last highlighted date: 2024-03-11
Highlights
- But – as many people rightly point out – the minerals needed to transition to technologies such as solar, wind, and electric vehicles – aren’t equally distributed either. They’re concentrated in a small number of countries. Concentrations of processing capacity are even more intense. China completely dominates the processing of minerals such as graphite, cobalt, lithium, and rare earths.
- Aren’t we just walking into another energy security disaster? Swapping fossil fuel crises for mineral ones?
- Note: question
- With solar or wind, the fuel is the sun and the wind.1 Other countries cannot block the sun. Sure, they can cut off your access to minerals to build more panels or turbines, but they can’t touch the ones you already have. A hike in prices might slow down your investments in new energy projects, but your existing grid could stay as it is for decades.
- Vaclav Smil said (Materials and dematerialization) that 75 per cent of Aluminium extracted in history is still in use.