#Minerals for the Energy Transition

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Circular battery self-sufficiency

I'm coming to DEFCON! On FRIDAY (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On SATURDAY (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

If we are going to survive the climate emergency, we will have to electrify – that is, transition from burning fossil fuels to collecting, storing, transmitting and using renewable energy generated by e.g. the tides, the wind, and (especially) the Sun.

Electrification is a big project, but it's not an insurmountable one. Planning and executing an electric future is like eating the elephant: we do it one step at a time. This is characteristic of big engineering projects, which explains why so many people find it hard to imagine pulling this off.

As a layperson, you are far more likely to be exposed to a work of popular science than you are a work of popular engineering. Pop science is great, but its role is to familiarize you with theory, not practice. Popular engineering is a minuscule and obscure genre, which is a pity, because it's one of my favorites.

Weathering the climate emergency is going to require a lot of politics, to be sure, but it's also going to require a lot of engineering, which is why I'm grateful for the nascent but vital (and growing) field of popular engineering. Not to mention, the practitioners of popular engineering tend to be a lot of fun, like the hosts of the Well That's Your Problem podcast, a superb long-form leftist podcast about engineering disasters (with slides!):

https://www.youtube.com/@welltheresyourproblempodca1465

If you want to get started on popular engineering and the climate, your first stop should be the "Without the Hot Air" series, which tackles sustainable energy, materials, transportation and food as engineering problems. You'll never think about climate the same way again:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/06/methane-diet/#3kg-per-day

Then there's Saul Griffith's 2021 book Electrify, which is basically a roadmap for carrying out the electrification of America and the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/09/practical-visionary/#popular-engineering

Griffith's book is inspiring and visionary, but to really get a sense of how fantastic an electrified world can be, it's gotta be Deb Chachra's How Infrastructure Works:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

Chachra is a material scientist who teaches at Olin College, and her book is a hymn to the historical and philosophical underpinnings of infrastructure, but more than anything, it's a popular engineering book about what is possible. For example, if we want to give every person on Earth the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, but colder), we would only have to capture 0.4% of the solar energy that reaches the Earth's surface.

Now, this is a gigantic task, but it's a tractable one. Resolving it will require a very careful – and massive – marshaling of materials, particularly copper, but also a large number of conflict minerals and rare earths. It's gonna be hard.

But it's not impossible, let alone inconceivable. Indeed, Chachra's biggest contribution in this book is to make a compelling case for reconceiving our relationship to energy and materials. As a species, we have always treated energy as scarce, trying to wring every erg and therm that we can out of our energy sources. Meanwhile, we've treated materials as abundant, digging them up or chopping them down, using them briefly, then tossing them on a midden or burying them in a pit.

Chachra argues that this is precisely backwards. Our planet gets a fresh supply of energy twice a day, with sunrise (solar) and moonrise (tides). On the other hand, we've only got one Earth's worth of materials, supplemented very sporadically when a meteor survives entry into our atmosphere. Mining asteroids, the Moon and other planets is a losing proposition for the long foreseeable future:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

The promise of marshaling a very large amount of materials is that it will deliver effectively limitless, clean energy. This project will take a lot of time and its benefits will primarily accrue to people who come after its builders, which is why it is infrastructure. As Chachra says, infrastructure is inherently altruistic, a gift to our neighbors and our descendants. If all you want is a place to stick your own poop, you don't need to build a citywide sanitation system.

What's more, we can trade energy for materials. Manufacturing goods so that they gracefully decompose back into the material stream at the end of their lives is energy intensive. Harvesting materials from badly designed goods is also energy intensive. But if once we build out the renewables grid (which will take a lot of materials), we will have all the energy we need (to preserve and re-use our materials).

Our species' historical approach to materials is not (ahem) carved in stone. It is contingent. It has changed. It can change again. It needs to change, because the way we extract materials today is both unjust and unsustainable.

The horrific nature of material extraction under capitalism – and its geopolitics (e.g. "We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.") – has many made comrades in the climate fight skeptical (or worse, cynical) about a clean energy transition. They do the back-of-the-envelope math about the material budget for electrification, mentally convert that to the number of wildlife preserves, low-income communities, unspoiled habitat and indigenous lands that we would destroy in the process of gathering those materials, and conclude that the whole thing is a farce.

That analysis is important, but it's incomplete. Yes, marshaling all those materials in the way that we do today would be catastrophic. But the point of a climate transition is that we will transition our approach to our planet, our energy, and our materials. That transition can and should challenge all the assumptions underpinning electrification doomerism.

Take the material bill itself: the assumption that a transition will require a linearly scaled quantity of materials includes the assumption that cleantech won't find substantial efficiencies in its material usage. Thankfully, that's a very bad assumption! Cleantech is just getting started. It's at the stage where we're still uncovering massive improvements to production (unlike fossil fuel technology, whose available efficiencies have been discovered and exploited, so that progress is glacial and negligible).

Take copper: electrification requires a lot of copper. But the amount of copper needed for each part of the cleantech revolution is declining faster than the demand for cleantech is rising. Just one example: between the first and second iteration of the Rivian electric vehicle, designers figured out how to remove 1.6 miles of copper wire from each vehicle:

https://insideevs.com/news/722265/rivian-r1s-r1t-wiring/

That's just one iteration and one technology! And yeah, EVs are only peripheral to a cleantech transition; for one thing, geometry hates cars. We're going to have to build a lot of mass transit, and we're going to be realizing these efficiencies with every generation of train, bus, and tram:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

We have just lived through a massive surge in electrification, with unimaginable quantities of new renewables coming online and a stunning replacement of conventional vehicles with EVs, and throughout that surge, demand for copper remained flat:

https://www.chemanalyst.com/NewsAndDeals/NewsDetails/copper-wire-price-remains-stable-amidst-surplus-supply-and-expanding-mining-25416#:~:text=Global%20Copper%20wire%20Price%20Remains%20Stable%20Amidst%20Surplus%20Supply%20and%20Expanding%20Mining%20Activities

This isn't to say that cleantech is a solved problem. There are many political aspects to cleantech that remain pernicious, like the fact that so many of the cleantech offerings on the market are built around extractive financial arrangements (like lease-back rooftop solar) and "smart" appliances (like heat pumps and induction tops) that require enshittification-ready apps:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unplanned-obsolescence/#better-micetraps

There's a quiet struggle going on between cleantech efficiencies and the finance sector's predation, from lease-back to apps to the carbon-credit scam, but many of those conflicts are cashing out in favor of a sustainable future and it doesn't help our cause to ignore those: we should be cheering them on!

