Thanks for the excellent write-up, codifying what many have seen across different reports before. But I think it is clear the situation.
You write "If proponents of NZE got their wish, America’s entire electricity grid would become beholden to the Communist nation, as well, because of China’s dominance in the supply chain for minerals." Given that those most keen on energy transition have shown themselves to be communists in all but name, it is clear that is their ultimate goal.
With luck, under the new Trump administration, many of these impediments will be removed and the US will be able to utilize its natural bounty of assets effectively and arguably in the most environmentally sound manner possible.
Another worrying factor is that the managers (and governments) of the Western Democracies didn't just offshore our manufacturing to China, they also neglected to ensure access to the raw materials needed to resume Western manufacturing. Meanwhile, the Chinese have completely outmanoeuvred us by a strategic plot to secure a monopoly of the supply of many raw materials. As the countries who supply raw materials often have corrupt governments, and with the ending of empire Western countries have little influence, China has now obtained a global monopoly stranglehold on our planet's essential resources. Shortsightedness in a nutshell.
Silk Road, belt and braces or whatever they called the strategy of bribing a few corrupt leaders (South Africa), trick them into a loan they can’t afford, then seize land due non payment while securing 100% of resource yield at fixed price against debts. China makes USA state dept look like choir boys.
Andy, I agree! The Trump admin has a lot of great things on their wishlist to knock down some of these policy barriers (and not just for mining - oil and gas too).
The prices of a wide range of commodities can be tracked here: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodities There are a few puzzles: copper is only up 7.9% on the year, lithium down 39%. Silver is another to watch for its use in photovoltaics and a hedge, like gold, against economic rough seas; up 32%. Germanium fits the picture, up 93%.
I would hope that some folk would find the book ' Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future' by Ed Conway as fascinating and eye-opening as I did.
A final personal comment: the scale of central government intrusion in our lives is oppressive,, coercive, negative in its effect, and (faint hope) could do with massively reining in (I write from the UK where the degree of acceptance of this is alarming).
Mark Mills is awesome on this subject. Notably, he says a few point swing in production can cause a price swing ten times as large. When supply is a few percent short of demand the price swing is similarly big
Net zero plans should not only be extended by multiple decades, it should lean much more on nuclear, and natural gas is going to provide much more value than its reasonable proposed climate costs for a long time to come
Why would the WEF care that there aren't enough rare-Earth minerals on the whole planet to replace everyone's car? That word "rare" says it all. But then, the WEF's Net Zero has never been about saving the planet from the WEF's other fallacy, the imagined "climate emergency", but by their own admission is really a mechanism for Global Wealth Redistribution. All part and parcel of the WEF's other great project, The Great Reset, where the majority of us return to a New Feudalism, survival farming, while our new Overlords live on in privileged luxury.
one of my keenest desires is to have the Trump administration label WEF a terrorist organization as its mandates are completely antithetical to the US Constitution, and perhaps simply put many of them in jail
Unfortunately Trump is a sociopath hence susceptible to bribery and flattery manipulation. But it would bring me joy to see WEF correctly labelled, along with various UN organizations.
Sociopath?!? How do you figure that? Bribery & flattery manipulation are what sociopaths do, not what they are susceptible to.
He is a narcissist & egomaniac but he is also charitable, kind, gregarious, pragmatic, a negotiator and a builder. Which is far above any president in the past 30yrs at least.
If people are worried about vehicle emissions (spoiler shocker; I’m not worried) then Toyota is and always was right with their 1:6:90 rule, the minerals needed for one full EV can be used to build 90 hybrids and over the life of those vehicles the 90 hybrids saves 37x more emissions than the single EV.
Simple, elegant, intelligent, everything the climate /nsane are not.
From vehicle standpoint, reduce mining required by 90x?
That is a rather meaningless claim, it sure as hell wouldn't make a rule. As in the article, BEVs use 2.4x the copper, probably the most critical mineral. Vastly more nickel, also important. Cobalt, manganese, lithium, graphite of much lower importance. And I don't know where they get the emissions number from, embodied emissions in the vehicle? Certainly not cradle to grave overall emissions.
Emissions of life cycle including mining, according to what I have read.
As noted I think we need more co2 but there is also nothing wrong with extending supplies of hydrocarbons, hybrids seem the ticket, it will reduce emissions but also extend them
"1:6:90 rule, the minerals needed for one full EV can be used to build 90 hybrids and over the life of those vehicles the 90 hybrids saves 37x more emissions than the single EV"
Nice article. I have a little experience building high voltage transmission lines in the west. The biggest hurdles are federal agencies that get in pissing contests with each other, Indian tribes (extortionists), state agencies, railroads, and land owners. It won’t get better. The only reason we need new transmission lines is because we insist on worthless renewable power plants that are hundreds of miles from load centers.
