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welcome everybody to Mere talk my name is kaisa Fern and I'm the director of communications at Mir we are really glad to be getting together for another mere
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talk today and before beginning I just thought since because of our topic that we could for a moment we're going to be talking about resources on Earth and for a
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moment we could just pause and consider all the resources that are part of our own lives our daily lives our lives here on the on the planet
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today we are going to be hearing from our guest speaker Professor Simon Michelle professor of geometallergy at the Geological Survey of Finland then we are going to have a question and
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discussion period with a couple of people from various sectors and and after that we will open it up to audience questions so you will be able to put those
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questions into the chat uh before we begin I'd like to give you some updates about Mir we are working to set up
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a mirror and cryosphere experiment and we would be very grateful for any donations that you can make to support the shipping of the experimental materials which include mirrors and
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other devices so to donate you can go to mir.org forward slash donate and we are very grateful if you have any questions or want to be in touch you can always email community
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near.org here at Mir we are very cognizant about the issue of feasibility energy and material requirements so in that Spirit today Professor Simon Michelle will be
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talking about the feasibility of going off fossil fuels and I'm going to first talk to you a little bit tell you a little bit about Simon foreign associate professor of geometallergy at
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the Geological Survey of Finland in the circular economy Solutions unit he has a Bachelor of Science in physics and geology and has a PHD in mining
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engineering from Julius krutchnitz mineral Research Center at the University of Queensland his long-term objectives include the development and transformation of the
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circular economy into a more practical system for the industrial ecosystem to navigate the twin challenges of the scarcity of Technology minerals and the
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transitioning away from fossil fuels if anybody has any questions while Simon is presenting then you could send them along to Bud in the chat and Bud will be
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showing up as the co-host so Simon we're so grateful to have you and uh thank you thank you for coming you're welcome hello
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so yeah it's very nice to meet you all uh the Mia platform sounds amazing uh it's a very interesting uh um ideas you're working with so I'm going to show you today a summary of
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two pieces of work would you like bookends the mineral Supply challenge to phase out fossil fuels the origin of this work was a simple question my manager posed me over a cup of coffee
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of how does the European Union Source minerals to to Source the mineral supply for the gigafactories that Europe's going to build how much minerals and what kind
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and where and when I started doing this work it became apparent that the basics hadn't been done so I went and did them myself but before we get to the work I'm going to show something that I've been developing for
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some time to show that the change is in fact happening now that this is not a uh theoretical thing that might happen in our future all right so what you're looking at here is all the metals that the World Bank uses
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to track the health of the industrial system the base Metals the precious metals and oil gas and coal and so what I've done here is taken the data as far back as I can get which was 1960 in a
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month by month basis and I've overlaid them by indexing each curve to the number 100 and December 2001 and so everything was a reference point to that and so the idea of doing that is to
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show periods of relative stability and so prior to 2005 things are relatively stable with the exception of the 1979 Iran oil embargo
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but after 2005 that happened something blew out now I make the case that this blowout started a chain reaction that started in the oil industry now that put a strain on the rest of the
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system and that later created the global financial crisis what we call the GFC now the largest economic correction since 1929 was not enough to address whatever the problem was
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and so that volatility is still there so whatever that was it is still there the purpose of this chart is to show that this is not an abstract thing that might happen 50 years from now
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or we're discussing something in theory this is an observation that the change started 17 years ago we're in the change now right so here's the first piece of work
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that uh was put together this was the assessment of the extra capacity required Alternative Energy electrical Power Systems to completely replace fossil fuels that is when you how do we replace the existing system
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that we've got around it no more Chit Chat no more discussion we will now do it so what I first did is well what was the physical task done industrially by fossil fuels and determine the useful work done so