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/12/s-curve/#anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-eventually-stops

Take "innovation." Silicon Valley's string of pump-and-dump nonsense – cryptocurrency, NFTs, metaverse, web3, and now AI – have made "innovation" into a dirty word. As the AI bubble bursts, the very idea of innovation is turning into a punchline:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/burst-damage/

But cleantech is excitingly, wonderfully innovative. The contrast between the fake innovation of Silicon Valley and the real – and vital – innovation of cleantech couldn't be starker, or more inspiring:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon

Like the "battery problem." Whenever the renewables future is raised, there's always a doomer insisting that batteries are an unsolved – and unsolvable – problem, and without massive batteries, there's no sense in trying, because the public won't accept brownouts when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing.

Sometimes, these people are shilling boondoggles like nuclear power (reminder: this is Hiroshima Day):

https://theconversation.com/dutton-wants-australia-to-join-the-nuclear-renaissance-but-this-dream-has-failed-before-209584

Other times, they're just trying to foreclose on the conversation about a renewables transition altogether. But sometimes, these doubts are raised by comrades who really do want a transition and have serious questions about power storage.

If you're one of those people, I have some very good news: battery tech is taking off. Some of that takes the form of wild and cool new approaches. In Finland, a Scottish company is converting a disused copper mine into a gravity battery. During the day, excess renewables hoist a platform piled with tons of rock up a 530m shaft. At night, the platform lowers slowly, driving a turbine and releasing its potential energy. This is incredibly efficient, has a tiny (and sustainable) bill of materials, and it's highly replicable. The world has sufficient abandoned mine-shafts to store 70TWh of power – that's the daily energy budget for the entire planet. What's more, every mine shaft has a beefy connection to the power grid, because you can't run a mine without a lot of power:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene

Gravity batteries are great for utility-scale storage, but we also need a lot of batteries for things that we can't keep plugged into the wall, like vehicles, personal electronics, etc. There's great news on that score, too! "The Battery Mineral Loop" is a new report from the Rocky Mountain Institute that describes the path to "circular battery self-sufficiency":

https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2024/07/the_battery_mineral_loop_report_July.pdf

The big idea: rather than digging up new minerals to make batteries, we can recycle minerals from dead batteries to make new ones. Remember, energy can be traded for materials: we can expend more energy on designs that are optimized to decompose back into their component materials, or we can expend more energy extracting materials from designs that aren't optimized for recycling.

Both things are already happening. From the executive summary:

The chemistry of batteries is rapidly improving: over the past decade, we've reduced per-using demand for lithium, nickle and cobalt by 60-140%, and most lithium batteries are being recycled, not landfilled.

Within a decade, we'll hit peak mineral demand for batteries. By the mid-2030s, the amount of new "virgin minerals" needed to meet our battery demand will stop growing and start declining.

By 2050, we could attain net zero mineral demand for batteries: that is, we could meet all our energy storage needs without digging up any more minerals.

We are on a path to a "one-off" extraction effort. We can already build batteries that work for 10-15 years and whose materials can be recycled with 90-94% efficiency.

The total quantity of minerals we need to extract to permanently satisfy the world's energy storage needs is about 125m tons.

This last point is the one that caught my eye. Extracting 125m tons of anything is a tall order, and depending on how it's done, it could wreak a terrible toll on people and the places they live.

But one question I learned to ask from Tim Harford and BBC More Or Less is "is that a big number?" 125m tons sure feels like a large number, but it is one seventeenth of the amount of fossil fuels we dig up every year just for road transport. In other words, we're talking about spending the next thirty years carefully, sustainably, humanely extracting about 5.8% of the materials we currently pump and dig every year for our cars. Do that, and we satisfy our battery needs more-or-less forever.

This is a big engineering project. We've done those before. Crisscrossing the world with roads, supplying billions of fossil-fuel vehicles, building the infrastructure for refueling them, pumping billions of gallons of oil – all of that was done in living memory. As Robin Sloan wrote:

Did people say, at the dawn of the automobile: are you kidding me? This technology will require a ubiquitous network of refueling stations, one or two at every major intersection … even if there WAS that much gas in the world, how would you move it around at that scale? If everybody buys a car, you’ll need to build highways, HUGE ones — you’ll need to dig up cities! Madness!

https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/room-for-everybody/

That big project cost trillions and required bending the productive capacity of many nations to its completion. It produced a ghastly geopolitics that elevated petrostates – a hole in the ground, surrounded by guns – to kingmakers whose autocrats can knock the world on its ass at will.

By contrast, this giant engineering project is relatively modest, and it will upend that global order, yielding energy sovereignty (and its handmaiden, national resliency) to every country on Earth. Doing it well will be hard, and require that we rethink our relationship to energy and materials, but that's a bonus, not a cost. Changing how we use materials and energy will make all our lives better, it will improve the lives of the living things we share the planet with, and it will strip the monsters who currently control our energy supply of their political, economic, and electric power.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility

[coopsday]

Press conference by the Co-Chairs of the UN Secretary-General's Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals. 

