Will a scramble to mine metals undermine the clean energy revolution?

Creating greenish technologies similar batteries and star panels requires a batch of minerals, and a batch of mining. The situation present is to extract what we request without destroying the environment

Environment 10 November 2021

By Graham Lawton

Lithium is important for batteries, and Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni has the largest known deposits

Kseniya Ragozina/Alamy

IF THE unofficial rallying outcry of the fossil substance lobby is “drill, baby, drill”, renewable vigor should person 1 too: “dig, baby, dig”. If we are going to hit our clime targets, the satellite is going to request a batch of caller mines.

“Minerals are indispensable ingredients of the aboriginal cleanable vigor system,” says Fatih Birol, enforcement manager of the International Energy Agency (IEA). “If we effort to visualise our aboriginal cleanable vigor systems – millions of electrical vehicles, cars, buses, windmills, star panels – they request minerals to build. Huge amounts of minerals.”

He isn’t exaggerating. According to a recent IEA report, if the satellite is to scope its people of net-zero c emissions by 2050, wide request for what it calls “critical minerals” – including lithium, copper, cobalt, nickel and the rare world elements, each of them captious ingredients of cleanable vigor tech – volition summation sixfold. Another caller estimation from Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies forecasts that electrifying transport and expanding renewable powerfulness procreation volition increase request for minerals astir 7 times by 2050.

That presents a immense situation to the realisation of our cleanable vigor dreams. While determination is nary shortage of the minerals themselves, getting them retired of the crushed successful time, successful capable quantities, and without creating different biology monster, is simply a antithetic matter. Ultimately, we person nary choice. “We request to bash it,” says Kingsmill Bond, a strategist astatine vigor deliberation vessel Carbon Tracker. “But we request to bash it the precise champion …