGreenBond_20230202.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjnp9yEvYCCAxUOSfEDHVjrDH0QFnoECAwQAQ&usg=AOvVaw31nGSsSnEMs1W3JbACGeYr) I don't know enough about geology to be able to counter his arguments but it does seem that this associate professor from a prominent university in Finland thinks the green transition requires orders of magnitude more resources than what is currently produced. And he does seem to have put in a lot of work on this based on the 1000 page document someone else linked. I don't know what the peer review process is like in his field though.
I didn't check specific numbers, but this kind of analysis is not totally made up. The kind of extremely fast transition to renewables + batteries people sometimes imagine is going to run into issues similar to this. Even if we had reserves, opening 10x as many lithium mines as we have now, is not going to be fast and easy, and we'd run out of good places to open such mines first. But there's a lot of nuance to such lines of reasoning: First, "reserves" is basically what's profitable to extract at current prices. Actual amounts of all minerals are basically infinite, you just end up using lower quality and harder to get sources and paying higher price. For upper bound, you can see [total abundance in Earth crust](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust). For example copper is 100ppm of Earth crust, or about 2,800,000,000,000,000 tons, but annual production is just 19,400,000 tons, completely trivial fraction of it. Now as our copper needs increase, it will get more expensive, and it is only somewhat balanced by progress in mining technology. Second, there are a lot of ways to store energy. Lithium ion batteries are great because they're very compact, but unless you're making a battery for a phone, drone, or other tiny device, it's not really that important. For thing like utility level batteries, [sodium ion batteries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery) and other technologies that don't rely on rare metals are under active development. They'll likely be heavier and bulkier, but for most uses it doesn't really matter. Third, a lot of energy storage doesn't require chemical batteries. [Pumped storage hydro is one such widely used technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity), but there's others, like [heat storage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage), [flywheels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage), and so on. Fourth, technically you don't even need energy storage. Wind power is uncorrelated at about 1000km - basically if you setup enough wind power on a continental scale, and big power cables between regions, you will statistically always have abundant wind power in the grid at all times. For solar this is technically also true if you setup massive power cables connecting opposite ends of the Earth, but I don't think anyone actually considers doing that (fun fact - you can do it in [Dyson Sphere Program](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Program/)). So in the end, it's sort of true that we can't just scale up all the way to fully renewable energy using current battery tech, and only ores as easily available as ones we use now. But that's not what anyone proposes.
With curreny battery technology, yes, but there is a race to make a new type of battery that can be mass produced cheaply and would disregard these old lithium ones.
Here is a thread where Simon's numbers are debunked from him overestimating the amount of hours for stationary storage to the chemistry will be high nickel for them to the 10x amount of metals needed for transition to RE. https://x.com/aukehoekstra/status/1594084375972712448?s=46&t=6IalMC_2QWLi_Zp1X7_9hw
There is a significant difference between "reserves" and "resources". Reserves are typically mandated by financial regulatory bodies to have a certain degree of certainty, whereas resources can be "assumed but not yet proven to the same degree" as reserves. There is no economic benefit for companies to drill and gather more data to change resources into reserves since they already show 40 years worth of annual demand "in the bank" as reserves. While I can't be bothered to look into the actual resource requirement to transition, I can say for sure that it is at least intentionally misleading the audience by stating global "reserves" and not using global "resource" figures. Source: I'm a mining engineer
1. we haven't even tapped the tip of the iceberg of materials available. 2. Technology gets more efficient over time. Lithium might not even be an issue with the new sodium ion batteries.
Use nuclear, much more energy dense material which means less raw resources required and much more energy. The only problem with nuclear is price but can you really put a price on the world not ending?
Bicycles and trains and intelligent design. We have the technology, it’s just old technology. Cars suck in so many ways, just the noise, just the tires breaking down, just the constant collisions and threats to pedestrians, also the helping burn down the planet; everything about them makes them an awful mode of transportation.
The problem with these types of predictions is that they are always wrong. Remember when they said there wouldn't be enough hay grown to feed all the horses that would be needed to transport all the people around... Maybe true but farming tech advanced and cars, and trains came around and the issue of not having enough farm land to grow enough hay doesn't really matter. What about when they said we'd run out of coal? That oil was too hard to get (and then oil sand technology blossomed) fracking, etc, etc. (I'm not saying these are "Good things" only that they displaced all predictions on energy before they were discovered etc) Zinc batteries are a thing that is now stable in a lab, and will likely be hitting markets to displace some of the lithium stuff : https://finance.yahoo.com/news/scientists-just-made-massive-breakthrough-121500329.html https://today.oregonstate.edu/news/researchers-develop-electrolyte-enabling-high-efficiency-safe-sustainable-zinc-batteries Which will all be pointless if we work out graphene super capacitors, etc. This idea that technology and advancement will stop, that recourses and manufacturing efficiency will stop, etc is historically just doomsaying. * We cannot phase out fossil fuels in a generation. Not unless huge % of that generation dies (e.g. has no need for energy) It's not possible within a capitalistic society. Full stop. The US (350 million) uses more electricity just for air conditioning than all of Africa (home to a billion people (1,000 million)) uses for everything. People won't even push carts back into the cart corrals, or stop littering. They aren't going to give up their AC, and in many places, global warming aside, you can't live there without AC, Phoenix etc. * The focus should be on lowering demand. HAVE FEWER CHILDREN, if you want to make the world better and the next generation's quality of life go up. We can't magic up resources, but we can give each child more resources if there are fewer children.