Interesting that Minnesota is stuck at 30% renewables. So is California. That is when you hit the wall. The easy connection points are all used and expanding the grid to allow more is really expensive and time consuming. If you request connection for solar to the California grid today, your connection date is 2034..if everything goes perfectly. It will take $100 billion and 25 years to get California to 50%.
Don’t worry about transmission. We actually NEED very little of it. We insist on building thousands of miles of it to connect remote, worthless renewables because we believe in a flawed computer model says the world is ending. I think of our inability to build transmission as the emergency brake on what would be total economic madness. It took 150 years to build the grid we have now. The expansion we think we need will take at least 50 years and cost trillions. We can’t afford it. Hopefully the delay with transmission will allow time for rational thinking to creep back in.
Always love hearing your insights, Lee. Is there anything the feds can really do to streamline transmission line buildouts (even though we only need them to build dumb stuff)?
You have entrenched bureaucrats whose missions are at odds with development and even with each other. We used to be able to complete studies and engineering for interconnection in 18 months. FERC put legions of bureaucrats on streamlining the process. Our initial efforts to comply with their direction will take at least two years if everything goes perfectly. We knew that going in. I’m afraid their efforts to streamline the rest of the process will be similarly “successful”. The interconnection study and engineering part of the process is easy. Building the stuff is getting even harder. Each solar or battery installation requires high voltage transformers and circuit breakers that are nearly impossible to get, cost twice what the did and have 5-6 year lead times.
Climate alarmists are what I term, ‘One Step Thinkers.’ They are the type of people who think food comes from grocery stores and power comes from the socket thing you plug cords into.
Thanks for the huge number of facts. Like this, for example:
"a 3-megawatt wind turbine (the average size of a new turbine in 2021) requires nine tons of copper, 335 tons of steel, 1,200 tons of concrete, three tons of aluminum, and two tons of rare earth elements. An average offshore 3.6 MW wind turbine requires approximately 32 tons of copper."
We either need to permit a lot more mining or we need to cancel the crazy net zero idea.
"A goal without a plan is just a wish.", Antoine de St. Exupery
There is no plan. If there had been a serious effort to develop a plan, it would have been obvious that the schedule is as implausible as it is unnecessary.
Jk about Greta, but you're absolutely correct. they've been making the plan up as time goes along. policies come down to messaging from progressive thinktanks staffed by liberal arts majors who haven't worked a minute in the actual energy sector (e. g. mining, drilling, and pumping it out of the ground), and well, there ya go.
And the corollary to the resources issue is the manpower issue - there just isn't the skilled workforce to bring all of this into being. Rick Rule talks a lot about it - international shortages of electricians, linesmen etc etc
I related this anecdote before but maybe not here.
A friend who is a very experienced mechanical/electrical engineer here in canada in the mining sector but now semi-retired was hired as a consultant to a company applying to build a new copper mine in BC.
I ran into him in the Vancouver airport in June 2023 as he was returning from a permit hearing, the permit was denied and the company was directed to start over.
The initial application was in 2009!!
14 years and nothing.
There is no transition, the climate/insane are the ones actively preventing it.
That's what happens when you let crooked, despicable politicians install voting machines, which take 2 weeks to give you unverifiable results vs the traditional hand counted paper ballots you get verifiable results in a few hours.
Every $1 of GDP requires ONE KILOGRAM OF MINED MATERIALS. See the Energy IS the Economy chapter of my Amazon book, New Nuclear is HOT!, by transiting my article, https://hargraves.substack.com/p/energy-is-the-economy
On average in 2022 each $1 of economic production, gross world product (GWP),
The way this nation addresses resource development issues is akin to getting 50 single-issue advocates into a room, telling them of the plan, then setting them loose to publicize their single issues about why they are AGAINST the plan. And by coincidence, every one of those single issues happens to have a cut-out in the laws to make it impossible to work around those issues. See the balance between mining and solar energy as described in the article.
As long as that is the case, it explains why nothing positive will ever get done in the US about this trip down the dirt road of destitution.
All mining, along with solar, wind, and grid lines on public lands and elsewhere is destroying habitat for imperiled species. The mining for lithium for EV batteries at Thacker Pass, NV, for instance, is completely destroying prime habitat for sage-grouse, pronghorn, golden eagles, endangered spring snails, pygmy rabbits, wildflower, sagebrush, and more. This article describes what humans "need" (really, "want") in terms of "resources", but completely ignores that we really do need flourishing ecosystems and a functioning web of life, as we too are mammals relying on that web for our own lives. We cannot continue to sacrifice ecosystems and non-human life for endless "resources" - energy or materials.