Press conference by the Co-Chairs of the UN Secretary-General's Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals, Ambassador Mxakato-Diseko of South Africa and Director-General Ditte Juul Jørgensen of the European Commission, on the release of the panel's report. 

Watch the Press Conference: Co-Chairs of the UN Secretary-General's Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals.

[thoughtlessarse]

Global demand for critical minerals, particularly lithium, is growing rapidly to meet clean energy and de-carbonisation objectives. Africa hosts substantial resources of critical minerals. As a result, foreign mining companies are rushing to invest in exploration and acquire mining licences. According to the 2023 Critical Minerals Market Review by the International Energy Agency, demand for lithium, for example, tripled from 2017 to 2022. Similarly, the critical minerals market doubled in five years, reaching $320 billion in 2022. The demand for these metals is projected to increase sharply, more than doubling by 2030 and quadrupling by 2050. Annual revenues are projected to reach $400 billion. In our recent research, we analysed African countries that produce minerals that the rest of the world has deemed “critical”. We focused on lithium projects in Namibia, Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Ghana. We discovered these countries do not yet have robust strategies for the critical minerals sector. Instead, they are simply sucked into the global rush for these minerals. We recommend that the African Union should expedite the development of an African critical minerals strategy that will guide member countries in negotiating mining contracts and agreements. The strategy should draw from leading mining practices around the world. We also recommend that countries should revise their mining policies and regulations to reflect the opportunities and challenges posed by the increasing global demand for critical minerals. Otherwise, African countries that are rich in critical minerals will not benefit from the current boom in demand.

continue reading

[waterandenergyrelief]

Panel Discussion on Critical Energy Transition Minerals.

Critical minerals such as copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt and rare earth elements are essential components of clean energy technologies, including wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles and battery storage. Rising demand for these minerals to fuel the renewables revolution presents risks, challenges and opportunities, particularly for developing countries. In response, Secretary-General António Guterres is leveraging the United Nations' convening power to assemble a diverse and representative group of governments and non-state actors to facilitate standards and safeguards, and embed justice, in the transition to renewable energy.

A newly established Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals -- co-chaired by Ambassador Nozipho Joyce Mxakato-Diseko of South Africa and Ms. Ditte Juul Jørgensen Director-General for Energy from the European Commission -- will develop a set of global common and voluntary principles to guide governments and other stakeholders involved in critical minerals value chains in the years ahead by addressing issues relating to equity, transparency, investment, sustainability and human rights.

UN-convened panel to address equity, sustainability and human rights across the value chains of critical energy transition minerals

[decolonize-the-everything]

Why are they mining so much right now?

Cobalt has become the center of a major upsurge in mining in Congo, and the rapid acceleration of cobalt extraction in the region since 2013 has brought hundreds of thousands of people into intimate contact with a powerful melange of toxic metals. The frantic pace of cobalt extraction in Katanga bears close resemblance to another period of rapid exploitation of Congolese mineral resources: During the last few years of World War II, the U.S. government sourced the majority of the uranium necessary to develop the first atomic weapons from a single Congolese mine, named Shinkolobwe. The largely forgotten story of those miners, and the devastating health and ecological impacts uranium production had on Congo, looms over the country now as cobalt mining accelerates to feed the renewable energy boom—with little to no protections for workers involved in the trade.

The city of Kolwezi, which is 300 km (186 miles) northwest of Lubumbashi and 180 km from the now-abandoned Shinkolobwe mine, sits on top of nearly half of the available cobalt in the world. The scope of the contemporary scramble for that metal in Katanga has totally transformed the region. Enormous open-pit mines worked by tens of thousands of miners form vast craters in the landscape and are slowly erasing the city itself.

[...]Much of the cobalt in Congo is mined by hand: Workers scour the surface level seams with picks, shovels, and lengths of rebar, sometimes tunneling by hand 60 feet or more into the earth in pursuit of a vein of ore. This is referred to as artisanal mining, as opposed to the industrial mining carried out by large firms. The thousands of artisanal miners who work at the edges of the formal mines run by big industrial concerns make up 90 percent of the nation’s mining workforce and produce 30 percent of its metals. Artisanal mining is not as efficient as larger-scale industrial mining, but since the miners produce good-quality ore with zero investment in tools, infrastructure, or safety, the ore they sell to buyers is as cheap as it gets. Forced and child labor in the supply chain is not uncommon here, thanks in part to a significant lack of controls and regulations on artisanal mining from the government.

[...]When later atomic research found that uranium’s unstable nucleus could be used to make a powerful bomb, the U.S. Army’s Manhattan Project began searching for a reliable source of uranium. They found it through Union Minière, which sold the United States the first 1,000 tons it needed to get the bomb effort off the ground.

The Manhattan Project sent agents of the OSS, precursor to the CIA, to Congo from 1943 to 1945 to supervise the reopening of the mine and the extraction of Shinkolobwe’s ore—and to make sure none of it fell into the hands of the Axis powers. Every piece of rock that emerged from the mine for almost two decades was purchased by the Manhattan Project and its successors in the Atomic Energy Commission, until the mine was closed by the Belgian authorities on the eve of Congolese independence in 1960. After that, the colonial mining enterprise Union Minière became the national minerals conglomerate Gécamines, which retained much of the original structure and staff.

[...]Dr. Lubaba showed me the small battery-operated Geiger counters that he uses in the field to measure radioactivity. He had begun the process of trying to find and interview the descendants of the Shinkolobwe miners, but he explained that tracing the health consequences of working in that specific mine would be difficult: Many long-established villages in the area have been demolished and cast apart as cobalt extraction has torn through the landscape. His initial inquiries suggested that at least some of the descendants of the Shinkolobwe miners had been drawn into the maelstrom of digging in the region around Kolwezi.

