pfi572
Active VIP Member
Attached piece just looks at the amount of rare earth minerals required to move towards more renewables. It ignores C02 intensity & water usage but the sheer scale of raw ore required should give people an idea of why I don’t think the age of oil & natural gas is over by an stretch.
Among the material realities of green energy:
Building wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity, as well as batteries to fuel electric vehicles, requires,
on average, more than 10 times the quantity of materials, compared with building machines using hydrocarbons
to deliver the same amount of energy to society.
A single electric car contains more cobalt than 1,000 smartphone batteries; the blades on a single wind turbine
have more plastic than 5 million smartphones; and a solar array that can power one data center uses more glass
than 50 million phones.
Replacing hydrocarbons with green machines under current plans—never mind aspirations for far greater expansion—
will vastly increase the mining of various critical minerals around the world. For example, a single electric
car battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials. Averaged
over a battery’s life, each mile of driving an electric car “consumes” five pounds of earth. Using an internal
combustion engine consumes about 0.2 pounds of liquids per mile.
Oil, natural gas, and coal are needed to produce the concrete, steel, plastics, and purified minerals used to build
green machines. The energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil is used in the processes to fabricate a single battery
that can store the equivalent of one barrel of oil.
By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels—much of it non-recyclable — will constitute double
the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics
from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage.
mines-minerals-green-energy-reality-checkMM.PDF
Among the material realities of green energy:
Building wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity, as well as batteries to fuel electric vehicles, requires,
on average, more than 10 times the quantity of materials, compared with building machines using hydrocarbons
to deliver the same amount of energy to society.
A single electric car contains more cobalt than 1,000 smartphone batteries; the blades on a single wind turbine
have more plastic than 5 million smartphones; and a solar array that can power one data center uses more glass
than 50 million phones.
Replacing hydrocarbons with green machines under current plans—never mind aspirations for far greater expansion—
will vastly increase the mining of various critical minerals around the world. For example, a single electric
car battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials. Averaged
over a battery’s life, each mile of driving an electric car “consumes” five pounds of earth. Using an internal
combustion engine consumes about 0.2 pounds of liquids per mile.
Oil, natural gas, and coal are needed to produce the concrete, steel, plastics, and purified minerals used to build
green machines. The energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil is used in the processes to fabricate a single battery
that can store the equivalent of one barrel of oil.
By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels—much of it non-recyclable — will constitute double
the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics
from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage.
mines-minerals-green-energy-reality-checkMM.PDF
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