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.
...
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....
...
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.
Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now. It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
James Robbins: ... Bin Laden suggests that President Bush should allow Zarqawi’s body to be returned to his family in Jordan, but this is a matter that is up to the Jordanian government, which so far has not shown much interest in facilitating a homecoming. Bin Laden mocks King Abdullah II, calling him a Coalition minion, and asking “w hat scares you about Abu Musab after he’s dead? You know that his funeral, if allowed to happen, would be a huge funeral showing the extent of sympathy with the mujahedin.” A large crowd would definitely turn out, though most people would be on hand to demonstrate their anger and disgust. Last November’s hotel bombings in Amman , masterminded by Zarqawi, are still fresh in people’s memory, and mentioning them to Jordanians has the same visceral impact as memory of the 9/11 attacks does here. Jordan has adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards those who choose to mourn the country’s least favorite son, and four opposition members of parliament who paid con
Comments
Post a Comment