🔋THREAD🔌
The inconvenient truth about climate change is that solving it will involve digging, blasting & leaching more minerals from the skin of this planet than ever before.
No one much likes to talk abt this.
But talk about it we must.
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Why? Because tackling climate change is a multi-decade (poss centuries-long) effort.
Hushing up the trade-offs & costs may feel right today, esp if it helps galvanise change.
But it'll only fuel a bigger backlash in decades to come. Because eliminating fossil fuels is a HARD SLOG
It will involve building a LOT more infrastructure: wind turbines and solar panels, high voltage cabling and energy storage.
In crazy quantities.
Because a) these power sources are less energy-dense than fossil fuels and b) the logic of net zero is to electrify EVERYTHING.
And there is simply no way of building all this stuff without digging a LOT of minerals out of the ground.
To see what this means in practice, consider a wind turbine. Many materials in there: steel in the tower structure, fibreglass & carbon fibre, rare earth metals up top...
But also, you need crazy amounts of copper.
Imagine a moderately big turbine, capable of turning out about one megawatt of power (so actually smaller than the mega one in the pic).
You need about three tonnes of copper in the generator and another tonne in the transformer...
Then you need about half a tonne of copper in the cables carrying the power down the tower.
Then you need to get that power back onshore, which involves long shielded collector cables which have enormous copper wiring. Look at this cross section of one of them!
There's more: copper at the substation where the power arrives; copper in the distribution cables connecting it to the grid... Tot it all up and according to @WoodMackenzie you're talking about roughly 15 tonnes of copper per megawatt generated.
And we need LOADS of these!
Extrapolate this across the world, and perhaps you're starting to see why copper is, to quote Goldman Sachs, the "new oil". They reckon we could see a four-fold or even nine-fold increase in demand from green energy in the coming decades.
We don't think about this all that much because copper is, as far as most of us are concerned, invisible. Yet it's already a massive part of our lives, since without copper there is no electricity. But suddenly, now we're electrifying EVERYTHING, we need much, much more.
The good news with copper is that we are pretty experienced at getting it out of the ground. The bad news is that a) we've already got most of the easy stuff and b) the rate of new mine discoveries has petered out in recent years. So there's a looming shortfall.
The other bad news is that copper extraction is a dirty business. Even when done as "cleanly" as possible it still involves displacing crazy amounts of rock, leaching them with acid, expending lots of energy, and dumping the waste in enormous tailings dams. It's often dirtier.
Copper is not evenly distributed. I just visited Chile, which has the world's biggest reserves (& the world's biggest copper company, state-owned Codelco).
Yet there the new government, led by new socialist President @gabrielboric is pondering new environmental controls on mining
They just shut down a copper smelter in Ventanas because it had caused so much pollution that the local area had been designated a "sacrifice zone". There are other such zones around the country. It's a big issue in Chile. mining-journal.com/copper-news/ne…
Over the past year a convention of people from around the country has been rewriting Chile's constitution. It's a v big moment: first rewrite since Pinochet. For a while they mulled banning some forms of mining altogether. The final draft is less radical but still proposes limits
So even as the rest of world looks to Chile for the crucial material upon which its net zero ambitions depend, Chile is thinking long and hard about restrictions: more environmental rules, bans on mining near glaciers. And this is doubly significant given it's not just copper...
For alongside the copper, Chile also has the world's biggest reserves of lithium - the material at the heart of rechargeable batteries. Lithium ion batteries are so named because the power inside them is stored/discharged thanks to lithium ions moving between cathode and anode
When people talk abt critical materials in batteries they often reference cobalt. Understandable given much of it comes from the DRC. But you don't actually NEED cobalt in batteries. Lithium on the other hand is essential - EVERY battery chemistry needs it (plus copper!)
So where does the lithium come from? In Chile's case from under the Salar de Atacama. This place 👇An enormous salt flat which looks extraordinary. But even more extraordinary is what lies beneath that salt - a great underground reservoir of brine, concentrated salt solution
This is a v different kind of mining to copper. No digging/blasting: brine is pumped up & evaporated over a year, removing non-lithium salts and leaving a liquid which is then refined at this place on the edge of the desert. The SQM refinery. Biggest lithium plant on the planet.
Problem is: this is one of the driest places on the planet. Locals say lithium miners are taking their water. SQM et al have convincing arguments that they don't. But even so, this is an incredibly sensitive environment. Some, eg @criordor, say local ecosystems are being harmed.
The undersecretary for mining from the new Boric government says he is concerned about this - and about pollution from copper mines. He also wants to create a state lithium firm a la Codelco. Tho interestingly he told me there are no plans to force nationalise private companies
The problem is that while there are clearly impacts from this type of brine mining, the other type of lithium mining - getting it from spodumene in Australia - involves considerably more water use and carbon emissions. It's more like conventional, dirty mining. Look:
So it's not just that there are compromises involved with replacing fossil fuels with renewable alternatives. There's a big spectrum in the cleanliness and nature of compromises of one type of lithium vs another.
Yet, again, few people want to discuss this!
Anyway, this is a v long-winded way of saying: please watch my film abt this.