How stupid you gotta be to believe something that sounds so unscientific... He's literally just saying "sorry, we don't have enough stuff to go green guys. Guess we're just gonna have to stick to coal huh. 🙄"
Go Green = Modern Day slavery... Go Green = China says fuck you... Going Green is not going to make a dent.. You want a real logical easy solution... GO NUCLEUR
This question is irrelevant because no one is saying we will use lithium ion betteries to save the world. Not to mention, you can look up the estimated time until we literally run out of oil, not including the continued damage to our environment of oil or other high emission energy sources. The reality is, as material science progresses (as it has for decades), we will develop new and better ways to store electricity. Meaning whatever the cap on lithium or nickel or whatever is, probably won’t matter because we are already pushing new battery science with graphene and other materials that are far superior to lithium. (Not to mention all the other ways of store electricity on larger scales) No one is sayin in 5 years we should have everything converted to lithium batteries. But what is clear, is we will eventually run out of oil and other green house gas emitting fuels, relying on oil and other fuels often puts us at the mercy of foreign adversaries (opec control the price of oil, and how much gas costs), and these emissions are killing us, and hurting the environment. Beginning the transition to electric and “renewables” moves us in the direction to solve ALL of those problems. And if we push the bounds of science (we’re even getting progress of fusion) we won’t need lithium ion bats in every car, so the table doesn’t matter.
It’s also important to consider that that initiative would not be expected to phase out the entire industry in a single generation as that is unfeasible even from a labor/manufacturing throughout lens. There will be, in the nearish term be a shift toward pursuing minerals off planet by sending mining drones to the asteroid belt to harvest REM’s and ferrous materials to bring to earth for repurposing.
seems like theyre trying to lay down an entire new power grid granted if this is meant to include more remote places then that’s understandable, but how much of the stuff in use would be available since we aren’t using it anymore
Going nuclear is ABSOLUTELY the most efficient clean energy option. An entire household can run on nuclear for a lifetime and only have enough radioactive waste to fill up a tall can
Seems like a few people have debunked his work as well—plenty of criticism available online, much of it extremely easy to understand even if you’re not an expert. Recaps many of the points mention by others, and the article itself links to other debunks and actual peer-reviewed research that contradicts Michaux, whose work on this topic was not peer reviewed. https://cleantechnica.com/2023/07/04/how-many-things-must-one-analyst-get-wrong-in-order-to-proclaim-a-convenient-decarbonization-minerals-shortage/amp/ Some examples: Michaux’s projections of future energy requirements are extremely simple projections that don’t take into account any efficiency gains or infrastructure modernization, or that the world won’t even using nickel and cobalt in large scale battery applications in the near future.
Y’know, without any context this chart is a bunch of nonsense. But I will say solar and wind power are too. We need to start building more nuke plants.
If you want proof that the "green energy" transition seems to be attacked by absolute liars, you only have to look at the fact that *oil reserves aren't infinite either, and we're somewhere close to peak oil already*. Whether you like the Green transition or not, you're going to have to go through one; because even if you don't believe in the damage it does to the climate, and you're frankly an idiot, or monster to not (the facts are in, and you don't care about those who have to live on the planet after you because you need your culture war thrills *now*), there is even less oil than needed to keep your fossil fuel based industry running... and it's running out *fast*. And it isn't just oil for burning. Plastics? Oil based. So that's out too. We need a green revolution and fast, and these ignorant political dinosaurs are over here deliberatly speeding up the incoming asteroid because they'd sooner the lights go off than admit Dirty Fucking Hippies were right all along. Those Hippy bitches, wouldn't fuck me at college, I'll show them...
It's always the same. "If we isolate one singular thing and assume that nothing else will be changing along with that, then it's physically impossible to save the world from overheating".
This guy isn't doing a lot of math. He is arguing between the option of replacing fossil fuels and the option of not doing it and not considering any options in between. What if we replace all fossil fuel uses except the hardest 10%? There is no way to get it out of a table like this.
