Get free renewable energy updates

We will send you a myFT Daily Digest e-mail to round up the latest Renewable energy news every morning.

The writer chairs the Commission for Energy Transitions

Heat waves, floods and droughts around the world are a wake-up call. We must rapidly reduce fossil fuel consumption and reduce CO₂ emissions to approximately zero by mid-century. To achieve this we need to electrify as much as possible, decarbonise electricity supplies and use hydrogen, bioenergy and carbon capture in applications where direct use of electricity is not possible.

Global electricity supply needs to expand approximately fourfold; transmission networks must increase from 70 million km to approximately 200 million km; we need to increase EVs from 25 million to over 1 billion. This means a big increase in mineral supply – seven times more lithium will be used annually than in 2022, while copper consumption will double.

In the face of this challenge, fears abound—that mining will use up vast amounts of precious water, that high lithium prices will make electric vehicles prohibitively expensive, or that discarded solar panels will wreak havoc on landfills. We need to separate myths from real concerns – Energy Transition Commission latest news aims to do so.

One thing we don’t have to worry about is long-term supply: for all key minerals, known resources easily exceed total future requirements. And one for context is the CO₂ or other greenhouse gases emitted when we use fossil fuel energy to make the materials needed for the first generation of wind turbines, solar panels, battery and electrical equipment. These emissions could amount to a cumulative 15-35 gigatons of CO₂ equivalent over the next 30 years: but this compares to around 40 Gt of CO₂ equivalent produced each year by the fossil fuel-based energy system.

Soil and water requirements are also manageable. Roughly 5 billion cubic meters of water per year needed for new mineral extraction compared to 2,700 billion cubic meters used in food and fiber production; and all solar PV farms and to mine the required sites would occupy less than 2 percent of the land devoted to agriculture. Eating red meat threatens the world’s tropical rainforests; batteries for electric cars do not.

Instead, there are three key challenges. The first is supply growing fast enough to meet rapidly growing demand. There are enough copper and lithium resources to meet global needs in 2050, but already announced supply plans fall short of likely demand in 2030. New mines and refineries need to be built, financial flows to developing countries need to be increased, and planning systems need to be reformed to allow the development of some mines and refineries in rich countries.

Second, new developments may have adverse local environmental impacts. In summary, the adverse effects will be more than offset by the cessation of coal mining, but this will not be the case for some local communities. Best mining and refining practices can dramatically reduce damage – and must be required by regulation imposed on mineral producers and users. The community should share in the profits generated, with a small additional cost accepted as the price for a more sustainable supply.

However, environmental impacts can also be greatly reduced through innovation and recycling, reducing the need for mining. New battery designs have reduced future cobalt needs by 50 percent in just five years; Nickel-free LFP batteries are now used in 40 percent of electric vehicles – up from 7 percent in 2019; and by 2040, more than 50 percent of the lithium used in new batteries could come from recycling. Regulation is increasingly requiring full recycling of all battery materials.

Third, we should build more diverse supply chains. Almost 70 percent of cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, 48 percent of nickel from Indonesia and 74 percent of refined lithium from China, although lithium sources are spread around the world. Significant concentration of mining is inevitable, and complete decoupling from China would significantly increase costs – slowing progress towards a zero-carbon economy. But policies aimed at reducing dependence on imports make sense: the EU’s target of obtaining 40 percent of its refined mineral supply from domestic sources is a sensible balance.

Mineral supply issues need to be clearly faced and managed. However, we must also welcome the sustainable nature of the new energy system. In today’s energy system, we burn 8 billion tonnes of coal, 35 billion barrels of oil and 4 tonnes of cubic meters of gas each year, producing around 40 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent. In the new system, we mine much smaller amounts of key minerals and place them in structures that generate, store and use clean electricity; and the materials are then ready to do the same next year or be recycled again and again. This is an inherently renewable system, and the faster we build it, the better.