Tag Archives: green energy

The Real Green Energy Transition: Mining Minerals from Plants

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Worries about China’s domination of critical minerals are driving Western scientists and companies to embark on increasingly novel ways to develop alternative sources. One such effort seeks to exploit a quirk of nature: Certain plants, called hyperaccumulators, absorb large quantities of minerals, like nickel and zinc, from the soil. Cultivating these plants, and then incinerating them for their metal, could provide U.S. companies with a small stream of domestically sourced minerals—without the expense and environmental destructiveness of conventional mining….At a greenhouse in Amherst, MA, scientists undertake gene editing to build a new fast-growing, nickel-absorbing oilseed plant. If successful, the plant could be used to harvest the metal from mineral-rich soils in states such as Maryland and Oregon…

Some 10 million acres of barren, nickel-rich soil are scattered around the U.S. In such areas, concentrations of minerals are generally too low to justify large-scale mining, but could offer opportunity for inexpensive nickel farming. In the case of nickel phyto-mining, as such efforts are known, the plants are dried and incinerated, leaving an ashy nickel concentrate. This concentrate can then be further purified and turned into battery-grade material.

To be sure, phytomining is small in scale. Companies in the field are targeting harvests of around 300 pounds of nickel per acre per year, roughly enough for six EV batteries. But the funding for nickel-farming plants is one small piece of a broad effort by the U.S. government to develop secure supplies of the minerals that are needed for defense and cutting-edge industry, and are an area where China is dominant.

Excerpt from Jon Emont, The New Weapon Against China’s Mineral Dominance: Plants, WSJ,  Jan. 25, 2025

How to Kill People 8 000 Feet Below Ground

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The South Africa’ government has been trying to starve out 1,000 informal prospectors so as to force them out of the Buffelsfontein mine, which extends some 8,000 feet below ground. For months in 2024, police have been sealing most entrances to the tunnels, blocking food and water deliveries and stationing guards at remaining exits to arrest any miners who make their way to the surface. In recent days, nearly 1,200 have surrendered. Police estimate that hundreds of men remain below, but it isn’t clear if they are unwilling or unable to reach the surface.

The operation is part of what police call their “Close the Hole” plan to combat illegal mining, an acute problem in what was once the gold-mining capital of the world. The South African government estimates that illegal gold mining costs the country the equivalent of over $3.8 billion a year in lost revenue, and is often associated with a jump in violent crime in nearby communities and an influx of migrants from neighboring countries… Facing a 42% unemployment rate, impoverished South Africans and migrants from nearby countries pry open sealed entrances and venture thousands of feet underground to try their luck. Locals call the men zama zamas, a Zulu phrase meaning “take a chance.”

Whole ecosystems exist below ground, with entrepreneurs selling miners everything from soda to toothpaste to sex.  The miners in Stilfontein, 100 miles southwest of Johannesburg, are suffering from hunger and dehydration, according to police. Industry experts say the zama zamas are often the lowest-level workers for larger criminal gangs that ultimately sell the gold abroad. Those who have migrated from elsewhere are sometimes victims of abuse, forced to work underground to pay off debts. Police said most miners who emerge will be charged with crimes and imprisoned or deported. 

Excerpt from Alexandra Wexler, The Standoff Deep Inside an Abandoned South African Gold Mine, WSJ, Nov. 15, 2024

What Ails the West: the Forgotten Art of Industrialization

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For the past few years, the West has been trying to break China’s grip on minerals that are critical for defense and green technologies. Despite their efforts, Chinese companies are becoming more dominant, not less. They are expanding operations, supercharging supply and causing prices to drop. Their challengers can’t compete. Take nickel, which is needed for electric-vehicle batteries. Chinese processing plants that dot the Indonesian archipelago are pumping out vast quantities of the mineral from new and expanding facilities, jolting the market. Meanwhile, Switzerland-based mining giant Glencore is suspending operations at its nickel plant in New Caledonia, a French territory, concluding it can’t survive despite offers of financial help from Paris. The U.K.’s Horizonte Minerals, whose new Brazilian mine was expected to become a major Western source, said last month that investors had bailed, citing oversupply in the market. Lithium projects in the U.S. and Australia have been postponed or suspended after a surge in Chinese production at home and in sub-Saharan Africa. 