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the true scope with the understanding that every Energy System has an energy efficiency so once we had that assemble the non-fossil fuel technology that we could get at the time uh what's coming off the market we have
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to do this now so it's commercially available now summed it all together and calculated the extra quantity of electrical power we will need now the first generation of work was
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um if we were to expand the new uh the existing non-fossil fuel mix in 2018 up to the need amount how many fossil fuel power stations could be needed the second generation of work was to use an
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energy split that the iea has recommended in 2022 so in this report we have the number of vehicles by class number and size of batteries and understand you when you'd use an electric vehicle and when you'd use a
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hydrogen fuel cell estimates of the maritime shipping and the rail systems in both Electric uh Battery Systems and in hydrogen fuel cells
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and estimates of what we would need to do to phase out fossil fuels for things like gas and coal power generation I examined the concept of expanding the nuclear power plant Fleet
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and the possibility of using biofuels if so where and Plastics and fertilizers so what this report does was tried to catch everything in but it did not catch the fossil fuels consumed by industry
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directly to generate heat for manufacture and that accounts about half the 60 of coal and about 40 of gas so what we have here the numbers I'm about to show you are not only
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conservative but they're just simply too small so what would it take to replace the system now assuming we're going to move as fast as we possibly can to phase out fossil fuels and implement
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new technology like solar panels and wind turbines the faster we do it uh it and it's going to be so difficult to actually predict what that will be five years from now we'll have for example but there comes a point
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when the existing system is fully replaced when you walk down the street all the cars and trucks you see will not be powered by fossil fuels anymore all the power that is generated that
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comes on the lights in your computers is no longer fossil fuel generated so what is that system and then once we reach that point well okay we'll settle into a more stable growth or so we would like to think so my report was to model that
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system presumably it's in our future now the European Union in 2017 committed to 100 done by 2030. well that's what they would say in meetings they formally committed in
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Parliament recently uh a year or two ago I suppose it was with 30 will be done by 2030 or 30 of what and it turns out not really many people have actually thought on these terms
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foreign so what's the true scope to phase at fossil fuels so I looked at the existing transport Fleet in 2018 cars trucks trains planes automobiles
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aircraft I did this for the United States Europe European Union as in the E28 eu28 China I mapped the Chinese government
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that was an experience and the fourth calculation was the global large so there are four calculations running in parallel what I'm showing you today is the global calculation and that gave us the number of units
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required batteries and what have you now in 2018 84.5 percent of global primary energy was still fossil fuel based less than one percent of electric
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vehicles of a passenger vehicles sorry uh um non-fossil fuel the majority of the system has still be yet to be manufactured and as that is
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the case it cannot be recycled you cannot recycle what something hasn't been built yet so this is a mining problem for the first generation it must come from mining and there was the required power grid
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expansion and that led to the required power storage to manage in intermittent Supply and that has proven to be a a sore point in um on Twitter in particular uh how big must that power
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storage be and uh my numbers are much larger than anyone else's and that is having implications if you couldn't be bothered reading the report fair enough just read this little black box current plans are not large enough in
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scope of the task force is much larger than current Paradigm allows for Baseline calculation went like this when I first started this I asked the basic question how many vehicles were
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there in the world and I couldn't find a single report that actually had defendable answer to that so I actually did the work myself and this is a very crude estimate it's out of date 1.4 billion Vehicles travel a little under
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16 trillion kilometers the real number is probably close to 1.5 it's it's a it's a crude estimation but it was the best I could do [Music] now because everything was electric and
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everything was calculated as hydrogen as well I was able to do some interesting comparisons so let's compare Electric Vehicle Systems against hydrogen fuel cells and what I found was
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the EV system had a battery Mass 3.2 times the size of the hydrogen fuel cell tank but so it could go 3.2 times further or
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last 3.2 turns longer if you had a hydrogen fuel cell right so and that was just a as it sort of came out but if we're not going to use natural gas to make that hydrogen hydrogen is an energy carrier not an
