Essay by Eric Worrall
“… current mineral supply meets between 10 and 35% of projected 2050 requirements …”
McKinsey: Clean Energy sees Critical Minerals Supply Crisis
By Sean Ashcroft
October 25, 2024McKinsey clean energy report part 1: Mining faces long-term critical minerals supply shortfall as demand soars for raw materials to fuel clean energy drive
Ensuring sufficient critical minerals are available to support the deployment of low-emissions technologies will require significant scale-up of their extraction and refining, a new McKinsey report says.
The report – The hard stuff: Navigating the physical realities of the energy transition – stresses how the energy transition is in its early stages, with only an estimated 10% of required deployment of low-emissions technologies by 2050 achieved in most areas.
…
McKinsey says current mineral supply meets between 10 and 35% of projected 2050 requirements. This assessment comes under the consultancy’s Achieved Commitments scenario, which models countries meeting their stated climate pledges.
The authors identify supply expansion speed as a primary constraint. They highlight uncertainties around material substitution technologies. Performance impacts of alternative materials require evaluation.
…
The consultancy forecasts nickel demand will increase by 100%. Dysprosium and terbium requirements could expand by 400%. Lithium demand faces a potential 700% surge.
…
Read more: https://miningdigital.com/sustainability/mckinsey-warns-of-critical-minerals-supply-crisis
Imagine commissioning a trillion dollar project without checking the logistics. Surely nobody could be that stupid.
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The Green Blob also opposes mining, so it should be expected.
They plan to take care of you like those on the train to Auschwitz. They didn’t need much.
Don’t do that.
The Asteroids likely have massive amounts of exploitable minerals. Those will become available … eventually.
Now why didn’t I feel that with the obvious? I’ll just have to strive harder to become a better more open pronoun with the feels.
As a staunch advocate that CO2 is wholly beneficial trace gas, and more CO2 is good, I have no love for the mania around Nut Zero. If it were up to me, all mandates for EVs and electric everything would be abolished. The minerals off planet will mostly stay off planet, for development of a solar system wide civilization. Look how quickly human technology has changed in the past 200 years. Just imagine how much more it will change over the next 200 years, especially as the rate of change is accelerating.
Except that the rate of change is decelerating. Humanity got spoiled by the pace of progress from 1800-1970, and blithely assumed that it would continue. Terminator, Blade Runner, 2001; all of these futures are now in the past. By 1970, all of the “easy” science and technology had been done; ever since, and into the foreseeable future, progress is more incremental, more expensive, and more difficult to achieve.
I think that quantum computing and AI may prove you wrong…
Perhaps in the areas when people killing each other will delegate decisions to AI to make the killing more efficient.
AI drones are being used now in Ukraine.
Joseph,the drones in use in Ukraine are not truly AI, they can make no decisions beyond should I go left or right, What they are are target acquisition drones, that is, they are flown under human command to the target zone, shown the target and from there are no longer under direct human control to avoid jamming.
Automated stupidity on steroids!
I am not optimistic about accelerating of the rate of change. I think humanity went through an S-shaped curve of productivity increase, and the rate of change is now decelerating.
One example: the rate of change from no electricity to telegraph, radio, to wire telephone networks, to cell phone networks with video phone and messengers was fast and fascinating. But most of the progress now is from n to n+1 model of a smartphone with a better camera and screen resolution. Perhaps we are improving worldwide coverage, but this has obvious limits.
Similar with medical procedures and drugs. Antibiotics, vaccines and scientific drug design have been a revolution, but currently medical care quality is hardly accelerating, as can be seen in the stabilization of life expectancy. Further improvements will always happen, but do not expect miracles. Worldwide coverage will also improve, but also has limits.
And what else is next?
Green energy and e-mobility are a spectacular failure.
Fusion will be 20-30 years ahead for eons.
The AI is more of a marketing buzzword for inflating a startup or publicly traded stock than a solution to any real problem.
With the world population likely to stabilize at ~10 bln, and each person able to consume only so much food, housing, clothing etc., there will be even less need for further accelerated productivity increase. And without need, it will not grow by itself.
P.S. We should consider ourselves to be extremely lucky to live through the sweeping changes. Our grandfathers plowed the land with oxen.
