Preface. Electricity generating contraptions like wind and solar can’t replace the 50% of oil used in global manufacturing, because they can’t generate the high heat needed, or run battery or catenary electric trucks as I explained in “When Trucks Top Running”. Nor are there enough rare earth metals, lithium, cobalt and others to scale up renewables.

Peak metals in the news:

Tabuchi H (2021) Thieves Nationwide Are Slithering Under Cars, Swiping Catalytic Converters. The pollution-control gadgets are full of precious metals like palladium, and prices are soaring as regulators try to tame emissions. Crooks with hacksaws have noticed. New York Times.

And there simply aren’t enough minerals on earth to make a transition to “renewables”:

• 2021 All the Metals We Mined in One Chart  Visualcapitalist.com
• Antonio Turiel (2021) Some inconvenient questions: An open letter
• Simon P. Michaux (2021) The mining of Minerals and the Limits to growth video

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com Women in ecology  author of 2021 Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy best price here; 2015 When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Podcasts: Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity

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Since renewables depend on fossil fuels entirely for every step of their life cycle, I call them Rebuildables. The showstoppers keeping them from replacing fossil fuels are that they can’t substitute for fossils in either transportation (explained in When Trucks Stop Running), or in manufacturing (explained in “Life After Fossil Fuels”, because they can’t generate the high heat needed to smelt and forge metals, ceramics, solar cells, and the other components they’re made of. Without transportation and manufacturing, they can’t make “babies” and reproduce, no matter how much electricity they generate. And given their fossil-dependent life cycle, their energy return is certainly negative.

In addition, there aren’t enough rare earth metals, platinum group metals, steel, copper, and so on to scale them up to replace fossil fuels.

Just look at the materials to make a 2 MW wind turbine. To generate just half of U.S. electricity with wind would require 1,095,000 2 MW wind turbines (Friedemann 2015), each of them requiring 1,671 tons of material, including 1300 tons concrete, 295 tons steel, 48 tons iron, 24 tons fiberglass, 4 tons copper, and Chinese rare earth metals 0.4 tons of neodymium and .065 tons dysprosium (Guezuraga 2012, USGS 2011).  Then rinse and repeat every 20 years with 3.7 trillion pounds of materials. 

Utility scale batteries simply don’t scale up. The world’s largest lithium-ion battery project, a 300 MW facility, is being built in Moss Landing, California, adding enough storage capacity to the grid to supply about 2,700 homes for a month (or to store about .0009 percent of the electricity the state uses each year). But they’re far too expensive and don’t last long (15 year lifespan). At best, batteries can step in when peak power is needed, which mainly natural gas plants do today. They can not fill in the gaps of days, weeks, and even months when wind and solar generation flags. Especially in California, where both solar and wind fall off greatly in the fall and winter (Temple 2018).

Add billions more tons of materials to the rebuildable power shopping list for transmission, power plants, hundreds of square miles of backup utility-scale batteries, and then replace them in 20-25 years. 

Using fossil energy every step and releasing a lot of CO₂, since mining consumes 10% of world energy (TWC 2020).

If you can get these minerals that is. By mid-century many minerals and metals needed for high-tech could be running short , including stainless steel, copper, gallium, germanium, indium, antimony, tin, lead, gold, zinc, strontium, silver, nickel, tungsten, bismuth, boron, fluorite, manganese, selenium, and more (Pitron 2020 Appendix 14, Sverdrup 2019, Kerr 2012 and 2014, Frondel 2006, Barnhart 2013, Bardi 2014, Veronese 2015).

Computers are made of 60 minerals, many quite rare with no substitutable elements (EC 2017, NRC 2008, Graedel 2015). Fortunately the abacus can be made entirely with renewable wood.

Bardi (2014) wrote “The limits to mineral extraction are not limits of quantity; they are limits of energy. Extracting minerals takes energy, and the more dispersed the minerals are, the more energy is needed. Today, humankind doesn’t produce sufficient amounts of energy to mine sources other than conventional ores, and probably never will. But long before they “run out”, if oil peaks, then game over, fossil fuel resources are necessary for the extraction of almost everything else, and the easy high-grade ores have been mined, leaving crummy ore and expensive declining fossils left to extract it.”

We’re out of time. It would take 15 years to ramp up rare earth mining to prevent China from controlling most of these 17 metals (GAO 2010). Though all China has to do is drop the price of a metal to drive a mine out of business. 

Not a problem many say. We’ll recycle. But some elements are impossible to pry out of composite materials and alloys (Bloodworth 2014, Hageluken 2012). The cost to recover most rare metals exceeds their value. Recycling is time-consuming and uses toxic chemicals to separate them out. Of the 60 most used industrial metals, 34 recycled less than 1% of the time, and another eight less than half the time (UNEP 2011). 

Solar panels don’t last forever. Ninety percent of solar panels are going into the landfill or are sent to Europe. They are not being recycled in the U.S. because it costs more, isn’t required and is expensive to dissemble, etch, and melt them to remove lead, cadmium, copper, gallium, aluminum, glass, and silicon solar cells.

While some parts of a wind turbine can be recycled, 720,000 tons of blade material are expected to end up in landfills over the next 20 years, especially the up to 300-foot-long blades made of materials not worth salvaging: resin and fiberglass (Stella 2019).

And it is not just solar, wind, nuclear, and other alternatives that use rare metals. The entire universe of green energy depends on dozens of metals (i.e. rare earth, platinum) as alloys in steel, electronics, computers, the power grid, phones, wind turbines, magnets, photovoltaic cells, electric motors, satellites, semi-conductors, telecommunications, fuel cells, batteries, lasers, fiber optics, catalysts, aluminum alloys, integrated circuits, GPS navigation, and much more. 

We are running out of time. China produces 90% of rare earth metals, and nearly all of dozens of other metals, plus owns part of all of mining companies around the world.  It’s as if Saudi Arabia bought most of the world’s oil fields.

The Chinese now control the entire manufacturing chain from mining to metals to making missiles, components used in defense systems, communications, computers and more. This is driving calls in the U.S. and Europe to open their own rare metal mines lest a missile using Chinese parts be programmed to fail in war.

Why compete? Let China mine for essential minerals. Mining and ore processing are the second most polluting industry on earth, spewing out acid rain and heavy metals onto land, water, and air (PEBI 2016). One fifth of China’s arable land is polluted from mining and industry (Chin 2014).  If their high-technology parts are booby-trapped to prevent war, all the better.  Why waste rapidly declining oil on wars?

Green energy is anything but clean and green, and quite a Pyrrhic victory for China! 

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