Once a wind turbine or solar panel is constructed, no further mining is needed. Among clean energy technologies, wind turbines in particular require a considerable amount of minerals per amount of energy produced, as illustrated in the chart below from the International Energy Agency.īut that chart only illustrates the minerals needed to construct the power plants. Today the world mines 8 billion tons of coal every year, whereas the clean energy transition is estimated to require around 3.5 billion tons of minerals in total over the next three decades.Ī December 2021 paper by Rice University researchers sought to answer this question in detail. The short answer to this question is that fossil fuels require much more mining and drilling than clean energy technologies. Which requires more mining - fossil fuels or clean energy? Clean technologies will have a non-zero impact, but they will be much smaller than the dirty fossil fuel status quo. This raises some common questions - when we account for the impacts of the mining and manufacturing of these technologies, are they really better for the environment, human rights, and climate than the fossil fuel alternatives they’re replacing? Instead of drilling and mining for fossil fuels, we’ll need to mine for critical minerals to manufacture a whole lot of “clean” technologies like solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. It will involve a fundamental shift in the way we generate and use energy for various purposes. The grand transition from a fossil fuel-based economy to a green one is underway.
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