The quick answer is that we are not short of any of those materials. We might not be producing enough right now, but there's far more than enough that can be mined or recycled inexpensively.
Increased prices will cause more mining and recycling, eventually the price will settle at the cost of production + something for profit. The something for profit is quite small, the coast for low risk capital is ~5% a year.
There might be a 5-10 period when profits are high for miners, but eventually the profits will be competed away by new entrants. (Except if you have a mine that produces very cheaply because it is so rich or easy to operate, these people will stay high profit. The most expensive mines will just make back they're capital costs + return).
You can see this with fracking which is horribly unprofitable. Hedge funds have lost billions over building fracking wells.
Right. Reserves are really just a measure of "things people bothered to look for at the current price." High prices can and do induce more searching.
Part of the whole hullabaloo about "peak oil" is that people stopped looking for oil reserves in an environment with low oil prices. Once prices started rising you saw fracking come into play that regenerated areas previously thought dead for oil production.
That's not the argument of peak oil. It's not about price or quantity of oil available in the planet. It's an argument about thermodynamics.
The argument is that in order to extract oil, you need to spend energy, and, logically, the most easier oil to extract is extracted first.
That means that oil extraction is every year more expensive (energetically not financially). Because technology can make extraction more efficient but not indefinitely, at some point, in order to extract oil, it will be necessary to spend the same energy than burning it creates.
I suppose we could say that it's kind of an inversion of what's going on with fusion research.
Some commenters say that we already pass that point and that's the reason oil companies CaPex have fall in the last years.
I don't know if that's the case, but I can't avoid to ask myself about solar.
Is the energy that a solar panel generate in its life enough for its normal use, plus extracting the minerals that it's made of, plus push the panel, through the ocean all the way from China? or are we fooling ourselves using oil for all that?
I would like to see some numbers and expert discussion about that.
> That's not the argument of peak oil. It's not about price or quantity of oil available in the planet. It's an argument about thermodynamics.
... that hasn't been the traditional argument behind peak oil, from its original adherents (checks notes) 70 years ago. The traditional theory is a pretty bare oil demand inevitably increases while fields run dry because we extract all the [usable] oil first--and one of the main points of the theory is to ask what you're going to do when you need oil and there is none left. It may be that newer adherents are arguing peak oil on the basis of energy-invested-on-energy-returned basis, but that's not the traditional argument for the theory.
While it is true that newer oil sources require more energy to extract, but that's not particularly relevant for a few reasons. For one, on current trends, it looks like demand for oil will peak well before economical supply of oil will be exhausted (which is the main point of the theory). But even being net-negative on energy production isn't necessarily a deal breaker, for there can well be cases where there's no realistic alternative to oil as an energy source due to its great energy density (see airplanes, for example).
If my memory of reading one of his books serves, fracking now costs 50% of the energy it produces (in addition to non-energy environmental impact, which is pretty large), up from ~10% for the easy oil we had ~50 years ago. Current-tech solar panels are in the same order of magnitude (again, not counting non-energy environmental impact). Nuclear energy has the highest yield. I seem to remember that coal is the worst, unless it's burnt at the point of extraction.
That doesn't pass the smell test. A "raw" solar panel in China costs about 25 cents / W, and each watt should produce about 45kWh over its lifetime (5W per day for 25 years). If the embodied energy in the panel is half of the lifetime energy, that means that there is 22kWh of embodied energy in that W of solar panel, and they're selling that embodied energy for about 1 cent / kWh. And that assumes that there are no costs to the panel other than the embodied energy.
A rule of thumb is that embodied energy in a finished manufactured product sells for about $1/kWh. By that rule of thumb, the embodied energy in a solar panel is about 0.5% of the energy it will produce over its lifetime.
> A "raw" solar panel in China costs about 25 cents / W, and each watt should produce about 45kWh over its lifetime (5W per day for 25 years).
I imagine that you're making assumptions on having sufficient luminosity all year round, right? So perhaps that depends on where on Earth you are.