In her book Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade, historian Gabrielle Hecht recounts the U.S. Public Health Service’s efforts to investigate the effects of uranium exposure on people who worked closely with the metal and the ore that bore it. In 1956, a team of medical researchers from the PHS paid a visit to Shinkolobwe while the mine was still producing more than half of the uranium used in America’s Cold War missile programs. Most of their questions went unanswered, however, as Shinkolobwe’s operators had few official records to share and stopped responding to communications as soon as the researchers left.

[...]“Don’t ever use that word in anybody’s presence. Not ever!” Williams quotes OSS agent Wilbur Hogue snapping at a subordinate who had said the mine’s name in a café in Congo’s capital. “There’s something in that mine that both the United States and Germany want more than anything else in the world. I don’t know what it’s for. We’re not supposed to know.”

[quixoticanarchy]

Finished reading Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara and he does a good job showing how the cobalt supply chain is inextricable from incredible human suffering, near-slavery, rampant exploitation, environmental devastation, and child labor. And it’s very clear that no promise a tech or battery manufacturer makes that their supply chain is clean means literally anything bc industrially and artisanally mined cobalt are mixed into the same supply untraceably. And the book also covers the fact that cobalt supplies are finite and when the DRC’s cobalt is exhausted the industry will move elsewhere, rinse and repeat, and the people in the Congo will be left with the ongoing and unremediated -maybe irremediable - damage. All of this so that we can have smartphones, electric vehicles, iPads, electric scooters, almost anything with a rechargeable battery.

It’s also clear that the tech and battery industries are interested in good PR and making empty statements about human rights when they should be taking responsibility for the working conditions of small-scale miners (and minors) dying at the bottom of their supply chains. What Kara doesn’t really address is the demand side of this equation, not just the demand by companies whose products use cobalt-containing batteries but also the consumers sustaining that demand, who buy every new smartphone and eagerly pin their hopes on electric vehicles to let us keep our car-dependent world without the fossil fuel guilt. The book takes it for granted that cobalt will be required in high quantities for consumer electronics and for “green” tech, and to some extent this is true - as in, none of those demands or uses will cease overnight and in the meantime we should worry about how to address industrial and business practices and government corruption in order to treat Congolese miners as human beings.

But it feels incomplete without also asking questions like: should that demand continue? Can it? Do we need this many devices? What costs are acceptable? Can we really have our cake (smartphones, EVs, etc) and eat it too (slavery-free, non-exploitative supply chains that don’t kill the people at the bottom and lay waste to the environment)? What if - as the book would seem to suggest - we really cannot? If one goal of the book is for people to realize what conditions underlie the extraction of cobalt, what action is then incumbent upon us? Personal consumer choice will not undo all this harm, but it is a necessary step in rethinking or attempting other ways to live. Is it a right to have a smartphone, a new one every year or two, if it comes at the price of other people’s human rights? At what point do we say that it is not an acceptable cost that the extractive industries are perpetuating neocolonialism and near-slavery in order that we should have comfortable lives?

We know we have to stop relying on fossil fuels or we’ll burn down the planet (to a greater degree than is already locked in) but the “green energy transition” is not clean at all. Capitalism seeks the lowest price for labor and the highest profits; obviously these extractive relationships owe a lot of their horror to being conducted in a capitalist milieu. But even thinking about, say, a socialist world instead, if it aspires to still provide smartphones and electric vehicles en masse and maintain the comforts and conveniences of the “Western” lifestyle then we would still be relying on massive amounts of resource extraction with no guarantee of less suffering. The devices are themselves part of the problem. The demand for them and the extent to which “modern” life in “developed” countries relies upon them is part of the problem. It is unsustainable. It is built on blood and it makes a mockery of purported values of dignity, equality, and human rights. The lives of Congolese cobalt miners are tied to how we in the “developed” or colonizer countries live and consume. I do not think their lives will change substantially unless ours do.

[umbralwaves]

Last year nearly 200 environmental defenders were killed — certainly an undercount. The leading culprit? The mining industry. The most dangerous region? Latin America.

These are the stark realities we need to confront as we face a new mining boom linked to the energy transition

— Thea Riofrancos (@triofrancos) September 14, 2024

Nearly 70 percent of mining companies globally are headquartered in Canada and 50 percent of the world's publicly listed mining and mineral exploration companies are in Canada.

— Harsha Walia (@HarshaWalia) September 14, 2024

[mindblowingscience]

New research has found that 4,642 species of vertebrates are threatened by mineral extraction around the world through mining and quarrying, and drilling for oil and gas. Mining activity coincides with the world's most valuable biodiversity hotspots, which contain a hyper-diversity of species and unique habitats found nowhere else on Earth. The biggest risk to species comes from mining for materials fundamental to our transition to clean energy, such as lithium and cobalt—both essential components of solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars.

Continue Reading.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Close to 40 percent of all global shipping is devoted to moving fossil fuels around, a gargantuan source of emissions (and strain on the ocean) that clean energy will almost wipe out. In a net-zero economy, there will be, on net, less digging, less transporting, less burning, less polluting. The fact is, fossil fuels are a wildly destructive and inefficient way to power a society. Two thirds of the energy embedded in them ends up wasted. That inefficiency has been rendered invisible by fossil fuels’ ubiquity and the lack of alternatives. Now that alternatives are coming into view, it’s clear that any shift away from mining, drilling, transporting, and combusting fossil fuels will dramatically ease human pressure on the biosphere and the atmosphere. Again — I can not emphasize enough — this is no reason to ignore or gloss over the very real environmental impacts of mineral mining, processing, and transport. Though overall environmental pressure will ease in a clean-energy world, it will be concentrated in new places, among people who may not necessarily enjoy the benefits of the transition. There are ugly and cruel ways to go about an energy transition, and there are sustainable and equitable ways to go about it. I’m strongly in favor of the latter and encourage everyone to do what they can to bring that about. Nonetheless, either way, the broader cause is environmentally righteous.

[mariacallous]

A new report by environmental groups lays out a case for banning deep sea mining—and explains why the real solution to humanity’s energy crisis might just be sitting in the trash.