The actual mines do destroy habitat, but their land 'footprint' is small, so they are not "completely destroying" prime habitat - that is a gross exaggeration. Nevada still has millions of acres of beautiful open land. I appreciate your passion for our ecosystems, but wish you weren't so radical about it.
Between old mines leaving a toxic legacy (NV is littered with them), new mines, nuclear blast zones, military target zones, ranching, roads fragmenting habitat, growing urban areas, and now solar and grid lines, unfortunately land suitable for thriving ecosystems is getting much harder to come by.
That's why we need concentrated energy. One ounce of thorium will supply the US per capital total primary energy supply for 80yrs. Minuscule effect on the environment. And reducing human impact on the environment requires more energy, not less.
We have been improving the CO2 levels above their former starvation value, dropping to 180ppm 20kyrs ago. At 150ppm plants die.
Life is biota. Increasing biota is increasing life. If you like vast dry sterile deserts, go to Mars, lots of that there. Lots of that on 100's of billions of planets in our Galaxy. Only one that we know of with biota.
We can always mine asteroids. One asteroid has a million $trillion worth of minerals. Easy to send down the Earth's gravity well. You just need an ablative heat shield and drop it into a shallow sea or desert.
Thanks for the excellent write-up, codifying what many have seen across different reports before. But I think it is clear the situation.
You write "If proponents of NZE got their wish, America’s entire electricity grid would become beholden to the Communist nation, as well, because of China’s dominance in the supply chain for minerals." Given that those most keen on energy transition have shown themselves to be communists in all but name, it is clear that is their ultimate goal.
With luck, under the new Trump administration, many of these impediments will be removed and the US will be able to utilize its natural bounty of assets effectively and arguably in the most environmentally sound manner possible.
Another worrying factor is that the managers (and governments) of the Western Democracies didn't just offshore our manufacturing to China, they also neglected to ensure access to the raw materials needed to resume Western manufacturing. Meanwhile, the Chinese have completely outmanoeuvred us by a strategic plot to secure a monopoly of the supply of many raw materials. As the countries who supply raw materials often have corrupt governments, and with the ending of empire Western countries have little influence, China has now obtained a global monopoly stranglehold on our planet's essential resources. Shortsightedness in a nutshell.
Silk Road, belt and braces or whatever they called the strategy of bribing a few corrupt leaders (South Africa), trick them into a loan they can’t afford, then seize land due non payment while securing 100% of resource yield at fixed price against debts. China makes USA state dept look like choir boys.
Andy, I agree! The Trump admin has a lot of great things on their wishlist to knock down some of these policy barriers (and not just for mining - oil and gas too).
Thank you Sarah and EBBs. Your subscribers may also be interested in this presentation by Mark Mills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7Gi0vObVSo
The prices of a wide range of commodities can be tracked here: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodities There are a few puzzles: copper is only up 7.9% on the year, lithium down 39%. Silver is another to watch for its use in photovoltaics and a hedge, like gold, against economic rough seas; up 32%. Germanium fits the picture, up 93%.
I would hope that some folk would find the book ' Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future' by Ed Conway as fascinating and eye-opening as I did.
A final personal comment: the scale of central government intrusion in our lives is oppressive,, coercive, negative in its effect, and (faint hope) could do with massively reining in (I write from the UK where the degree of acceptance of this is alarming).
Just purchased this on audible!
Mark Mills is awesome on this subject. Notably, he says a few point swing in production can cause a price swing ten times as large. When supply is a few percent short of demand the price swing is similarly big
Net zero plans should not only be extended by multiple decades, it should lean much more on nuclear, and natural gas is going to provide much more value than its reasonable proposed climate costs for a long time to come
This is great, thank you! Snagged Material World for Kindle.
Why would the WEF care that there aren't enough rare-Earth minerals on the whole planet to replace everyone's car? That word "rare" says it all. But then, the WEF's Net Zero has never been about saving the planet from the WEF's other fallacy, the imagined "climate emergency", but by their own admission is really a mechanism for Global Wealth Redistribution. All part and parcel of the WEF's other great project, The Great Reset, where the majority of us return to a New Feudalism, survival farming, while our new Overlords live on in privileged luxury.
one of my keenest desires is to have the Trump administration label WEF a terrorist organization as its mandates are completely antithetical to the US Constitution, and perhaps simply put many of them in jail
Unfortunately Trump is a sociopath hence susceptible to bribery and flattery manipulation. But it would bring me joy to see WEF correctly labelled, along with various UN organizations.