The only dedicated cobalt mine in the U.S. also suspended operations last year, five months after local dignitaries attended its opening ceremony. Its owners say they are struggling against a flood of Chinese-produced cobalt from Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Last year, non-Chinese production of refined cobalt declined to its lowest level in 15 years… The share of lithium mining done within China or by Chinese companies abroad has grown from 14% in 2018 to 35% this year… Over the same time, lithium processing done within China has risen from 63% in 2018 to 70%…China has many advantages in the race to lock up minerals. Its miners are deep-pocketed and aggressive, making bets in resource-rich countries that Western companies have long viewed as corrupt or unstable, such as Indonesia, Mali, Bolivia and Zimbabwe. State banks provide financing for power plants and industrial parks abroad, paving the way for further private Chinese investment.

China’s rapid industrial development also means its companies have spent decades fine-tuning the art of turning raw ore into metals. They can set up new facilities quickly and cheaply. A paper published in February by the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies pegs the costs of building a lithium refinery outside China as three to four times higher than building one within the country. In eastern Indonesia, Chinese companies have built a fleet of highly efficient nickel and cobalt plants over the past few years after mastering a technology Western miners long considered glitchy and expensive. The plants run on coal power, some of it new, at a time when the world is looking to phase out dirty energy. “It’s just a simple, straightforward engineering capability that the Chinese have that has been lost in the rest of the world,” said Jim Lennon, managing director for commodities strategy at Macquarie, an Australian bank. “The Chinese have this overwhelming competitive advantage now that can’t really be addressed.”….

Excerpts from Jon Emont, China Is Winning the Minerals War, WSJ, June 19, 2024

Mining the Earth to Save it

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The rush to secure green-energy metals is bringing new life to one of the world’s oldest mining hubs. Like the United States, Europe is worried that it is too reliant on China for supplies of once-obscure natural resources, such as lithium and rare-earth metals, that are seen as climate-friendly successors to oil and gas…. 

On both sides of the Atlantic, one of the best answers to long-simmering worries about green-energy security is to look north…, for example, to the “Canadian Shield,” a vast band of rock encircling Hudson Bay. The “Baltic Shield” that stretches across Scandinavia to western Russia is similarly mineral-rich. It helps explain why Sweden in particular has such a long mining heritage. In the mid-17th century, the country’s “Great Copper Mountain” near Falun provided two-thirds of the world’s copper. Even today, 80% of iron ore mined in the EU comes from a site near the Arctic town of Kiruna that Swedish state operator LKAB has exploited for well over a century.

The energy transition is an opportunity for Sweden’s mining complex. LKAB said in January 2023 that it had identified Europe’s largest body of rare-earth metals close to its existing Kiruna operation…Digging up the planet to save it is an awkward pitch. The only way for miners to counter accusations that they are adding to the problem they want to solve is by decarbonizing operations. Here Sweden is again helped by the geology of the Baltic Shield, whose river valleys are favorable for green-energy production. Roughly 45% of the country’s electricity comes from hydroelectric power, with much of the remainder provided by nuclear and wind. It is also cheap, particularly in the Arctic, where many mines are located. Against a favorable geopolitical backdrop, the biggest risk for investors is political. Mines, which can bring a lot of noise and relatively few jobs to an area, don’t tend to be popular locally.

There is a reason the West relies on autocracies for a lot of its oil.

Excerpts from Stephen Wilmot, For Mining EV Metals, the Arctic Is Hot, WSJ, Feb. 14, 2023

The Limits of Green Energy: Wind Blades of Wood and Plastic

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What does the deforestation of balsa wood in Ecuador’s Amazon region have to do with wind power generation in Europe? There is a perverse link between the two: a drive for renewable energy has boosted global demand for a prized species of wood that grows in the world’s largest rainforest. As Europe and China increase the construction of blades for wind turbines, balsa trees are being felled to accelerate an energy transition driven by the need to decarbonize the global economy.