According to Jancovici [1], in most of Europe, solar panels produce about 100 kWh/m²/year, assuming that they are oriented correctly (I don't know if e.g. the necessity of cleaning them up is factored in). From the same source, in terms of energy used to build the panel (is shipping included?), it takes 1 to 4 years to reimburse that energy but that's under the assumption that all the energy from the panel can be used. In practice, solar panel installations produce energy at a rhythm that depends on nature, which means that for many uses, the electricity needs to be stored somewhere if we want to actually use it at a different rhythm, e.g. when you're actually at home/in the office/etc.
Unfortunately, storing electricity at scale with current-tech is energy-expensive (both to build the batteries and because of energy loss during storage), e.g. storing it as hydrogen has a yield of ~30%, couldn't find the yield of other technologies of batteries including the energy cost of building/shipping/disposing of the battery. So, in the worst case, these 100 kWh/m2/year turn into ~30 kWh/m2/year, which means 3 to 12 years for recouping energy cost.
So, by this calculation, the worst hypothesis maps to the number I was quoting above and the best one is at least one order of magnitude better. My bad.
Now, there is the problem that current-tech battery often relies on metals (i.e. Lithium) that are only available in limited amounts.
The numbers in your linked article are from 2000. The price of solar panels per watt is about 5% of what it was in 2000. Most of that cost reduction was from reduced energy use, so you need to multiply Jancovici's numbers by 5%.
You're also assuming that you have to store 100% of the energy to get to a green grid. But in a grid with a good mix of different renewable sources, grid ties large enough to cover areas with different weather, substantial amount of nuclear, hydro and a large number of EVs that can charge while energy is cheap means that very little energy needs to be stored. So you also have to multiply your storage numbers by about 5%.
> Is the energy that a solar panel generate in its life enough for its normal use, plus extracting the minerals that it's made of, plus push the panel, through the ocean all the way from China? or are we fooling ourselves using oil for all that?
This is such a thoroughly debunked line it's barely worth discussing.
Here's a sufficient proof.
The dirtiest cheapest coal is about $1-2/GJ at the mine front. A good brown coal power plant is about 50% efficient.
Current unsubsidized solar module cost (not whole project) for large scaleprojects is in the $0.2-0.3.
At 25% capacity factor a dollar of solar at $0.3 will produce 500MJ over 20 years and still be 80% productive.
Thus even if the only activity required to build a solar panel were burning brown coal as it comes out of the ground, it could not be profitable to burn more fossil fuels than the energy the panel released.
The energy delivered by a solar panel is overwhelmingly more than needed to make it. The gain is enormous. There is simply no contest.
Consider that makers of solar panels, and of the materials that go into them, get no break on their power bills. Each and every kWh that goes into making the panel is paid for, and necessarily has its cost folded into the price of the panel. Otherwise they would be paying power out of their own pocket, to give it to you for free.
Furthermore, the fraction of the energy used in making the panel that comes from renewables goes up every year, as their share of the total generated increases.
The same argument applies to wind turbines, tidal turbines, wave engines, dams, and (in their way) storage media.
One could look for more direct sources, but the summary is that energy payback happens in 1-4 years out of current 25 year "life". And that 25 years is typically a warranty to 80% of original capacity. Year 26 of operation is not a sudden drop.
Unless I'm mistaken, that's based on the assumption that you're in position to use 100% of the energy produced during the day, exactly when it's produced. I'm sure that there are scenarios in which that's true (e.g. keep the refrigerator on all day long, use some other energy source for the night) but if your main use for the energy is not correlated with the sun being up (e.g. power your computer when you're back home in the evening), you need to add the actual energy cost of storage, which is typically really bad.
This considerably increases the time to energy payback. Still probably worth it, though.
Panels are so cheap now that they pay even if you waste most of what they could have produced. A smallish battery that captures only some of the excess, and delivers it when you need it, suffices. Battery cost is still falling fast as new chemistries come online. Hydrogen synthesis and storage might displace batteries for domestic use, particularly if hydrogen-fueled cars succeed. (Advice: keep all that equipment outside!) If not, zinc/bromine battery tech looks strong.