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energy source so we required two and a half times the electricity to make that hydrogen compared to charging the equivalent electric vehicle battery so you put those two together and we get this
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all short range transport should be Electric Vehicle Systems anything that stays in a city or has a range of say 100 kilometers I don't know what the real number is for that range that's an engineering calculation to be done by others but all passenger cars
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commercial Vans delivery trucks 1.39 billion Vehicles they'll do 14.25 trillion kilometers in a year now here's the important part to do that we need 65.19 terawatt hours of
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batteries now all other studies I've seen have that num the number of batteries looked at is in gigawatt hours I'm terawatt hours I think what's happened here is other
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Studies have misdiagnosed the size of the global Fleet of vehicles they're not including trucks they're not including trains or Maritime shipping at all but it's just not there
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and all long-range transport should be hydrogen fuel cells all the big semi-trailer Class 8 hcv trucks uh any rail transport that goes between cities that does Freight anything that's
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a diesel locomotes now be hydrogen and the entire Maritime shipping Fleet now to be understood all of these things can be electric vehicle the engineering does exist this is a straight Logistics efficiency cut it actually makes more
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sense efficiency wise if everything long range is hydrogen fuel cell and everything's short range is electric it's not a question of engineering viability we will need 200 million tons of
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hydrogen for that hydrogen economy so this is the electric vehicle Fleet and that's the amount of power we will need to charge the batteries across one year so to phase out other industrial
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applications like gas and coal power generation heating of buildings and the coal-fired steel manufacturer into something else we will need a little under 20 000 terawatt hours
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the hydrogen economy that number of vehicles uh travel that distance and we'll need that amount of hydrogen but we won't produce it and we'll need that amount of power
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so I looked at biofuels biofuels could be the most sensible way to keep the aviation industry going it could be the only way to keep the Plastics industry going with bioplastics also our food and fertilizer almost
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certainly have to be sourced organically which is all feedstock from the environment but at the moment we're actually over our skis already so a sustainability audit that looks at these things directly with both economic
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sustainability and biodiversity sustainability and a bridge between the two has to be embedded in that study and right now that doesn't exist and so there was a great big dirty great big question mark over what can or
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should come from biofuels so now I'm going to come to the energy split that in um 2022 Arena releases very nice report where they made a prediction in 2050 of
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what the energy split would be most of its wind and solar have a little bit of gas there so I took that out and I used some assumptions from my previous work and so I had an energy which is on the
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slide after this so given that energy split let's put our Energy Systems together we need 36 000 terawatts terawatt hours in a year now according to that split we need 586
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000 new non fossil fuel power stations of average size put this in context in 2018 the fleet was 46 000 station that is the difference in energy return and energy invested I collected some
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statistics of what each system actually did um and I systems I could run some statistics on it so what did the average system do not what they promised or they actually did
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and so you apply that that split and you get this amount of um stations of average size now a lot of this is not practical but if we're to hit that Target according to those splits that's what we
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need to do the basic outcome of my work is the current plan is a crap plan and we need a better one so I'm done for a moment think that I'm suggesting that that this transition
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won't happen because it not only must happen but these are the only options we have for now it just won't work the way we think it will now what's the elephant in the room is power storage buffer wind and solar
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highly intermittent right and um so that power storage buffer at the moment is believed to be battery Banks by our policy makers there are other Technologies but it's the battery Banks is what
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they've bet on so let's look at that so if we were to deliver a thousand terawatts uh um is powered over a year so these are all the systems that were in 2018 according to the global energy
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Observatory and I had a couple of thousand power stations across the across the world and all the different groups so Ransom stats nuclear is our clear best provider but it's the end of a very complex and expensive and
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vulnerable uh value chain I actually looked at expanding the nuclear power plant but the answer is it cannot expand fast enough to be useful and the large volumes are spent nuclear fuel at the end of it is going to become a serious
