There’s been a lot of talk lately about how the scarcity of “rare-earth” minerals like lithium and cobalt will short-circuit the “green revolution”. In that regard, I came across an interesting 2022 Standard & Poors Global (SP Global) study on the amount of plain old everyday copper needed for a Net-Zero 2050 scenario. The study is entitled “The Future of Copper: Will the looming supply gap short-circuit the energy transition?“, and the answer is … yep. It will.
In my post “Bright Green Impossibilities” I listed a number of physical, political, and economic reasons why we can’t get to “Net-Zero” CO2 emissions by 2050. This post is about one reason that I didn’t mention in that post.
The problem is that copper is the only material suitable for transmitting electricity … and in addition, it’s used in building construction, appliances, electrical equipment, brass hardware, and cell phones, as well as expanding applications in communications, data processing, and storage.
[UPDATE: As several commenters have mentioned, aluminum is replacing copper for the transmission of electricity at high voltages (generally over 480V.) However, copper is still used for to-the-home and in-home wiring, as well as all the other uses listed above. And the numbers in the linked study and in the graphic below are unchanged.]
So if we’re going to go to an all-electric world, we’re going to need a truly massive amount of copper.
How much? Well, according to “The Future of Copper” linked above, here’s the bad news:
Figure 1. Estimates of the amount of copper needed to achieve Net-Zero 2050.
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So … by 2040 we’ll need about all the copper we’ve currently located in the ground, and we’re still nowhere near Net-Zero 2050. We’re likely to find more in the ground, which will allow for further recoverable reserves. But it will generally be very poor ore and expensive to mine. “Back in the day”, as they say, ores which were 4% or even 6% copper were not uncommon. But newly discovered ores are on the order of 0.1% copper. Of course, as it becomes more scarce it will become more expensive, allowing poorer ores to be economically viable … but that leads to another problem.
The current London Metal Exchange price for copper is about ten thousand dollars per tonne. So the copper necessary for Net-Zero will cost a minimum of fourteen trillion dollars at current prices. However, as noted immediately above, as copper becomes more scarce the prices will inevitably rise. So the likely total cost will be at least fifty percent higher or even more, call it a minimum of twenty trillion dollars …
And that’s just for the smelted copper. It doesn’t include turning the copper into electrical wiring with insulation, transporting the wire and other copper products to where they’re going to be used, installing the new transmission lines, substations, switching gear, generators, and all the other costs to get the global electrical grid up to what would be required for an all-electrical world....
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There is more. He also notes that it will take even more reliance on China for the shrinking amount of copper that can be mined. BTW, I am not a fan of aluminum wiring as a replacement.
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