When somebody references the ‘rate of change’, and they (might) mean the changing rate of ‘change’, and further throw in the term accelerating as some sort of qualifier, I get confused.
If I integrate the rate of ‘change’ don’t I get the acceleration of ‘change’? Is this then (and maybe simply) the ‘rate of change’ (of change)? If I integrate again, do I not then find how the ‘rate of change’ is changing (with respect to ‘change’) … and essentially I could say that societal change is accelerating?
Or, when you say the ‘rate of change is accelerating’ are you actually trying to say the ‘jerk of change’ … have you intergrated past any useful meaning?
“Eventually” can be a verrrrrrry long time.
fusion power
“fusion power”
a mirage on the far horizon. !! 🙂
JP Morgan were saying similar things a couple of years ago – see some of their reports and others here:
https://www.climatecatastrophefund.com/
When will the government cease subsidies to go green that ENCOURAGES the environmental degradation and humanity atrocities occurring in developing countries mining for those exotic minerals and metals to support the “green” movement.?
Subsidies to purchase EV’s are financial incentives to encourage further exploitations of yellow, brown, and black skin residents in developing countries.
“surely nobody could be that stupid.”
Actions speak louder than words.
AOC, Harris, Biden, Grenholm, … ARE that stupid.
Down here we have PLENTY of those very stupid people. !
Albo, Bow-wow, and most other Labs/Greens, and, unfortunately, many Libs.:-(
Never misunderestimate the stupidity of politicians and climate sciencefictionists.
Socialism – the art of creating and managing shortages.
The reality is much much worse. As I have written here many times, “electrify everything” — which is a huge part of the “transition plan” — requires massive upgrades to the electrical grid in the United States, all the way down to the power panel in individual homes.
That means thousands of miles of new transmission lines, millions of new transformers, new higher amperage electrical drops, new power panels (distribution boxes in homes), multiple EV fast chargers for most homes, and the list goes on.
In the US, we are NOT manufacturing these items — not only not fast enough, but some not at all.
We may not have enough “stuff” to make them all and certainly not in the time frame being proposed by frantic fanatics.
The whole nation would have to go on a war footing to pull this off — with government taking over all factories and production like we did in WWII.
However – even if the Democrats take the White House and both houses of congress, the people will not stand for that. This means: The so-called transition will not happen.
JP Morgan’s 2024 energy report was on the electrify everything theme:
https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/outlook/market-outlook/eye-on-the-market-electravision
“What might the future of energy look like? The prevailing vision is electrification, powered by solar, wind, transmission and distributed energy storage. But due to complex factors like chemistry, physics, cost, politics and human behavior, this shift is progressing at a slower-than-ideal pace.
In this year’s Eye on the Market Annual Energy Paper, Michael Cembalest, Chairman of Market and Investment Strategy at J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management, examines these dynamics, as well as nuclear power, hydrogen, Gaza’s energy future and more.”
Read the full report here (PDF).
Thx for the JPMorgan link!
I only got through page 20 [bedtime! lol ] but it exhibits common sense, nice graphs and the author seems to have a bit of humor. Of course, it doesn’t question the necessity of NetZero by 2050 but it does show how unrealistic & costly the current policies are.
Yes, there is no transition. Either in the US or the UK or anywhere else. Partly because China, India etc who account for most of the emissions are not trying. But for those countries that are trying there is no solution to intermittency. All governments are doing is spend lots of money on intermittent generation, which is not in itself a transition. Because this leads to two problems.
One, that it fails to generate when demand is high. Not all the time, but for enough of the time that you have to be able to meet almost all of peak demand from some other source.
Two, that it generates huge amounts when you cannot use it. So you then have to pay the operators for this useless generation.
It basically doesn’t matter how many trillions you spend on transmission from the wind sites to the high demand locations, if there’s no wind there will be no power to carry. And if its noon on a summer weekend and demand has cratered, and your wind and solar are at max, then you’ll be paying them not to produce, again regardless of your transmission network. So this heads towards a combination of rationing, blackouts and high prices. Or a more or less disguised U-turn, where all the transmission and the wind farms are just useless addons to a gas powered basic system.