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problem if it does expand so the the iea believes the future is wind and solar now the
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if we were to replace 142 Coal fire power stations led to delivering a thousand terawatts per year 142 coal coal-fired power plants or 30 000 solar PV stations
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right the the sheer efficiency and power of fossil fuels is going to be tough to replace we have to face the fact that renewals may have a much lower energy return on energy invested ratio than fossil fuels and may
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not be strong enough to replace fossil fuels in the next industrial era and that implies that the not Renewable Energy Systems are not the foundation for the next industrial era they're a stepping stone to something else and we
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don't know whether something else is yet and if we don't get that alternative then we are just going to step into a very low energy future right so here are these numbers graphically
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the column on the left is what the power was generated in 2018 so they're the non-fossil pure systems we've got that's the uh stuff that needs to be phased out oil gas and cot and the column on the right is the green
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one this is what we need to construct to replace the existing system now we are talking about building an electrical system substantially larger than the existing one using very
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expensive and fragile energy context total power in 2018 was 26 614 terawatt hours across the year for the globe the jobs are charge the batteries make
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the hydrogen uh electrical power generation to phase out gas and coal heat the buildings and to phase out coal-fired steel manufactures the little sliver across the top
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so this is our job this is our Target so that energy split that I mentioned before from the iea combined with my work as in we're facing fossil fuel Tech completely I came up with this split
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and as you can sort of see uh wind and wind and solar take up the bulk of it and this is where the 586 000 power stations come from
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now let's talk about buffer spline demand must balance in fact it must balance to a millionth of a second if it doesn't do that we get what's you know power blackouts and power spikes
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and uh the grid tears itself apart here's a snapshot from Canada for a couple of weeks a couple of days sorry five days I think it is okay nuclear is pretty stable it can't move around
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but you might notice supply and demand demand does go up and down with a day and night cycle Hydro can vary a little but only a little it's gas the gas can actually
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um uh gas can actually uh turn itself on or off at will and deliver power pretty quickly now wind and solar were so variable that they're just not useful
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but it's the gas industry as the buffer and if we phase out gas we have no buffer and that's something that I have not seen anywhere on the literature mm-hmm
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this is wind a solar radiation in Germany I think it's in Berlin across a year there's simply less Sunray Radiance in Winter than there is in summer Factor life so not only is it varying day and
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night and it's subject to wind uh whether um being overcast and what what have you but you've got a seasonal variation as well wind ah
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in 2014 the UK Parliament uh did a study on wind and they found that power production was so erratic it could not be predicted and reliable capacity as a percentage of the maximum capacity of the of the grid
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was only about seven to twenty five percent but they couldn't even pin it down to that with better resolution so variations in power produced can last week since some cases months now looking at those stats that I showed
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before across the calendar year of 2018 solar PV was producing power 11.4 percent of the year and wind was producing power 24.9 percent of the calendar year
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both of those need a buffer or we just completely re-engineer our grid to allow for variable power so demand can function on a 48-hour buffer uh we could probably do that that'll
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that'll outmaneuver all the weather issues but supply supplies where you need the large buffer uh now I've actually in the literature they recommended uh there's several
00:22:49
things one was one month I selected four weeks for Just Wind and soul only not the whole system so it's conservative if you've got the time look at this presentation by Jan bloomprint he talks about the the practicalities
00:23:02
associated with um uh Power sharing and balancing of Renewable Power right so this is the second generation of work we've got this energy slip we're going to look at a buffer for just four
00:23:15
weeks of wind and solar we're not even going to use with solar thermal just PV in the literature they had 48 hours and that's obviously not going to be enough but they also recommended one month that was the best reference I
00:23:27
could find so that's the whole system I selected four weeks for Just Wind and solo but if wind and solar are actually 72 percent of the grid when installed a may not be viable in a large grid because at
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the moment all existing wind and solar is stabilized by something else like all the wind in Denmark stabilized by power from Germany or power from Sweden if the grid is so large what's going to stabilize it anyway so these numbers are pretty