Sociopath?!? How do you figure that? Bribery & flattery manipulation are what sociopaths do, not what they are susceptible to.
He is a narcissist & egomaniac but he is also charitable, kind, gregarious, pragmatic, a negotiator and a builder. Which is far above any president in the past 30yrs at least.
And so far, this term, he is looking VERY good.
On point comment! Net zero is a critical part of making serfdom cool again.
The numbers don’t lie.
If people are worried about vehicle emissions (spoiler shocker; I’m not worried) then Toyota is and always was right with their 1:6:90 rule, the minerals needed for one full EV can be used to build 90 hybrids and over the life of those vehicles the 90 hybrids saves 37x more emissions than the single EV.
Simple, elegant, intelligent, everything the climate /nsane are not.
From vehicle standpoint, reduce mining required by 90x?
That is a rather meaningless claim, it sure as hell wouldn't make a rule. As in the article, BEVs use 2.4x the copper, probably the most critical mineral. Vastly more nickel, also important. Cobalt, manganese, lithium, graphite of much lower importance. And I don't know where they get the emissions number from, embodied emissions in the vehicle? Certainly not cradle to grave overall emissions.
Emissions of life cycle including mining, according to what I have read.
As noted I think we need more co2 but there is also nothing wrong with extending supplies of hydrocarbons, hybrids seem the ticket, it will reduce emissions but also extend them
"1:6:90 rule, the minerals needed for one full EV can be used to build 90 hybrids and over the life of those vehicles the 90 hybrids saves 37x more emissions than the single EV"
Wow. thanks for the numbers. It's amazing.
The obvious solution is to stop wasting resources on wind and solar, and get on with a build out of nuclear, which uses far less resources.
Nice article. I have a little experience building high voltage transmission lines in the west. The biggest hurdles are federal agencies that get in pissing contests with each other, Indian tribes (extortionists), state agencies, railroads, and land owners. It won’t get better. The only reason we need new transmission lines is because we insist on worthless renewable power plants that are hundreds of miles from load centers.
Interesting that Minnesota is stuck at 30% renewables. So is California. That is when you hit the wall. The easy connection points are all used and expanding the grid to allow more is really expensive and time consuming. If you request connection for solar to the California grid today, your connection date is 2034..if everything goes perfectly. It will take $100 billion and 25 years to get California to 50%.
Transmission is really what I'm starting to worry about. I've heard a lot about interconnection queues and it's astounding that even when most are cancelled/withdrawn it's taking that long. (https://emp.lbl.gov/news/grid-connection-backlog-grows-30-2023-dominated-requests-solar-wind-and-energy-storage)
Don’t worry about transmission. We actually NEED very little of it. We insist on building thousands of miles of it to connect remote, worthless renewables because we believe in a flawed computer model says the world is ending. I think of our inability to build transmission as the emergency brake on what would be total economic madness. It took 150 years to build the grid we have now. The expansion we think we need will take at least 50 years and cost trillions. We can’t afford it. Hopefully the delay with transmission will allow time for rational thinking to creep back in.
Always love hearing your insights, Lee. Is there anything the feds can really do to streamline transmission line buildouts (even though we only need them to build dumb stuff)?
You have entrenched bureaucrats whose missions are at odds with development and even with each other. We used to be able to complete studies and engineering for interconnection in 18 months. FERC put legions of bureaucrats on streamlining the process. Our initial efforts to comply with their direction will take at least two years if everything goes perfectly. We knew that going in. I’m afraid their efforts to streamline the rest of the process will be similarly “successful”. The interconnection study and engineering part of the process is easy. Building the stuff is getting even harder. Each solar or battery installation requires high voltage transformers and circuit breakers that are nearly impossible to get, cost twice what the did and have 5-6 year lead times.
Climate alarmists are what I term, ‘One Step Thinkers.’ They are the type of people who think food comes from grocery stores and power comes from the socket thing you plug cords into.
Thanks for the huge number of facts. Like this, for example:
"a 3-megawatt wind turbine (the average size of a new turbine in 2021) requires nine tons of copper, 335 tons of steel, 1,200 tons of concrete, three tons of aluminum, and two tons of rare earth elements. An average offshore 3.6 MW wind turbine requires approximately 32 tons of copper."
We either need to permit a lot more mining or we need to cancel the crazy net zero idea.
"We either need to permit a lot more mining or we need to cancel the crazy net zero idea."
How about both???
I'm a fan of that plan!
Now that's a smart plan.