I've left pretty much all the detail from the film out of this thread because I'd much prefer you watch it, cos a) we've been working on this for a while & b) I promise you'll enjoy it.
Wee preview:
🍿Full film here🍿
Shot by Richie Mockler (his first piece since coming back from Ukraine so esp grateful in every respect to have him along). Produced by @aoifeyourell. Pls share if you enjoy
Final thing: I was also in Chile researching my forthcoming book, MATERIAL WORLD.
📖 It'll touch on all this stuff - & go into more detail.
🪨Fascinating nuggets aplenty.
If u enjoy this kind of thing, do check it out.
Erm, when I've finished it.🫣
Out next year all being well...
The link to the video seems to have disappeared so here’s an updated link.
Do give it a watch if you find any of the above 👆interesting.
🍿THE RACE FOR CRITICAL MATERIALS🍿
A short film about SCALE:
Big news from Chile today: voters have rejected the new convention which proposed a raft of big changes, inc a national health system and new constraints on mining. Big blow to @gabrielboric.
More on why Chile matters so much to all of us in thread ☝️ theguardian.com/world/2022/sep…
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The Chinese owners of British Steel say they are now considering shutting their blast furnaces and end steelmaking at Scunthorpe in early June - only a few months away.
It would mean an end of virgin steelmaking in the country that invented it during the industrial revolution
British Steel say the main question now is timing: whether the operations will close in June, in September or later.
It says tariffs are one of the reasons the blast furnaces are "no longer financially sustainable".
Press release 👇
The news means @jreynoldsMP faces two interlocking crises in the coming months: 1. The imposition of US tariffs on an ever growing segment of British exports 2. The end of virgin steelmaking (the UK would be the first G7 country to face this watershed moment).
This is big stuff
Donald Trump just announced 25% tariffs on anyone importing oil from Venezuela.
This is odd.
Because the country importing the most crude from Venezuela is... the US.
Capital Economics chart of Ven oil exports by Capital Economics via @rbrtrmstrng
But it raises a bigger point
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Why does the US import so much oil from Venezuela?
Mainly for the same reason it imports so much oil from Canada.
And no it's not just because they're close.
It's because most US refineries are set up to refine the kind of oil they have in Venezuela and Canada.
To understand this it helps to recall that crude oil is actually a broad term. There are LOTS of different varieties of crude - a function of the geology of where the oil formed and the organic ingredients that went into it millions of years ago.
It's called "crude" for a reason
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Here's a thread about ALUMINIUM.
Why this commonplace metal is actually pretty extraordinary.
How the process of making it is a modern miracle...
... which also teaches you some profound lessons about the trade war being waged by Donald Trump. And why it might be doomed.
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Aluminium is totally amazing.
It's strong but also very light, as metals go.
Essentially rust proof, highly electrically conductive. It is one of the foundations of modern civilisation.
No aluminium: no planes, no electricity grids.
A very different world.
Yet, commonplace as it is today, up until the 19th century no one had even set eyes on aluminium. Unlike most other major metals we didn't work out how to refine it until surprisingly recently.
The upshot is it used to be VERY precious. More than gold!
🚨TARIFFS🚨
Here's a story that tells you lots about the reality of tariffs both for those paying them & those hoping to benefit from them.
A story of ships, storms, bad luck and bad policy.
It begins a week and a bit ago, with a man frantically refreshing his web browser...
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That man is Liam Bates.
He runs the UK unit of a steel company called Marcegaglia. They make stainless steel - one of the most important varieties of this important alloy. The method of making it was invented in Sheffield. And this company traces its DNA back to that invention.
Watching the process is TOTALLY amazing.
They tip a massive amount of scrap: old car parts, sinks etc, into a kind of cauldron and then lower big glowing electrodes into it.
Then flip the switch.
⚡️Cue a massive thunder sound as a controlled lightning storm erupts inside it.
🧵Three years ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine, EU, UK and other nations vowed to wage economic war, via the toughest sanctions in history.
So... how's that going?
We've spent months documenting what ACTUALLY happened. Here's a thread of threads on the REAL story on sanctions...
1. Flows of dual use items, including radar parts, drone components and other parts used by Russia to kill Ukrainians, carried on from the UK and Europe to Russia, via the backdoor (eg the Caucasus & Central Asia)
2. Of all the goods sent by the UK to Russian neighbours, few were as significant as luxury cars.
Having sanctioned Russia (the idea being to starve Putin's cronies of luxuries) Britain (and Europe more widely) began sending those sanctioned cars in via the backdoor instead
If the main thing the US really wants out of a deal with Ukraine is "50% of its rare earth minerals" then I'm surprised this can't be wrapped up pretty quickly.
Why? Because Ukraine doesn't HAVE many rare earth resources.
Really. As far as anyone knows it's got barely any...
Yes, Ukraine has lots of coal and iron and manganese.
It also has some potential sizeable reserves of stuff like titanium, graphite and lithium. Not to mention some promising shale gas.
But of the 109 deposits identified by KSE only 3 are rare earth elements
Now in one respect I'm making a pedantic point: a lot of people say "rare earth elements" when they actually mean "critical minerals".
The two aren't the same thing.
Rare earth elements are a v specific bit of the periodic table: actually they're NOT all that rare.
More on them👇