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conservative but we need 2 000 terawatt hours that is actually 30 times the size of the electric vehicle Fleet in the simulation and that size number there is so large and that's what a few people on
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Twitter have got their hair on fire over but according to this very conservative estimate that's what we need so these are the number of systems that we need we've got electric vehicles and their batteries
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hydrogen fuel cells wind turbines solar panels and power storage batteries down the bottom this is our Target and remember this is just one generation all this stuff wears
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out after 10 to 20 years and then we go again watch this oh so in this report with the iea role of critical raw materials in clean energy they started to quote what is the
00:24:45
metal content of each of the different systems and there was a whole lot of these things there was um they also had Market check like these are wind turbines there's four
00:24:57
there's four model to wind turbine that that are going to dominate the market and so in the year 2040 the future what will dominate where both onshore and offshore so we've got an estimate of
00:25:10
what's in each one and then we've got the metal content in each system so you take these contents project them onto the needed number of turbines and solar panels that we've already got based on the previous work
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sum it all up together they also gave thank you very much all the battery chemistries so now in a situation for light duty vehicles and heavy duty Vehicles we've got an understanding of what's going to
00:25:37
be in the market in 2040 or the future this is what they think never never mind what we are now in the future what will we be and so we're able to develop things like uh this is the split that
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was actually worked out market share and then that market check and then projects into will the different chemistries this is uh Power storage and then leads us to a situation for by
00:26:03
chemistry battery chemistry we've now got a quantity of metals going into each one for the whole global system now there's about 36 tables in this calculation and all of this is going
00:26:17
into report if there's there's a paper in um there's some peer review at the moment but I'm actually wanting a report as well so I can actually put all tables in so it can be looked at so now we get down to this situation here for each task for example metal
00:26:30
content in all electric vehicle batteries according to metal we've got their full tons and then we've got all the different tasks for um the needed geothermal power
00:26:42
construction or the needed nuclear power plants or the needed hydrogen fuel cells I only did the um Platinum I didn't get a metal content for everything else but it could all be summed together right
00:26:55
so it's all done together the red is the total metal required EVS batteries wind turbines solar panels using a four week buffer for wind and solar only that's red this is a this is a um
00:27:08
log scale by the way the blue is instead of 48 Hours let's use 48 Hours only four weeks close to 48 hours that's not good enough I can tell you that right now the yellow is reported Global reserves
00:27:22
as stated in 2022. the black is what we produced in 2019 in mining now you might notice that the black and the yellow are simply not enough remembering
00:27:34
in 20 years we do it all again most cars were um not were ice in 2020 and 2018 Renewable Power accounted for four percent are power generation the vast majority of the systems not
00:27:50
being constructed yet and as such it cannot be recycled but it was all constructed next year let's say we it all just magically happened that it would not be till 2033 until large enough volumes be available
00:28:02
for recycling now I'm also involved in recycling um projects as well the technology in its current form is nowhere near good enough to recycle the volumes needed but at least the first generation must
00:28:15
come from mining conclusions current thinking is seriously underestimated the size the task battery chemistries other than lithium-ion should be looked at and they will be looked at we can make batteries
00:28:27
out of sodium or fluoride or zinc but we've got to do it we've got to develop the value chains actually do it instead of putting you know more less talking more wickety whack that's
00:28:40
what's required there so there's a projected mineral shortage um production rates and mineral reserves are not neither one or a good enough they're just not uh and this there are supply shortages
00:28:53
for nickel Cobalt and um lithium now and those uh structural supply shortages will remain the same at least till 2025 because no new mines are coming online and they take time to build so metals of all kinds are about to
00:29:07
become much more valuable and evolution of the industrial ecosystem is highly likely there's a coming Renaissance for the exploration of mining of minerals I believe and that's it
00:29:18
done wow and that is that is really kind of it's really shocking for those of us who
00:29:32
you know don't don't study this it's very surprising news um and I know that there are some people who have some questions for you from our mere Community who would like to ask
00:29:46
um yeah that would be great and the chats all right um yeah actually they'll be coming on I'll introduce them now and you'll you'll see them and okay
00:29:57
so Chloe Romero is a sophomore at Stanford University majoring in Earth Systems on the energy Science and Technology track and minoring in computer science her interest in
00:30:12
environmental issues started with her time at the NGO Fridays for future in her hometown of Montevideo Uruguay she hopes to pursue a career that works with climate change solutions that are
00:30:24
Equitable and effective we also will be having Kyle Kyle Kimball is currently a legal Master's candidate at vry universitat Amsterdam
00:30:39
focusing on climate-induced migration and legal redress for the global self he recently graduated from Tallinn Technical University with a degree in
00:30:51
European law and in his free time enjoys weightlifting and urban exploration and then finally Paul maidovsky is a full-time climate activist and political
00:31:02