Then we have the slowly unfolding EV crash. Today its reported that VW is planning closing three plants and laying off ten thousand or so. Could be an underestimate.
The end result of meeting the EV goals at the same time as making the power transmission will be blackouts and rationing. But the result of not meeting the EV goals and continuing to penalize the production of ICE cars will be that companies stop making ICE and the car market crashes.
The total irrationality of this is just amazing.
“The total irrationality of this is just amazing”
Yes, it is.
The “transition” is already falling apart:
Story tip
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cGyvVxFDas
US Auto Insurer BANS EV charging in its OWN car parks
It doesn’t really need to mean all that.
It could simply mean that, utilizing Strativarius’ logic/defn above, that we need better Social Artists to manage away the electric demand.
please kindly stop with the ‘we’
you and i and everyone here had nothing to do with what “we” did in WW2, even in ww2 the peoples had nothing to do with what the visible politicos and their behind scenes bosses did and inflicted on everyone else
collective possessive (we/our) pronouns scramble people’s brains
in what way exactly is the government ‘ours’? do we own it? do we control it?
“collective possessive (we/our) pronouns scramble people’s brains”
Yes!
One of my pet peeves.
I hear people all the time claiming “we” did this or “we” did that, when describing some stupid government action, when in fact, it is Biden and the Democrats who are doing those things. I had nothing to do with it. Don’t include me in the stupidity. Which is what peope who say “we” are doing.
“Ya got a mouse in your pocket?” used to be the reply to someone making the “we” noise.
Not only production, but installation capability is missing. Handling high voltage and high power even at the distribution level is enormously dangerous. You don’t take a one semester class at a votech to become capable of handling these.
“Surely nobody could be that stupid.”
There you go again, questioning the acumen of the academics (e.g. Mark Jacobson in CA and Robert Howarth in NY) who put so much brainpower into their “peer reviewed” “studies” that are pushing the “clean” “energy” transition. /sarc
Over the years they have used so much brainpower that they have not really had any for quite some time now 🙂
“Some ideas are so stupid only intellectuals could believe in them.” — George Orwell
“Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it.” — Stephen Vizinczey
“Never confuse education with intelligence. You can have a PhD and still be an idiot.” — Original source unknown
Many academics specialize. They know more and more about less and less until eventually they know everything about nothing.
There is also the other side of that spectrum, like me, that hate to specialize … and end up knowing nothing about everything.
What’s old is new again. Times change, human nature does not.
Orwell had it all figured out.
I’ve been in the mining industry/business for 50+ years. Nothing has changed. The same naysayers are still at it. They consider the natural resource industries their enemy , all the while basking in the remarkable standard of living those industries provide.
I live in the northern rockies and have seen the mining industry up close for most
of my life. The mining industry has created much of this situation through their
actions. The pendulum swings both ways. I’ve found posting some of the issues
here on this board that the mining industry has created will be ridiculed but no
one has disputed the facts behind my postings. Oh and if you want to bring up
the particulars I can cite a few..
Minning if 100 to 50 years ago is not mining today. I can show you a coal mine and you would be hard press to tell me what land was mined and what land was not. The mined land is back to growing crops. Ditto for old oil/gas well sites.
There’s number of mines since 1980 that have made some serious pollution
in this area. Perhaps you can see the pattern from the cyanide heap leach
operation from this era. The mining companys come in take the gold and
leave the mess for the public to pay for.
https://news.mt.gov/Department-of-Environmental-Quality/DEQ-Proceeds-with-Bond-Forfeiture-at-Montana-Tunnels-Mine
In December 2022, Montana Tunnels filed for Chapter 11 federal bankruptcy protection.”