Monetary cost, as already noted, reveals an exact upper bound on the amount of energy needed to build and deliver the goods: people doing those get no discount on their power bill. The price also includes labor, administrative and marketing costs, tariffs, taxes, and whatever profit was taken, less any public subsidy or loss-leader discount.
For the most part you are correct. But building the mines, refining, supply chains, etc takes time. So you are perhaps missing one of the main points I was trying, maybe unsuccessfully, to make: we need to deal with the 'right now' and not just worry about how we'll be fine in 50 years.
Lithium is a perfect example. We have plenty in the ground. We don't have plenty of mines. We should be allocating Li carefully until those issues are resolved in 5-10 years.
If we only base our energy policy on how things will be in a decade we will delay the transition while inflicting maximum pain on the population(energy and food shortages, rampant inflation, lower standard of living, etc).
In fact, we do not have "plenty" of lithium. There's not enough lithium in the world to put in all the batteries for all the EVs we'll need to replace ICE vehicles. This is entirely orthogonal to the fact that recycling lithium ion batteries is expensive, difficult, and potentially dangerous in the case of any type of mishap.
That article mentions "reserves" 5 times and cost/price not once. Same type of articles were written about peak oil and then the price of oil went up and magically reserves grew as it be came profitable to find and extract new sources of oil.
That's because reserves are what matters. I don't care if there's billions of tons of lithium at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, nobody's ever going to go get it because it's too dangerous, difficult, and expensive. The same thing with space mining. Nobody's going to go mine asteroids because it's stupidly expensive. For all intents and purposes, if we can't get to it, it doesn't exist.
And let's not forget about all the problems that "innovative" methods of oil extraction such as fracking have created, over and above the fact that it's provided more oil to burn. Lithium mining itself is already an environmental disaster, and it seems highly unlikely that increased demand for the product is going to improve the environmental impact of extracting it. You know, tragedy of the commons and all. The fact that "peak oil" came and went is not a capitalist success story.
Not at all. If there were billions of dollars worth of whatever on the bottom of the Mariana trench, people would build advanced technology to extract these billions, without any further incentives than the market demand.
A comparable case in point: commercial space launch companies. Arguably, commercial large-scale aviation, too.
Well, that brings us back to earlier in the thread.
It's not only about money-expensive. If it gets more energy-expensive to produce/store/route/... energy than the amount of energy we end up with in the end, the game is over.
So, in practice, there are limits to reserves. There is, of course, the possibility that these limits can change with new technologies, which in turn depends on money-cost as you mention.
You seem not to understand what "reserves" actually means.
It does not exclude easily accessible material. It only excludes material not assessed yet because there has been no need to, as existing reserves will last more than long enough to perform further surveys.
If you go to the source of that claim, you'll see that it's basically about proven reserves, using current tech and know how, basically how we did it for oil, when we were supposed to run out of oil in 1872, 1919, 1960, etc.
We've just started looking for the thing at the scales we need it now, prospecting and extracting and processing it will improve.
Maybe, but I am skeptical. Do you know when lithium ion batteries were invented? Okay, truthfully, neither do I, because accounts vary, depending on what you mean by "invented" and "lithium ion battery," but it was definitely in the 1970s. The first prototypes were created in the mid 80s, and commercial introduction wasn't until 1991. This stuff is all up on Wikipedia, so you can just look it up if you doubt it.
Even if the research is being done, we've got decades before something commercially viable comes out. The need exists now. Anything that isn't essentially ready to go by 2030 probably isn't going to do squat to help us.
CATL (the biggest EV lithium-ion battery manufacturer in the world) has announced last year that it will bring sodium-ion batteries to market in 2023. We'll see. The technology is in many ways similar to lithium-ion, so more rapid advances are not surprising, especially considering the amount of investment being made compared to the 80s and 90s.
