The Realities of Net Zero: Green energy needs minerals, and Alaska should provide them.

• Author: Nieuwenhuyse, Rick Van

Organizations around the world are focused on addressing climate change. Most major corporations are rearranging priorities and reallocating capital and personnel to determine the most efficient path to achieve Net Zero (where emissions of carbon dioxide or methane are eliminated or balanced by removal from the atmosphere). The Paris Climate Accord focused the efforts of participating governments to achieve Net Zero by 2050--that's less than thirty years away. Specifically, the Net Zero objective is driven by achieving two main gargantuan transitions: changing to non-carbon-based fuel for both the transportation and energy sectors. These are virtuous objectives for sure, but where is all the metal going to come from that will allow this galactic shift to occur?

Electric vehicles (EVs) require three to five times more copper than an internal combustion engine (ICE). Lithium, nickel, and cobalt are also necessary to store the energy in a car battery. Windmills and solar panels require five to ten times as much copper per megawatt than a coal-fired power plant, along with a host of other metals, including the rare earth elements (REEs) that at present are only produced in a usable form in China. And the hydrogen highway--a chain of hydrogen-equipped filling stations that facilitate the use of hydrogen-powered cars--well, that requires some different metals, including the platinum group metals (PGMs), but certainly a lot more metals than old-fashioned ICE. And we haven't even talked about battery storage yet--not for the vehicles but for the grid, since wind and solar energy sources are intermittent and require storage for efficient redistribution. Batteries are an absolute necessity to store and distribute power in any new electrical grid that hopes to replace what is currently in operation.

A Lot of Zeroes

There has been lots of talk about "critical metals." The Biden administration acknowledged this fact with an Administrative Order followed up by language in the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act. There are fifty metals on the official US Geological Survey critical metals list. Oddly enough, copper didn't make the list, which I find odd because it is the most critical of ail the metals; none of the other metals work without copper. Bottom line: achieving all of our renewable energy goals will require more metal than has been mined in our brief history on planet earth!

To address the argument that all we need to do is consume less and...