Deep sea mining is the pursuit of rare, valuable minerals that lie undisturbed upon the ocean floor—metals like nickel, cobalt, lithium, and rare earth elements. These so-called critical minerals are instrumental in the manufacture of everything from electric vehicle batteries and MRI machines to laptops and disposable vape cartridges—including, crucially, much of what’s needed to transition away from fossil fuels. Political leaders and the companies eager to dredge up critical minerals from the seafloor tend to focus on the feel-good, climate-friendly uses of the minerals, like EV batteries and solar panels. They’ll proclaim that the metals on the deep seafloor are an abundant resource that could help usher in a new golden age of renewable energy technology.

But deep sea mining has also been roundly criticized by environmentalists and scientists, who caution that the practice (which has not yet kicked off in earnest) could create a uniquely terrible environmental travesty and annihilate one of the most remote and least understood ecosystems on the planet.

There has been a wave of backlash from environmentalists, scientists, and even comedians like John Oliver, who devoted a recent segment of Last Week Tonight to lambasting deep sea mining. Some companies that use these materials in their products—Volvo, Volkswagen, BMW, and Rivian among them—have come out against deep sea mining and pledged not to use any metals that come from those abyssal operations. (Some prominent companies have done the exact opposite; last week, Tesla shareholders voted against a moratorium on using minerals sourced from deep sea mining.)

Even if you can wave away that ecological threat, mining the sea might simply be wholly unnecessary if the goal is to bring about a new era of global renewable energy. A new report, aptly titled “We Don’t Need Deep-Sea Mining,” aims to lay out why.

The report is a collaboration between the advocacy group US PIRG, Environment America Policy Center, and the nonprofit think tank Frontier Group. Nathan Proctor, senior director of the Campaign for the Right to Repair at PIRG and one of the authors of the new report, says the solution to sourcing these materials should be blindingly obvious. There are critical minerals all around us that don’t require diving deep into the sea. You’re probably holding some right now—they’re in nearly all our devices, including the billions of pounds of them sitting in the dump.

The secret to saving the deep sea, Proctor says, is to prioritize systems that focus on the materials we already have—establishing right to repair laws, improving recycling capabilities, and rethinking how we use tech after the end of its useful life cycle. These are all systems we have in place now that don’t require tearing up new lands thousands of feet below the ocean.

“We don't need to mine the deep sea,” Proctor reiterates. “It's about the dumbest way to get these materials. There's way better ways to address the needs for those metals like cobalt, nickel, copper, and the rest.”

Into the Abyss

Schemes for delving into the deep ocean have been on the boards for years. While the practice is not currently underway, mining companies are getting ready to dive in as soon as they can.

In January 2024, the Norwegian Parliament opened up its waters to companies looking to mine resources. The Metals Company is a Canadian mining operation that has been at the forefront of attempts to mine in the Pacific Ocean’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ)—an area of seabed that spans 3,100 miles between Mexico and Hawaii.

The proposed mining in the CCZ has gotten the most attention lately because the Metals Company secured rights to access key areas of the CCZ for mining in 2022, and its efforts are ramping up. The process involves gathering critical minerals from small rock-like formations called polymetallic nodules. Billions of these nodules rest along the seabed, seemingly sitting there ripe for the taking (if you can get down to them). The plan—one put forth by several mining companies, anyway—is to scrape the ocean floor with deep sea trawling systems and bring these nodules to the surface, where they can be broken down to extract the shiny special metals inside. Environmentalists say this poses a host of ecological problems for everything that lives in the vicinity.

Gerard Barron, the CEO of the Metals Company, contends that his efforts are misunderstood by activists and the media (especially, say, John Oliver).

“We're committed to circularity,” Barron says. “We have to drive towards circularity. We have to stop extracting from our planet. But the question is, how can you recycle what you don’t have?”

Both Barron and the authors of the activist report acknowledge that there aren’t perfect means of resource extraction anywhere—and there’s always going to be some environmental toll. Barron argues that it is better for this toll to play out in one of the most remote parts of the ocean.

“No matter what, you will be disrupting an ecosystem,” says Kelsey Lamp, ocean campaign director with the Environment America Research and Policy Center and an author of the report. “This is an ecosystem that evolved over millions of years without light, without human noise, and with incredibly clear water. If you disrupt it, the likelihood of it coming back is pretty low.”

For many of the life-forms down in the great deep, the nodules are the ecosystem. Removing the nodules from the seabed would remove all the life attached to them.

“This is a very disruptive process with ecosystems that may never recover,” says Tony Dutzik, associate director and senior policy analyst at the nonprofit think tank Frontier Group and another author of the report. “This is a great wilderness that is linked to the health of the ocean at large and that has wonders that we’re barely even beginning to recognize what they are.”

Barron counters that the life in the abyssal zone is less abundant than in an ecosystem like rainforests in Indonesia, where a great deal of nickel mines operate—although scientists discovered 5,000 new species in the CCZ in 2023 alone. He considers that the lesser of two evils.

“At the end of the day, it's not that easy,” You can't just say no to something. If you say no to this, you're saying yes to something else.”

The Circular Economy

Barron and others make the case that this ecosystem disruption is the only way to access the minerals needed to fuel the clean-tech revolution, and is therefore worth the cost in the long run. But Proctor and the others behind the report aren't convinced. They say that without fully investing in a circular economy that thinks more carefully about the resources we use, we will continue to burn through the minerals needed for renewable tech the same way we've burned through fossil fuels.

“I just had this initial reaction when I heard about deep sea mining,” Proctor says. “Like, ‘Oh, really? You want to strip mine the ocean floor to build electronic devices that manufacturers say we should all throw away?’”