In the indigenous territories of the Ecuadorian Amazon, people began to notice an uptick in international demand for balsa wood from 2018 onwards. Balsa is very flexible but tough at the same time, and offers a light yet durable option for long-term wind power production. The typical blades of a wind turbine are currently around 80 meters long, and the new generation of blades can extend up to 100 meters. That means about 150 cubic meters of wood are required to build a single unit, according to calculations by the United States National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Ecuador is the world’s main exporter of balsa wood, holding 75% of the global market. Major players include Plantabal S.A. in Guayaquil, which has around 10,000 hectares dedicated to the cultivation of balsa wood destined for export. With the boom in demand starting in 2018, this company and many others struggled to cope with the quantity of international orders. This increase has led directly to the deforestation of the Amazon. Irregular and illegal logging has proliferated by those who have reacted to the scarcity of wood grown for timber by chopping down the virgin balsa that grows on the islands and riverbanks of the Amazon…

The impact on the indigenous people who live in the area has been as devastating as mining, oil and rubber were in their day…The Amazon’s defenders are calling for the wind turbine industry to implement strict measures to determine the origin of the wood used in turbine blades, and to prevent market pressure leading to deforestation. Ultimately, they say, balsa wood should be replaced by other materials…

In 2019, Ecuador’s balsa exports were worth almost €195 million, 30% more than the previous record from 2015. In the first 11 months of 2020, this jumped to €696 million.

Wind turbine blades are mainly made from polymethacrylamide (PMI) foam, balsa wood and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) foam…But The Spanish-German company Siemens-Gamesa..has  introduced blade designs using PET only, other competitors soon followed. Wood Mackenzie, a consultancy firm, forecasts that this “will increase from 20% in 2018 to more than 55% in 2023, while demand for balsa will remain stable…”

Today’s blades also present a problem for recycling. The first generation of wind turbines are reaching the end of their lives, and thousands will need to be dismantled… “But the blades represent a challenge due to their composite materials, as their recycling requires very specific processes…

Excerpts from How the wind power boom is driving deforestation in the Amazon, ElPais, Nov. 26, 2021

An Impossible Made Possible: the Green Energy Revolution

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Since the cost of renewable energy can now be competitive with fossil fuels. Government, corporate and consumer interests finally seem to be aligning.  The stock market has noticed. After years of underperformance, indexes that track clean-energy stocks bottomed out in late 2018. The S&P Global Clean Energy index, which covers 30 big utilities and green-technology stocks, is now up 37% over two years, including dividends, compared with 18% for the S&P 500.

This year’s Covid crisis will delay some renewable projects, but could speed up the energy transition in other ways. Alternative-energy spending has held up much better than spending on oil and gas. Globally, clean-energy investment is now expected to account for half of total investment in the entire energy sector this year, according to UBS.  Moreover, the crisis has pushed governments to spend money, including on renewable technologies. The massive stimulus plan announced by the European Union last month is decidedly green. The German government increased electric-car subsidies as part of its pandemic-related stimulus package rather than rolling out a 2009-style “cash-for-clunkers” program. China’s plans include clean-energy incentives, too.

Solar and wind are now mature technologies that provide predictable long-term returns. Big lithium-ion batteries, such as those that power Teslas, are industrializing rapidly. More speculatively, hydrogen is a promising green fuel for hard-to-decarbonize sectors such as long-haul transport, aviation, steel and cement.  Many big companies—the likes of Royal Dutch Shell, Air Liquide and Toyota —have green initiatives worth many hundreds of millions of dollars. They are, however, a relatively small part of these large businesses, some of whose other assets may be rendered obsolete by the energy transition… Early-stage electric-truck maker Nikola jumped on its market debut this month to a valuation at one point exceeding that of Ford.

Investors might be better off looking at the established specialists in between. Vestas is the world’s leading manufacturer of wind turbines. Orsted, another Danish company, has made the transition from oil-and-gas producer to wind-energy supplier and aspires to be the first green-energy supermajor. More speculatively, Canadian company Ballard has three decades of experience making hydrogen fuel cells.

Rochelle Toplensky, Green Energy Is Finally Going Mainstream, WSJ, June 24, 2020