Pegasus Gold Zortman-Landusky mine left the public on the hook for over
$100Million dollars
ASARCO’s Mike Horse Mine that poisoned the Blackfoot River when it’s poorly-engineered tailings dam failed
Beal Mountain Mine https://mtstandard.com/news/local/cleanup-costs-climb-at-beal-mountain-as-deq-drops-bad-actor-case-against-former-pegasus/article_2f78acdc-d083-5ab4-bdfd-be0dd60e5b3e.html
Golden Sunlight — hailed as the bright light of “new mining” — it now requires treatment in perpetuity to address cyanide-poisoned water at the very confluence of the Boulder and Jefferson rivers
W.R. Grace’s disaster in Libby that killed — and continues to kill — hundreds of Montanans from asbestosis from their vermiculite mining operation
The Year the EPA began operations the worst pollution in the entire country
was in Drummond MT.
https://fluoridealert.org/news/the-town-that-refused-to-die/
When the mining industry operates like this it turns the public into what
the regulars on this board call “the green blob” or whatever..
There’s more but I know I’m wasting my time. I do know a couple of
geologist’s and they won’t say much about the above mines for some
reason. I’m not anti mining, I don’t like the lack of integrity I see from
the mining industry. The WR Grace situation has personally affected me .
I live outside the city and about 20 years ago a strip mine started up on some farmland next to me, within eyesight.
Needless to say, I was not a happy camper. Who wants a coal strip mine next door?
Anyway, they mined the area for about six months and then folded up operations for some reason (much to my delight) and they went in there and restored the land and if you walked on it today, you would never know there had been a strip mine there.
I was impressed and grateful.
In this particular case, the coal company did a good job.
I haven’t seen a bulldozer since. I’m happy about that. 🙂
Surely nobody could be that stupid.
Says it all.
It is not a $trillion project, it is hundreds of $trillions. Over 10 $trillion are already wasted.
McKinsey is just catching up.
Simon Michaux did a study “Assessment of the Extra Capacity Required of Alternative Energy Electrical Power Systems to Completely Replace Fossil Fuels” in 2021. It is online.
And, NO, these carrots never do the math. They just FEEL, as pointed out in WUWT recently!
Stories such as those reported present short-term investment opportunities. Invest in mining/smelting operations now. Be prepared to bail-out (timing is critical) when the smart-money folks realize the so-called transition will not happen. (Kip’s wording.)
[Me? I’ll remain holding large diversified mutual funds.]
Last two sentences of above article:
“Imagine commissioning a trillion dollar project without checking the logistics. Surely nobody could be that stupid.”
Uhhhhh . . . have you checked out the Biden-Harris administration and Congressional Democrats lately?
The so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 authorized $891 billion in total spending – including $783 billion on energy and climate change™.
However, “In a forthcoming policy analysis, we estimate that the IRA will cost more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years and between $2 trillion and $4 trillion by 2050. The final tally of energy subsidies enabled by the IRA is difficult to predict because many energy-related tax credits are uncapped and depend on uncertain deployment levels and consumer choices yet to be made (such as electric vehicle purchases).”
— source: https://www.cato.org/blog/inflation-reduction-act-after-two-years-spending-estimates-reach-new-heights-green-new-deal
(my bold emphasis added)
It’s real world confirmation of a comment from author Harlan Ellison: “Apart from hydrogen, the most common thing in the universe is stupidity.”
People can be that stupid, and are that stupid, and too many of them are in positions of power.
The ones who aren’t stupid enough to believe the Alarmist Climate Change rhetoric are in it for the money and power. The rest are just stupid and/or ignorant.
Which means Western society is in big trouble. Western nations need to vote the stupidity out of their governments. Which means getting rid of radical Leftists.
Story tip – incinerating waste
Specialist crews were deployed in the early hours of Monday morning after one of the £580,000 lithium battery-powered trucks caught fire, forcing roads across the West End such as Oxford Street and Duke Street to close.
…
Smoke was seen rising from the stationary lorry, as firefighters were seen trying to put out the inferno whilst surrounded by rubbish and other shrapnel.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14010797/Electric-bin-lorry-bursts-flames-central-London.html
£580K? Jeez
Oh dear, that’s right in the middle of the Ultra Low Emission Zone.
Half a million quid and no end of toxins up in smoke.
This likely was a fire in the garbage/waste — not the truck’s battery.
Electric bin lorry bursts into flames in central London | NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT (wordpress.com)
But once it gets to the battery.. game over !!
California has announced a $2.1 M electric school bus.
There are plans for airborne vehicles to come online within the next 2 years or so. These will be passenger vehicles, taxis, and what not. They will be all electric.