While mining companies may wax poetic about using critical minerals for building clean tech, there's no guarantee that's where the minerals will actually wind up. They are also commonly used in much more consumer-facing devices, like phones, laptops, headphones, and those aforementioned disposable vape cartridges. Many of these devices are not designed to be long lasting, or repairable. In many cases, big companies like Apple and Microsoft have actively lobbied to make repairing their devices more difficult, all but guaranteeing more of them will end up in the landfill.

“I spend every day throwing my hands up in frustration by just how much disposable, unfixable, ridiculous electronics are being shoveled on people with active measures to prevent them from being able to reuse them,” Proctor says. “If these are really critical materials, why are they ending up in stuff that we're told is instantly trash?”

The report aims to position critical minerals in products and e-waste as an “abundant domestic resource.” The way to tap into that is to recommit to the old mantra of reduce, reuse, recycle—with a couple of additions. The report adds the concept of repairing and reimagining products to the list, calling them the five Rs. It calls for making active efforts to extend product lifetimes and invest in “second life” opportunities for tech like solar panels and battery recycling that have reached the end of their useful lifespan. (EV batteries used to be difficult to recycle, but more cutting-edge battery materials can often work just as well as new ones, if you recycle them right.)

Treasures in the Trash

The problem is thinking of these deep sea rocks in the same framework of fossil fuels. What may seem like an abundant resource now is going to feel much more finite later.

“There is a little bit of the irony, right, that we think it's easier to go out and mine and potentially destroy one of the most mysterious remote wildernesses left on this planet just to get more of the metals we're throwing in the trash every day,” Lamp says.

And in the trash is where the resources remain. Electronics manufacturing is growing five times faster than e-waste recycling, so without investment to disassemble those products for their critical bits, all the metals will go to waste. Like deep sea mining, the infrastructure needed to make this a worthwhile path forward will be tremendous, but committing to it means sourcing critical minerals from places nearby, and reducing some waste in the process.

Barron says he isn't convinced these efforts will be enough. “We need to do all of that,” Barron says, “You know, it's not one or the other. We have to do all of that, but what we have to do is slow down destroying those tropical rainforests.” He adds, “If you take a vote against ocean metals, it is a vote for something else. And that something else is what we’ve got right now.”

Proctor argues that commonsense measures, implemented broadly and forcefully across society to further the goal of creating a circular economy, including energy transition minerals, will ultimately reduce the need for all forms of extraction, including land and deep-sea mining.

“We built this system that knows how to do one thing, which is take stuff out of the earth, put it into products and sell them, and then plug our ears and forget that they exist,” Proctor says. “That’s not the reality we live in. The sooner that we can disentangle that kind of paradigm from the way we think about consumption and industrial policy the better, because we're going to kill everybody with that kind of thinking.”

Just like mining the deep sea, investing in a circular economy is not going to be an easy task. There is an allure of deep sea mining when it is presented as a one-stop shop for all the materials needed for the great energy transition. But as the authors of the report contend, the idea of exploiting a vast deposit of resources is the same relationship society has had with fossil fuels—they’re seemingly abundant resources ripe for the picking, but also they are ultimately finite.

“If we treat these things as disposable, as we have, we’re going to need to continually refill that bucket,” Dutzik says. “If we can build an economy in which we’re getting the most out of every bit of what we mine, reusing things when we can, and then recycling the material at the end of their lives, we can get off of that infinite extraction treadmill that we’ve been on for a really long time.”

[zvaigzdelasas]

Zambia plans to establish an investment company that will control at least 30% of critical minerals production from future mines.

Mines Minister Paul Kabuswe unveiled a strategy on Thursday that he said will allow Zambia to maximize the benefits from its deposits of metals key to the energy transition. Africa’s second-largest copper producer aims to more than quadruple output of the metal by early in the next decade, but it also has deposits of cobalt, graphite and lithium.

The state will set up a special purpose vehicle to invest in critical minerals under a design framework that includes a “production sharing mechanism” setting aside a minimum 30% of the output from new mining projects, according to the document unveiled by Kabuswe in Zambia’s capital, Lusaka.[...]

The government’s goal of producing 3 million tons of copper a year by 2031 requires existing assets to double their output to about 1.4 million tons, according to a separate document prepared by Kabuswe’s ministry.[...]

The government also intends to make investors in the critical minerals sector allocate at least 35% of procurement costs to local suppliers, according to the strategy. It will also review Zambia’s policy and regulatory environment to restrict the export of unprocessed materials.

29 Aug 24

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

As renewable energy demand rises, mining for minerals in the Amazon is at a critical point

Illegal mining for critical minerals needed for the global renewable energy transition is increasingly driving deforestation in Indigenous lands in the Amazon.

In recent years, these illegal miners, who are often self-employed, mobile and working covertly, have expanded their gold mining operations to include cassiterite or “black gold”, a critical mineral essential for the renewable energy transition. Cassiterite is used to make coatings for solar panels, wind turbines and other electronic devices. Brazil, one of the world’s largest exporters of this mineral, is now scrambling to manage this new threat to its Amazon forests.

The need for developing countries such as Brazil to conserve their forests for the collective global good conflicts with the increasing demand for their resources from international markets. To complicate matters further, both the renewable energy transition and the conservation of the Amazon are urgent priorities in the global effort to arrest climate change.

But escalating deforestation puts these forests at risk of moving from a carbon sink – with trees absorbing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than they release – to a carbon source, whereby trees release more carbon dioxide than they absorb as they degrade or are burnt.

Continue reading.

[cognitivejustice]

To build all of the solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicle batteries, and other technologies necessary to fight climate change, we’re going to need a lot more metals. Mining those metals from the Earth creates damage and pollution that threaten ecosystems and communities. But there’s another potential source of the copper, nickel, aluminum, and rare-earth minerals needed to stabilize the climate: the mountain of electronic waste humanity discards each year. 