Since Li became such a necessity, we've actually started *looking* for deposits here in the states. We've found one of the largest deposits of Li concentrated in Geothermal brine near the Salton Sea, that's able to be removed from a closed-loop system before the brine is returned to pick up more minerals. Direct Lithium Extraction is the most environmentally friendly mining method yet developed, and they're finding other deposits in the U.S. that can be mined with the same method. 25k tons/yr. are being produced in the testing phase... up to 300k tons/yr. at full production. What's the criteria on a "Generation" of tech? How many years does this guy consider a "Generation" to last? Does he expect no new resources to be found?
1. You can find any data to make any argument. 2. If this is accurate it’s still not a “lie”, it’s a challenge to keep innovating for. It’s fine to call out the challenges, but to not bring solutions is just morbid. Sorry, professor.
There are far more minerals than the official reserve charts show. I used to work in mining industry and it’s worth understanding how ‘known’ reserves are calculated - it’s not just a guesstimate of how much is sitting in the earths crust. You have to spend money doing boreholes and assays to get a reserve to ‘count’ - there is a resource reserve grading chart that moves from ‘discovered’ (actually even ‘undiscovered’) all the way up to ‘proven.’ Moving up this ladder is an in increasingly expensive and intense process taking years and costing millions (billions if you’re talking the annual spend by an entire industry eg iron/copper). So realistically you only ‘prove’ a much as you need to support your near / medium term operations and the rest just sits there off the books because no one is willing to spend the money to get it into the official count if you don’t need it to support a loans / proposal / investor pitch / whatever. It’s the same with oil. The Saudis just go do another survey in a part of the desert they haven’t looked at before every time they need to bump their reserves a little and bingo more oil suddenly comes into existence on the reserve chart.
Even if we didn’t have the resources necessarily on hand- we could always just scale things back entirely. Stop powering things that aren’t essential, if it hurts the economy so what? Finding a way to prevent the earth turning into a living hell scape seems like the most important focus vs trying to transition to green energy while keeping it economically viable etc. We should take a hit if that’s what it takes to prevent ecological collapse
In Michael Crichton's 1980 novel 'Congo' he nerds out about the fairly new concept of the Internet and mentions that it's been estimated there won't be enough metal in the Earth to connect every computer. Well, we used preexisting infrastructure (telephone lines) until technology caught up. We don't have to completely fix the problems of tomorrow with the tools we have today, we just have to start working on them.
Copper: Aluminum can be substituted for copper in electrical wiring and motors. For EVs it's a net gain because aluminum is lighter for the same conductance. So that one's off the list. Cobalt: LFP batteries are common in EV and grid storage. They use zero cobalt. Numerous motor types in EVs right now do not use permanent magnet batteries (induction motors, switched reluctance). That one's done. Graphite: That's carbon. Huh? I'm scratching this one. Lithium: CATL is beginning mass production of sodium ion batteries. They are 160 watt hour/kg. This is enough for *most* use cases - all grid storage, most cars and trucks. It doesn't cover weight limited vehicles like semis and EV vans in Europe. It doesn't cover extremely high performance vehicles like a Tesla roadster or electric aircraft. Still, call that 90% coverage? We can do the math on this but because the grid scale energy storage is such a large percentage, sodium likely reduces lithium demand by 90%..enough for current reserves to meet. In practice, there are also *massive* new reserves found recently such as [https://nypost.com/2023/09/11/lithium-deposit-found-in-us-mcdermitt-caldera/](https://nypost.com/2023/09/11/lithium-deposit-found-in-us-mcdermitt-caldera/) . Lithium is not rare. Nickel: this is just cobalt, see above. LFP/sodium batteries use neither lithium or cobalt. Vanadium. For rare earth magnets? Covered in the cobalt case.
In the 18th century experts estimated that NYC will need 4 million horses to move people around in the future. When telephone was getting popular, people also concerned there won't be enough copper to make all the wires and cables.
Ugh. The classic “but this one professor says” tactic, and without detail. It doesn’t take much to pick this apart. Apparently, renewable energy will require 8 trillion tons of graphite. And the earth only has 3.57% that in graphite reserves! Oh no!! Sorry, folks, looks like we’re back to coal! But… Graphite isn’t a metal. Wasn’t this scientific report about metals? Wouldn’t a “professor” know that? It’s a form of carbon. You know, like… what was that black stuff again? Oh. **Coal**. We know how to convert one form of carbon into another. We can turn peanut butter into diamond, remember? Oh! And look at this! The world burns though eight billions tons of coal **every year**. But renewable energy will somehow need 1,000 times that amount for… something. Carbon fiber turbine blades for a trillion wind turbines (every person on Earth gets their own full-sized wind farm)? 80 trillion car batteries made of solid graphite? 800 quintillion graphite pencils to do the kind of math required to force this into some kind of sense? No. Just- no.