“Moving to low-carbon energy means digging millions of tonnes of minerals out of the earth”. I hear this argument used against renewable energy and electric vehicles a lot.

It sounds like a lot, but is it really? Let’s take a look.

We currently mine around 7 million tonnes of minerals for low-carbon technologies every year.1

That includes all of the minerals for solar panels, wind energy, geothermal, concentrating solar power, hydropower, nuclear, electric vehicles, battery storage, and changes to electricity grids. I’ve included a complete list of the minerals included in the footnote.2

But we need to deploy more low-carbon energy, fast. This will need to increase. How much will be mining once the low-carbon transition really picks up speed?

The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that in 2040 we will need 28 million tonnes. This is in its ‘Sustainable Development Scenario’, which assumes a fast deployment of low-carbon energy.3

That’s a lot of stuff to be digging out of the earth. Until we compare it to what we’re moving away from: fossil fuels.

Every year we produce the equivalent of 15 billion tonnes of coal, oil, and gas. This comparison is shown in the chart.

Sources for all of these figures are included at the end of the article.

At its fastest rate of deployment, mining quantities for low-carbon energy will be 500 to 1000 times less than current fossil fuel production.

But even this underestimates the differences in these quantities: the numbers for fossil fuels are the amount we need every year because they’re the ‘running’ costs.

The minerals for low-carbon energy are like capital costs. The running costs after these technologies have been deployed are much less. We won’t maintain these big numbers forever: it will be a temporary scale-up if we develop affordable methods of recycling them. If we cannot recycle them (which I find unlikely), then this scale-up will occur periodically every few decades.

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We can’t wait for the ‘perfect’ solution, or we will do nothing

Here I’m only looking at quantity. Of course, that doesn’t cover everything we care about.

The environmental and social impacts of mineral mining and fossil fuel mining are not necessarily the same. In fact, mining any mineral or fuel does not have the same impact everywhere: mining from rainforests, indigenous lands, or protected land is not the same as uninhabited deserts.

On some metrics, per tonne impacts of fossil fuels will be worse. On some, it’s the opposite.

The other important question is how our mining rates compare to the total amount of resources that we have. Will we run out of minerals? I look at this question for lithium here, and the distribution of minerals across the world here. The summary is: not any time soon, but we’d benefit a lot from improved recycling and repurposing of these minerals.

With the right comparison, it’s easy to make renewables, electric vehicles and nuclear energy look bad. Just frame it as “low-carbon energy needs millions of tonnes of minerals”. They look bad because they’re comparing it to a world of zero impact. But this is not realistic. We can't build low-carbon energy without digging minerals out of the earth. We have to compare it to the problem that we’re trying to solve.

I see these dodgy framings everywhere. Take the safety of renewables and nuclear energy. Newspapers report an accident at a solar or wind plant, and people assume that these sources are dangerous. What they’re forgetting is that fossil fuels kill millions every year from air pollution. Nuclear and renewables are not perfect, but they are hundreds to thousands of times safer, even without considering climate change.

We can’t delay action on climate change because we don’t have the ‘perfect’ solution. I wrote about this here.

Sources

Mineral demand for low-carbon technologies

The figures for mineral demand come from the International Energy Agency (IEA)'s flagship report on The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions.

In 2020, it estimates that global demand was 7 million tonnes.

In 2040, I used the IEA’s ‘Sustainable Development Scenario’, which anticipates accelerated action on low-carbon technologies.

This list of minerals includes copper, silicon, silver, zinc, manganese, chromium, nickel, molybdenum, aluminum, lithium, cobalt, graphite, vanadium, and rare earth minerals.

An important note here is that aluminum (which is a metal, not a mineral) is not included.

If aluminum was included, the total material demand in 2040 would be 43 million tonnes. A lot higher, but still in the order of millions of tonnes, not billions.

We also shouldn't include aluminum for low-carbon technologies without including it for coal and other fossil fuels. Coal uses significant amounts of aluminum. Per unit of electricity, often more than other sources, with the exception of solar PV from silicon.

Including aluminum in these figures would not change the message in any notable way.

Fossil fuel demand

Coal

Data is sourced from the US Energy Information Analysis (EIA). You can explore this data on Our World in Data.

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Oil

The US Energy Information Analysis (EIA) estimates that global oil production in 2019 was 4.77 billion m³. This is equivalent to 4.3 billion tonnes.

This is confirmed by estimates of global oil demand from the IEA, which come to around 4 billion tonnes.

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Natural Gas

The US Energy Information Analysis (EIA) estimates that global natural gas production in 2019 was 4 trillion m³.

This is the same as IEA estimates.

To convert this to tonnes, we assume that 1 m³ = 0.712 kg.

This conversion factor is based on BP methodology which gives units of gas production at 15°C and 1013 mbar.

This then gives us 3 billion tonnes of natural gas.

1

This figure is for 2020 and comes from the International Energy Agency (IEA)'s flagship report: The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions.

2

This list of minerals includes copper, silicon, silver, zinc, manganese, chromium, nickel, molybdenum, aluminum, lithium, cobalt, graphite, vanadium, and rare earth minerals.

3

In its 'Stated Policies Scenario' which does not included accelerated action on the scale-up of low-carbon technologies, this figure is almost half, at 15 million tonnes in 2040.

Sustainability by numbers

Mining quantities for low-carbon energy is…