Exactly how much of each clean energy metal is there in the laptops, printers, and smart fridges the world discards? Until recently, no one really knew. Data on more obscure metals like neodymium and palladium, which play small but critical roles in established and emerging green energy technologies, has been especially hard to come by.

Now, the United Nations has taken a first step toward filling in these data gaps with the latest installment of its periodic report on e-waste around the world. Released last month, the new Global E-Waste Monitor shows the staggering scale of the e-waste crisis, which reached a new record in 2022 when the world threw out 62 million metric tons of electronics. And for the first time, the report includes a detailed breakdown of the metals present in our electronic garbage, and how often they are being recycled.

“There is very little reporting on the recovery of metals [from e-waste] globally,” lead report author Kees Baldé told Grist. “We felt it was our duty to get more facts on the table.”

[waterandenergyrelief]

7th Meeting, 15th Session of the Expert Group on Resource Management.

The UNECE Resource Management Week 2024, including the 15th session of the Expert Group on Resource Management (EGRM-15), will be held at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, 22-26 April 2024. Leaders, experts, and stakeholders in resource management will gather to discuss sustainable development challenges and opportunities. Our theme, "Assuring sustainability in resource management", will focus on the United Nations Framework Classification for Resources (UNFC) and the United Nations Resource Management System (UNRMS) and their pivotal role in resource management worldwide. 

Agenda highlights:

Seminars, Workshops, and Short Courses: Focusing on the UNFC and UNRMS as catalysts for transforming raw materials management.

Minerals for the Energy Transition: Highlighting the work of the UN Working Group on Transforming Extractive Industries for Sustainable Development.

Responsible Resource Management: The development and deployment of UNRMS.

Navigating the Future: Exploring various applications of UNFC.

Building capacity: International Centres of Excellence on Sustainable Resource Management.

Empowering Sustainability: Discussing global initiatives and case studies.

Lunchtime lectures: Professor Peter Hopkinson, Co-Director, Exeter Centre for the Circular Economy, Exeter University, and Professor Markus Zils, Circular Economy and Management Science, University of Exeter Business School, UK, on Circular Data (23 April) and Sarah Gordon, CEO, Satarla on The beauty of interconnected natural resource ecosystems, with a focus on ESG issues (25 April).

Session 3: Responsible resource governance

Chair: Karen Hanghøj

Agenda item 8: Building Capacity: International Centres of Excellence on Sustainable Resource Management

ICE-SRM Russia – Igor Shpurov and Vera Bratkova, Chief Executive Officer

ICE-SRM UK – Nick MacInnes, Circular Economy Lead, Office of the Chief Scientific Adviser, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), UK and Lynsay Blake, Head of Science in Resources and Waste, Defra, UK

ICE-SRM Mexico – Ulises Neri, Executive Director & Ministries of Energy and Economy of Subnational Governments of Mexico:

     José Ramón Silva - Secretary of Energy Development of the State of Tamaulipas

     Carlos Adrian García Basto - Director General of the State Energy Agency of the State of Campeche

     Esaú Garza - Secretary of Economy, Science and Technology of the State of Aguascalientes

ICE-SRM Criteria for Recognition and Terms of Reference (ECE/ENERGY/GE.3/2024/4)

ICE-SRM EU – Meta Dobnikar, Head of Mineral Resources and Geochemistry Department, Geological Survey of Slovenia

ICE-SRM Central Asia – Farkhat Abytov, Executive Director

ICE-SRM Africa – Tunde Arisekola, Senior Advisor, Geological and Minerals Information, African Minerals Development Centre

Dario Liguti, Director, UNECE Sustainable Energy Division

Discussion

Agenda item 7.2: Development and deployment of UNFC - Technical Advisory Group Annual Report - Updated Injection Projects Specifications (ECE/ENERGY/GE.3/2024/9)

Aleksandr Shpilman, Co-Chair, Technical Advisory Group

Serge Van Gessel, Chair, Injection Projects Working Group and TNO

Agenda item 7.2: Competency in resource management 

Vitor Correia, Chair, Competency Working Group, EGRM

Michael Neumann, Global Geoscience Professionalism Group

Gbenga Olugbenga Okunlola, President, Geological Society of Africa and Member, AMREC Working Group

Craig Waldie, Ontario Securities Commission, Canada - presentation to be delivered by Hendrik Falck, Chair, EGRM Minerals Working Group

Watch the 7th Meeting, 15th Session of the Expert Group on Resource Management

[talonabraxas]

HERBS OF MARS: Action, Strength, The Muscular System, Adrenaline

Mars represents primal energy, the fuel in which we bring ideas, dreams, and desires into manifestation. Mars yields and fuels us with power, strength, courage and physical activity. Within astrological charts, Mars is a key element noting aspects to one’s drive, desire, agility and the nature of one’s physical energy.

S A C R E D A N A T O M Y

Anatomically this energy corresponds with the muscular system, the motor nerves, and the production of adrenalin. Astrologers look to Mars’ placement in the natal chart to describe how we pursue many aspects of sexual fulfillment, along with how we source energy within the body and mind. Medical astrologers include the external sexual organs in correspondence to Mars.

Diseases which induce a fever are sometimes associated with Mars. Other inflammation based outbreaks, like herpes, cirrhosis, candida, are often connected to Mars. Due to the sexual nature of Mars, a lot of medical astrologers have also associated sexually transmitted diseases with this planet. Accidents due to “spacey-ness”, or a lack of coordination, are directly associated to Mars and its transits. Other conditions in relation to Mars include fatigue, energy levels (high or low), hyperactivity, living in “fight-or-flight mode.”

E N E R G E T I C S

By nature, the herbs of Mars are energetically yang and considered hot, energetic, and dry. They frequently cause an increase in energy or heat, even if only energetically. These herbs need to be used mindfully, as using them extensively can overthrow the adrenals for example, along with emotions. As you might relate, an excess of Mars energy can lead to behavior patterns generally perceived as aggressive, egotistic, argumentative, confrontational, etc. Or, a deficiency of Mars energy can lead to behavior patterns where we lack libdio, general desire, motivation, or even enough energy to act on something we love. Many of the herbs that fall under Mars’ umbrella are often protecting, strengthening, warming and energizing.

