Solving climate change includes solving transportation emissions. And all ground transportation will be part of electrifying everything everywhere all at once. Mining equipment is no different and the journey has already started.
Mining involves among the most extreme energy requirements and energy availability issues of any industrial process on earth. Billions of tons of rock have to be shattered, removed from mines, crushed and processed to extract the minerals and chemicals we depend on.
Aluminum is made from bauxite, the most common element in the Earth’s crust, with four to five metric tons of ore per ton of end metal. A ton of steel requires up to two tons of reasonable grade iron ore. These elements are common in the earth’s crust. Copper returns kilograms of metal per ton of ore. Rarer elements like gold or platinum see grams of metal per ton of ore.
Those are the hard rock metals. Soft rock mining for potash, some uranium and probably limestone will certainly continue, with open pit, long wall, short wall, room and pillar and other techniques applied.
Then there are metals like lithium, where brine extraction is a primary pathway to getting the battery metals we need, whether with massive evaporation ponds in Chile or with unconventional membrane filtration systems like E3 Lithium’s.
The technology is as diverse as the minerals, chemicals and approaches to mining. Blasting won’t be going away. The myriad of other technologies for fracturing hard and soft rock won’t be going away, but will likely continue to increase.
The sheer tonnage of rock and raw materials we extract will actually plummet. At present we extract approaching 20 billion tons of coal, oil and gas annually, mostly for single use burning to create 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide and waste heat, and most of that will stop. Only the necessary tonnage for non-burning persistent petrochemicals that we don’t replace with biologically sourced chemicals will still be occurring in 2100. Peak demand for all three fossil fuels is this decade, per Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA and China’s Sinopec announced that this year saw peak gasoline demand.
But we will require more of the minerals for batteries, electric vehicles and transmission wires. Iron is the only mineral that gets into the low billions of tons per year. The rest of the industrial metals like aluminum and copper are only in the low millions or tens of millions of tons each. The technical and precious metals like lithium, gold and rare earths combined are under two million tons a year combined.
These minerals have long, productive lifetimes once mined. Unlike the single use fossil fuels that they displace, they will be reused as durable batteries, vehicles and infrastructure for a decade or decades, vehicle batteries will often be repurposed for stationary storage, and then all will be recycled for the minerals to be repurposed into more valuable equipment.
Far less of these minerals are required than some much amplified analyses have suggested. One piece of un-peer reviewed napkin math by a Finnish expert on the fine dust created during explosions made several spectacular errors. The first was the primary energy fallacy. We don’t need to replace the energy in the 20 billion tons of fossil fuels, just the parts that aren’t extracting, processing, refining and distributing fossil fuels, about 11% of the total, and the parts that actually generate useful energy services. In all, economies throw away about two-thirds of the energy in fossil fuels.
By comparison, a future world where we get most of our electricity from wind turbines, solar panels and hydroelectricity and use it in electrified end uses like mining vehicles is much more efficient. We only need about half the total energy coming into the economy to get the same economic and comfort outputs in the end.
The analyses usually ignore moving electricity around as well. Electrons from far flung wind and solar farms, and new dams like the Three Gorges, are increasingly flowing across high-voltage direct current transmission with 3% or lower losses of energy per thousand kilometres. Broadening the grid is a key way to reduce the requirement to overbuild renewables and storage. That was ignored by the analyst in question as well, leading to another multiplication of mineral requirements.
The same analyst insists, despite the global prevalence of pumped hydro and the significant increases in different types of battery chemistries, that all energy storage would be lithium ion. Once again, this has a compounding effect on the mining requirement.
This lack of understanding of the ability of our economy to substitute solutions extends to transmitting and distributing electricity at large and short scales. While copper dominates short-distance transmission and vehicle wiring harnesses today, aluminum is a much more common metal, lighter and almost as good a conductor. Undersea HVDC cables, for example, are all aluminum. Once again, the analysis multiplies copper demand on top of the previous multipliers.
The analysis, like every other similar analysis that finds we can’t possibly mine the required metals to electrify our economy, is so flawed that it’s remarkable that anyone takes them seriously. Deep cognitive biases are required to consider them to have evidentiary value, and everyone should be asking why they are amplified so heavily. Who benefits from promoting clearly inaccurate information that creates headwinds for electrification?
But still, billions of tons of rock and soil will be moved to get the needed minerals. Surely the billions of tons of rock movement that will be left will require something besides electrons?
Not according to mining giants Rio Tinto, BHP and FMG. Rio Tinto is the world’s second-largest metals and mining company. BHP is the third largest. While smaller, Fortescue Metals Group is still in the low tens of billions of annual revenue, and is included in part due to FMG chair Andrew Forrest’s very bullish stance on green hydrogen for energy including mining vehicles in the past.
This year all three mining giants said the same thing within the same month: mines will be electric. They’d assessed all of the alternatives including biodiesel and especially hydrogen, and found that using electricity as directly as possible was so much cheaper and more effective that it was no longer worth considering alternatives. The biggest trucks will have big batteries, and will often be tied to catenary overhead lines.
Whether underground or above ground, the advantages of electric vehicles are significant. Regenerative braking as the vehicles rolled down hills will recharge the batteries or flow back into the mine’s local grid. Electric mining vehicles have no emissions underground, significantly reducing the high expense of mining ventilation. The torque and speed requirements are deeply into electric motors’ sweet spot. It’s much easier to get electrons to remote sites than liquid or gaseous fuels manufactured a long way away.
While the world’s largest mining firm, Glencore, has not dropped the potential for hydrogen trucks, it’s ordering battery electric vehicles for mines already.
Mines are major infrastructure projects with major energy requirements, and as they decarbonize it’s cheaper to build transmission to them and build local wind, solar and hydro facilities than to ship hydrogen in. Manufacturing hydrogen locally would require three times the electricity, so is economically non-viable.
Just as mines are already running drag lines, drills, conveyor belts, rail systems, ventilation and ropeways with electricity, increasingly the biggest vehicles will have batteries, electric motors and often connections to overhead wires.
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November 30, 2023 at 02:19AM
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Whether Hard Or Soft Rock All Mining Equipment Will Be Electric - Forbes
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