Reasons Why Mining Rare Earth Minerals is Less Destructive than Drilling for Fossil Fuels
Rare earth minerals hold immense potential for creating a greener and more sustainable future. These minerals, despite their name, are abundant in the Earth’s crust, but they occur in such small amounts that they are not easily accessible or economically viable to extract with conventional methods. However, with innovations in technology that is changing.
One of the chief complaints about renewable energy is that the methods used to mine the metals and minerals are environmentally destructive, so switching from fossil fuels to wind and solar is just transferring the pollution from the air to the ground.
While there is a measure of truth to this argument, it is overly simplistic. Extracting metals and rare earth minerals from the ground will cause some damage, but it is considerably less than what we are already inflicting on the planet by mining and drilling for fossil fuels.
Furthermore, there are a lot of ancillary benefits to transitioning off fossil fuels, like lower electricity costs, cheaper healthcare, fewer deaths from air pollution, increased worker productivity, better quality of life, and more economic stability. These also need to be taken into consideration.
This argument also neglects to acknowledge the improvements in technology surrounding mining metals and rare earth minerals, as well as our ability to recycle them. Here are just a few reasons mining rare earth minerals are substantially less destructive than drilling for fossil fuels.
Rare Earth Minerals Require Less than 1% of the Materials that Fossil Fuels Do
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) the world extracted 7.5 billion tons of coal in 2021. However, according to the MIT Technology Review,
“Estimates for the maximum amount of materials we’ll need annually to build low-emissions energy infrastructure top out at about 200 million metric tons, including all the cement, aluminum, steel, and even glass that needs to be produced.”
So, transitioning the world over to renewable energy means extracting about a quarter of 1% of the material that we currently do just for coal. That doesn’t even account for the 32.8 billion barrels of oil we pulled out of the ground in 2021 or the 132 million cubic feet of natural gas that is extracted each year.
New Methods of Mining
Although conventional methods of mining are destructive, scientists are researching new methods like biomining, which uses microbes to extract rare earth minerals and metals from the ground and to recycle e-waste. For example, researchers at Harvard are using bacteria from marine algae to filter out rare earth minerals from the soil. In Germany, they are using cyanobacteria to absorb rare earth elements from mining wastewater. These are still in the experimental stages, but they could become a reality in the next decade.
Then there is phytomining, which uses plants and trees to accumulate the minerals in their biomass. This is already being used in France and Malaysia and although it has been mostly used to mine nickel, scientists have found over 700 species of plants that can absorb thallium, zinc, copper, cobalt, and manganese, among others. Phytomining is not only less environmentally damaging than conventional methods, it is also more efficient and cost-effective.
Wind Turbines and Solar Panels are Recyclable and Last Decades
The way we use metals and rare earth minerals is also quite different from how we use fossil fuels, which we burn, so they are rapidly depleted. We can use metals and minerals for years, if not decades, and once we finish with them, we can recycle or repurpose them.
Solar panels are already about 80% recyclable and although today even the most useful of metals are only recycled, at a rate of about 50%, with biomining that will probably substantially increase.
Wind turbines can be down-cycled into other useful materials such as resin, construction material, and gummy bears (yes, that’s right, gummy bears).
Next Generation Wind and Solar
However, next-generation wind and solar, which are already being installed require substantially less rare earth minerals and other raw materials to make. For example, the vertical and bladeless wind turbines made by Aeromine have a footprint of 10 feet by 10 feet (3 by 3 meters), are maintenance-free, and function even when there is very little wind because they use aerodynamic principles from race cars that takes advantage of breezes creating by buildings. It is also quieter and less offensive than conventional wind turbines, and it doesn’t harm bats and birds.
Next-generation solar technology is also now available and is made with organic photovoltaics (OPV) which don’t require rare earth minerals. These OPVs are turned into a thin solar film and used to transform skyscrapers into solar farms. This technology is already available from Heliatek and Ubiquitous Energy and their lightweight means they are easier to install and ideal for retrofitting older buildings.
There are also next-generation solar panels made from perovskite, which are more efficient and cheaper and easier to manufacture than silicon-based solar panels.
Improved Air Quality
Then there are the ancillary benefits of switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy. 90% of the world is breathing polluted air, most of which comes from burning fossil fuels. This results in about 7 million premature deaths each year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Polluted air also cost us about $2.9 trillion in 2018 (or $8 billion per day) from healthcare issues and lower productivity.
According to the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air. Switching to renewable energy not only means reducing the damage from climate change, but it will also save about 5.3 million lives each year from the improvement of air quality alone.
Clean air will also substantially increase worker productivity and improve quality of life for those suffering from respiratory disease. We know this because, in 1970, the United States passed the Clean Air Act, which regulated air pollutants from stationary and mobile sources.
In 1990, Congress asked the Environmental Protection Agency for an analysis to determine whether the law had made any difference. The report found that this single law saved an estimated $22 trillion in health-related costs between 1970 and 1990.
Annually it prevented 184,000 premature deaths, 850,000 asthma attacks, and over 22 million lost days at work. The total cost to comply with the act was about half a trillion dollars. Meaning the benefits outweighed the costs by 44 to 1.
The health and economic benefits of transitioning off fossil fuels would be exponential and we could distribute them worldwide.
Less Inflation (A More Stable Economy)
The price of wind and solar energy is cheaper and more stable than fossil fuels since it is not subject to fluctuation on the global markets how oil is. Since the price of energy affects everything, it means that many things would get cheaper.
A study published in 2020 by Rewiring America, an energy policy non-profit says that transitioning to 100% renewables would save the U.S. $321 billion in energy costs alone, or about $2500 per household per year.
One reason for the savings is because of the increase in efficiency that you get when converting from fossil fuels to electricity. For example, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, electric motors are about 77% efficient, while internal combustion engines are only 12% to 30%. The electric motor converts most of the electricity into driving the vehicle, while an internal combustion engine converts most of its energy into heat that is wasted. Cheaper energy could have a lot of positive economic and social implications, leading to lower transportation costs, less expensive goods and services, and lower food costs.
So, using metals and rare earth minerals to power the world isn’t a perfect solution. But will do substantially less damage than we are already doing by staying on fossil fuels, in terms of ground and air pollution and the loss of human life.
Originally published at https://palmerowyoung.me on September 8, 2023.