H E R B A L C O R R E S P O N D A N C E S

There’s a broad spectrum of herbs that fall under Mars’ category, encompassing mineralizing tonics, like Nettle, to highly protective plants that help purge, like Rue, to energizing powerhouses that stimulate our system like Guarana. Mars’ herbs are activating one way or another, therefore they must be used wisely since they tend to activate all facets of one’s being; energetically and spiritually. It’s important to note, that if you’re engine is already running hot, and there is a prominence of Mars energy, don’t over consume plants that might make your engine overheat.

“A classic herb, like Rue, is an aromatic and stimulant whose energizing qualities have been known to relieve nervous heart problems such as arrhythmia and palpitation. Rue also relieves colic, eliminates worms and can bring on menstruation.” Paul Beyerl

Nettle, another classic that greatly embodies Mars, in its physicality and medicinal action, possesses thorns that act as hypodermics, injecting subcutaneous doses of stinging fluid. It is this same irritating juice, that when properly prepared becomes a powerful internal astringent, that through it’s heating action it relieves arthritic and rheumatic conditions, helps eliminate infections, regulate blood pressure, reduce susceptibility to colds and much more.

A combination of Solar Herbs with those of Mars add strength and forcefulness to the formulas’ personality, hence our personality. On an emotional level, they can increase a feeling of purposefulness and independence, enhancing our natural ability to not just to survive, but to thrive with our internal reservoirs as resources. An example of this combination would be pairing turmeric (sun) with pine pollen (mars).

Combining with Herbs of the Moon, for example, it can trigger deep emotional healing. This pairing can also be excellent for detoxification and combat gut issues. On an emotional/spiritual level diving deep into the emotional world can be pairing blue lotus (moon) with nettle root (mars).

For generating abundance, or being a better provider of resources, herbs of Mars can be combined with those of Jupiter. This increases a sense of abundance, self-confidence, delight, and spontaneity. A pairing that could reflect this would be: Meadowsweet and Maca.

HERBS of MARS

STIMULANTS + ENERGIZERS:

Coffee (+Uranus), Catuaba, Guarana, Maca, Prickly Ash, Pine (+ pine pollen), Ginkgo (+Mercury), Ephedra.

MUSCLES + JOINTS (Herbs that assist rheumatism + arthritis):

Chuchuhuasi, Cat’s Claw, Sarsaparilla, Nettle, Rheumatism weed (Chimapila), Hemp (CBD), Kratom (+ Saturn).

BITTERS + IMMUNE STIMULANTS:

Blessed Thistle, Milk Thistle, Cinchona (+Pluto), Pau D’Arco (+Pluto), Nettles, Rue (+Pluto), Plantain leaf, Quassia, Gentian, Indigo.

CULINARY:

Aloe, Basil, Black Pepper, Bay Laurel, Cashew, Chives, Cumin, Cayenne, Coriander, Garlic, Onions, Paprika, Parsley, Mustard, Marjoram, Radish.

RESINS + OILS:

Benzoin, Dragons Blood, Castor Bean, Palo Santo

VISIONARY:

Anemone, Juniper (+Jupiter), Palo Santo (+Pluto), Wormwood (+Pluto), Indigo

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

Overlooking a ridge in the Galiuro Mountains, one of Arizona’s famed Sky Islands that provide refuges for wildlife in the hot Sonoran Desert, Melissa Crytzer Fry and her husband, Steve, stand above what could one day become an underground mine. 

Steve pulls up a map showing Faraday Copper’s proposed mine site on a tablet and points to surrounding locations that would become mining pits, waste piles or facilities for the project. A creek that feeds into the river below them, at the mountains’ base, would become six open pits.

Under the peaks here lies copper, a long-standing pillar of Arizona’s economy and a critical mineral for the renewable energy transition because of its ability to transmit electricity. Its significance is not lost on the Frys; Steve works in the tech industry that depends on it.

But mining’s legacy is all around them in the desert northeast of Tucson. Facing their overlook, a tailings pile from a 1970s copper mine scars the earth.

For more than a century, Copper Creek, running deep into the foothills, has drawn the interest of mining companies, but none have ever dug in along it.

People come to southern Arizona and the Western U.S. to live near landscapes owned largely by the federal government and open to the public, as is the case in the San Pedro Valley that the Frys call home. But those lands are also open to mining companies that have free rein to claim the land and water.

If Faraday’s mine is built, the Frys worry the creek that feeds into the local river could disappear. Miners could dig open pits atop it and deplete the aquifer below, as the mine would likely require water to be pumped out once the digging punctures the underground reservoir, a process known as dewatering. Under Arizona law, anyone is free to pump as much water as they please in rural places like these, and even where the water is regulated, mines are largely exempt.

“A project like this,” Steve said as he looked over the mine’s proposed site, “has something for everyone to hate.” 

Concerns like Fry’s are increasing across the state as mining booms again to supply the energy transition with everything from uranium mined near the Grand Canyon to copper dug throughout southern Arizona. Locals, tribes and environmentalists are concerned about how these projects could wreak havoc on the state’s already depleted aquifers, which are the only source of water for many communities across Arizona. 

Worrying over water is nothing new in Arizona. Nearly 80 percent of the state lacks any groundwater protections, which has allowed large agricultural operations to move in and pump as much as they want without even keeping track of how much they suck from aquifers or paying a penny for it, leading residential wells in some areas to run dry. Water experts, local leaders and rural residents have pushed for years to change that, with the governor now also calling for action, but legislation to resolve the issue has proven divisive in the state legislature.

Mining operations can also pump as much as they want, even when aquifers are tapped out.