Lithium is 0.002% of the Earth's crust. The Earth's crust weighs 2.77 * 10^22 kg. Each car needs about 30kg of lithium. Therefore we have enough lithium for about 2*10^15 cars.
The quantity of Li in the crust is directly relevant. It provides an overwhelmingly more meaningful measure than "reserves", which only identify how much is in the next place people will dig when their current seam is tapped out.
What the number shows is that there is no possibility of ever tapping out all available lithium, no matter how many batteries are manufactured. Once the world is saturated, used-up batteries will become the main source for materials to build new batteries from.
The more immediate limitation is rate of manufacture of batteries, because building battery factories takes a long time.
> We might not be producing enough right now, but there's far more than enough that can be mined or recycled inexpensively.
That's not reality but a dream. So far we still have to find a sustainable lithium recycling on scale, there are various startups with various solutions, who actually prove to be just like most startup: PR scam for money or childish dream of someone who sold the cat before capturing it.
It's not better in mining estimation: we have estimations of different kind but they are nothing than dream, we do not really know how much lithium is accessible on earth.
Locally, there are several mines that have been trying to open for years (copper and nickel, mostly) but the environmental crowd has been extremely determined in using the courts and bureaucracy to block them from opening.
The net result is the green wave will be driven largely by relying on dirty minerals from other countries.
Mining tech is essentially the same since ever, we just have transferred some physical efforts to machines, how a local mine is "green" and some in exotic places is different?
Consider a thing: all industry do not pollute because they are evil but because the tech produce pollution. Something was done, something can be done, to reduce it of course, but that's not always possible, not possible more than a certain extent and not for free.
A simple idea: can you pay a 8-years maximum lasting car 100k€? Even if you can, how many others needs cars and can't? Because that's relatively less heavy than the physical possibility of doing something, but it's not marginal at all. I have built a new home, with all actual tech to consume less and get a better life, but if such homes can only be made let's say by 10% of the western population, witch means roughly by 3% of the total human population what's the outcome? We are a society. Some can be richer than others, nothing wrong in that. BUT when the difference between the poorest and richest and so their numbers on total humans diverge too much the society fall apart anyway.
are both nice entry points for basic research. Mining tech has changed quite a bit since the early days- waste management is probably the biggest factor in whether a mine is relatively neutral or harmful to the environment.
The other major factor between countries is the extent to which regulations are in place to ensure that old mines are also managed- ensuring water runoff doesn't flow into and through them (picking up excess metal waste), etc.
A final note is many countries do not have the regulatory strength to catch all illegal mining operations, which may have no waste management or treatment in place at all.
Even with all of the regulations in place, it would still be economically feasible to mine here- otherwise, the mining companies wouldn't be spending decades trying to open these mines up in the first place.
Both are dreams, not very green by it's own, not really doable (like recycling water) and more important hyper costly witch means that the final product would be hyper-expensive. Are you ready to buy a small pot around 550€? Because that's the realist outcome of these starting point dreams.
In the end yes, mining companies have invested in various tech, accidentally not one really environmentally friendly for real, those green parts tend to be just scam business like CO₂ sequestration tech and nothing really used on scale. That's probably why we almost close all mines in the western world to transfer them far from people's and reporters eyes...
Not really: ICEs for instance have enormously reduced their pollution, sure they can't be "green" but a modern European diesel engine is an order of magnitude less pollutant than one from just 30 years ago.
Some energivore process in various industries have evolved to demand far less energy, cement is a good example using the EMC process [1] same others have not evolved, not because they are evil but because we do not found anything better to evolve; mining is one of them.
Increased prices will cause more mining and recycling, eventually the price will settle at the cost of production + something for profit. The something for profit is quite small, the coast for low risk capital is ~5% a year.
There might be a 5-10 period when profits are high for miners, but eventually the profits will be competed away by new entrants. (Except if you have a mine that produces very cheaply because it is so rich or easy to operate, these people will stay high profit. The most expensive mines will just make back they're capital costs + return).
You can see this with fracking which is horribly unprofitable. Hedge funds have lost billions over building fracking wells.