"A goal without a plan is just a wish.", Antoine de St. Exupery
There is no plan. If there had been a serious effort to develop a plan, it would have been obvious that the schedule is as implausible as it is unnecessary.
Agreed!
"Fake it til u make it"
Greta T-berg
Jk about Greta, but you're absolutely correct. they've been making the plan up as time goes along. policies come down to messaging from progressive thinktanks staffed by liberal arts majors who haven't worked a minute in the actual energy sector (e. g. mining, drilling, and pumping it out of the ground), and well, there ya go.
And the corollary to the resources issue is the manpower issue - there just isn't the skilled workforce to bring all of this into being. Rick Rule talks a lot about it - international shortages of electricians, linesmen etc etc
This has been on my mind too! Hope to write more about it soon.
Thank you gentlemen.
And
I related this anecdote before but maybe not here.
A friend who is a very experienced mechanical/electrical engineer here in canada in the mining sector but now semi-retired was hired as a consultant to a company applying to build a new copper mine in BC.
I ran into him in the Vancouver airport in June 2023 as he was returning from a permit hearing, the permit was denied and the company was directed to start over.
The initial application was in 2009!!
14 years and nothing.
There is no transition, the climate/insane are the ones actively preventing it.
Insane!!! Permitting is a mess...
That's what happens when you let crooked, despicable politicians install voting machines, which take 2 weeks to give you unverifiable results vs the traditional hand counted paper ballots you get verifiable results in a few hours.
Every $1 of GDP requires ONE KILOGRAM OF MINED MATERIALS. See the Energy IS the Economy chapter of my Amazon book, New Nuclear is HOT!, by transiting my article, https://hargraves.substack.com/p/energy-is-the-economy
On average in 2022 each $1 of economic production, gross world product (GWP),
demands 1 kWh of heat energy,
uses 0.27 kWh(e) of electric energy,
emits 0.21 kg of CO2, and
requires 0.96 kg of mined minerals.
Graphic image at https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb0aebd40-03a3-43db-a59a-b55f41fecc72_1920x1080.heic
This one bothers me... Quoting...
"In 2021, the U.S. used only 11 terawatts of electricity to charge EVs; by 2030, electricity demand is estimated to rise to 230 terawatts."
Do you mean terawatt-hours?
Hi Mike, thanks for asking. The original reference for this is a McKinsey study linked here. That one is on me and should be terawatt-hours! https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insights/building-the-electric-vehicle-charging-infrastructure-america-needs
The way this nation addresses resource development issues is akin to getting 50 single-issue advocates into a room, telling them of the plan, then setting them loose to publicize their single issues about why they are AGAINST the plan. And by coincidence, every one of those single issues happens to have a cut-out in the laws to make it impossible to work around those issues. See the balance between mining and solar energy as described in the article.
As long as that is the case, it explains why nothing positive will ever get done in the US about this trip down the dirt road of destitution.
All mining, along with solar, wind, and grid lines on public lands and elsewhere is destroying habitat for imperiled species. The mining for lithium for EV batteries at Thacker Pass, NV, for instance, is completely destroying prime habitat for sage-grouse, pronghorn, golden eagles, endangered spring snails, pygmy rabbits, wildflower, sagebrush, and more. This article describes what humans "need" (really, "want") in terms of "resources", but completely ignores that we really do need flourishing ecosystems and a functioning web of life, as we too are mammals relying on that web for our own lives. We cannot continue to sacrifice ecosystems and non-human life for endless "resources" - energy or materials.
The actual mines do destroy habitat, but their land 'footprint' is small, so they are not "completely destroying" prime habitat - that is a gross exaggeration. Nevada still has millions of acres of beautiful open land. I appreciate your passion for our ecosystems, but wish you weren't so radical about it.
Between old mines leaving a toxic legacy (NV is littered with them), new mines, nuclear blast zones, military target zones, ranching, roads fragmenting habitat, growing urban areas, and now solar and grid lines, unfortunately land suitable for thriving ecosystems is getting much harder to come by.
That's why we need concentrated energy. One ounce of thorium will supply the US per capital total primary energy supply for 80yrs. Minuscule effect on the environment. And reducing human impact on the environment requires more energy, not less.
We have been improving the CO2 levels above their former starvation value, dropping to 180ppm 20kyrs ago. At 150ppm plants die.
Life is biota. Increasing biota is increasing life. If you like vast dry sterile deserts, go to Mars, lots of that there. Lots of that on 100's of billions of planets in our Galaxy. Only one that we know of with biota.
We can always mine asteroids. One asteroid has a million $trillion worth of minerals. Easy to send down the Earth's gravity well. You just need an ablative heat shield and drop it into a shallow sea or desert.