One can only, with horror, imagine the tragedy when a battery fire starts. On the ground, the EVs, some or many, have fire alarms allowing some minimal time for the occupants to evacuate the vehicle. At 100 feet above ground? And the wonderful image has the burning airborn EV crashing into an office high rise (or apartment building).
What are they thinking?
Yeah, we probably shouldn’t allow terrorists to buy flying electric cars.
Lets not fall into assuming Limits of Growth and imagining future material shortages.
Incorrect projection literature would be a fun elective. Would have to be taught by a grumpy old professor who drinks coffee after grading papers.
But not in a plastic cup and not with a plastic stirrer.
These people are not stupid. They know very well what they are doing and why. But hoi polloi don’t, which leaves it difficult to put together an opposition strategy.
Shirley Knott
I competed against McKinsey in ‘Fortune 500’ strategy consulting for 15 years before resigning to join a client. They are generally very good. If they say you cannot get there from here, then you cannot. That reality will eventually dawn on the UK and EU. Trump will bring reality to the US on Jan 20, 2025.
“If they say you cannot get there from here”
But they aren’t saying that. They are just saying more mining is needed. It often is.
Here is a plot of world nickel production over time. It doubled since 1995. It could double again.
Not unless regulation is changed to allow it!
“It doubled since 1995. It could double again.”
Tell your green and other far-leftist government chums to get the **** out the way, then.
Sorry Jim, That was meant as a reply to Nick. !
All of the Greens I know are opposed to more mining. But they are all in favour of the “energy transition”. When I point out that these two positions are incompatible, they accuse me of spreading disinformation. The level of cognitive dissonance which Greens exhibit is quite astonishing.
I foresee a large increased demand for geologists, geophysicists, and mining engineers required to find and exploit the vast deposits of unobtainiunite that will be needed.
“Imagine commissioning a trillion dollar project without checking the logistics. Surely nobody could be that stupid.” I assume that is sarcasm, the unfortunate part of the whole project is they are that stupid. Of course, for many of them stupidity is not the driver, it is their hatred of their fellow man.
Peak oil, peak gas, peak coal bla bla bla. We have been in peak minerals for their fantasy since before it was their fantasy. These people are really bad.
China directly or indirectly controls a significant proportion of these available minerals. How much are they funding the green blob pushing the need for these minerals? They will have so much leverage, China will control the world without a shot fired.
“Hold my beer” – Chris Bowen (probably)
Graphene is the replacement.
There is one metal (there are more, of course!) this idiotic NetZero2050 concept CANNOT do without, and that’s copper.
Current global copper production is 24.2 million tonnes per annum (Mtpa);
Global copper Reserves are 880 million tonnes (Mt);
And to build the wind turbines, solar panels, increase grid sizes by 3-fold, build the batteries for EVs, and the massive batteries for 28 days of power buffer storage for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, 6.16 BILLION tonnes of copper must be produced between now and 2050.
Even if the Reserves were there – they’re not – to produce that amount of copper at current rates of production would take . . . 254 years!
Or, if the Reserves were there – they’re NOT – the rate of global annual copper production would have to be increased this minute-overnight-by tomorrow morning from 24.2Mtpa to 241.6Mtpa. That’s an instantaneous increase of 998%!!
But let’s be utterly stupid for a very brief moment and suggest that an instantaneous increase in copper production from 24.2Mtpa to 241.2Mtpa would be possible. Well, that would actually result in global copper Reserves being depleted in . . . LESS THAN 4 YEARS!!
Apart from the obvious insanity of the concept so starkly demonstrated by the figures above, here’s a bit of mining engineering reality:
From Resource (mineralised deposit) discovery – which takes years of prior painstaking geological exploration work in itself – to operating producing mine is, AT BEST, a 15 year exercise.
NetZero2050 . . . is NOT going to happen.
And isn’t it utterly amazing that this brainlessness was embarked upon without even thinking about testing the feasibility of the concept to at least the level of a scoping study!!
(Figures from Dr Simon Michaux, Finland Geological Survey. Dr Michaux is a Geologist, a Mining Engineer, a Mineral Processing Engineer, and a Physicist.)