risk analyst from Berlin previously he has completed post-graduate education at Fletcher School Tufts University and studied international relations in Dresden and
00:31:16
Beijing and also worked since in international climate negotiations and the Renewables sector in specific so welcome to all three of you and we're
00:31:29
looking forward to hearing what you have to ask hi hi Simon it's great to meet you um so my first question is related to how
00:31:43
efficient each energy source uh that is necessary for a clean transition is but more in relationship to their use of minerals so
00:31:56
what would you say is the optimal mix of renewable energy sources or clean energy sources from the perspective of which one uses all of these minerals and metals that you mentioned in the most
00:32:10
efficient way and also in relationship to how efficient their energy output is a simple question I like it um all right so
00:32:21
what I found very simply is when I lined up all the energy systems I found every single one of them had problems um every single one of them worked fine on a small scale when it was supported by a larger system somewhere else but
00:32:35
when it became the dominant system every single one of them um had logistical challenges so I think the entire green transition at the moment is based on the idea that
00:32:47
our engineering will stay the same as will our society so the first and most easiest thing to change is actually us not our Energy Systems as in that is we've got to rearrange our
00:33:01
society to a new social contract and our estimate to what we think the future will be are going to have to be very very seriously revised or they'll be revised for us by reality
00:33:15
right now the first task that we could do is not to to go for the energy systems themselves is to go for our technology at the moment the computer you're
00:33:28
looking through is dependent on clean power that sign you soil and stable the power grid that's powering it requires power to be stable 100 of the time all the time
00:33:40
and the grid is massive it covers thousands and thousands of kilometers and that's our technology at the moment great but I think we will be forced practically into a series of micro grids that has localized grids that will uh
00:33:54
connect sometimes they're connected sometimes they're not they can drop in and out which means our technology our computers for example can tolerate very very rough power they can tolerate
00:34:06
power blackouts they can tolerate uh things going uh up and down so a Technology's got to be geared to accept not only less power but less quality power because at the moment if we get
00:34:19
like a series of power Spikes all our computers would would fry so that's probably it may sound strange but I think that's our first job re-engineering our technology into something that can actually cope with
00:34:33
um a rough a rough power grid then have a very hard look at what we use power for most we're very wasteful at the moment so if we tasked our power to in a Maslow
00:34:45
hierarchy of needs um a micro power grid will run that hospital or they'll run that smelter and just that smelter and and and all the support systems around all the
00:34:57
houses around it to run that operation and keep it going and and so it's like Society will become event based and um results based whereas at the moment
00:35:09
we have this massive grid that just just has power running smoothly just because we need it with the idea that we have no idea what the power's being used for the next thing we need to do is get an information gathering system that
00:35:22
actually collects information in terms of what what we use power for and how do we expected more effectively and so then we can get to the ideal which which power
00:35:35
system is most useful Hydro is the best performer by far in terms of when you balance everything up but it can only be put in certain places like anything that is good for a hydro
00:35:48
system has one already we're not going to be able to find Sixteen thousand new Hydro sites on the planet um nuclear has its place but I I think the spent nuclear fuel problem is its Achilles heel
00:36:03
um solar I think is to is is a problem to make solar a solar panel the solar Wafers the Silicon waves need to be heated to 2 200 degrees Celsius at the
00:36:15
moment we use coke and coal to do that if we knock out fossil fuels a lot of our manufacturing capacity will go with it if we have to go to non-fossil fuel heating systems you can get to that heat
00:36:29
using um biofuels but that's putting more pressure on the environment and what we extract from it so I think solar panels will struggle but wind turbines may not so it may well be true that wind
00:36:43
turbines might be our best and most flexible system but the idea of actually sort of having a proper buffer behind each wind turbine may be impractical
00:36:54
um beyond that I actually haven't done the numbers properly on what will be more sensible Beyond those limitations I know that doesn't necessarily help you in the way you hoped but that that's as
00:37:06
far as I've gotten yeah that's more than helpful um I think that's all the time for me so I'll pass it on to the next person total degree by the way uh that degree you're doing very
00:37:18
nice very nice hey Simon pleasure to meet you uh red you read your work before and uh was just across the water from you very recently okay over in Thailand um my primary
00:37:32
question I feel is in your work you describe the need for a radically different system of governance uh to meet this challenge of mineral blindness and you sort of touched on that with the question of resource prioritization uh
00:37:44
my question would be how you see this system functioning and what attributes it would need for it to embody for us to even have a chance at a green transition Okay so we've got to change our
00:37:57
relationship with energy uh possibly also with each other um but also with minerals uh it all has to change and shift around that now if we're moving into a world where
00:38:09
there's just not enough to go around we've either got to agree to cooperate at some level or we turn on each other let's give War a chance which actually is the free market action
00:38:20
so what I'm proposing is see all all human systems in the past have allowed for growth or they dependent on growth so what we're now facing is unprecedented and all past Solutions won't work
00:38:35
so whatever we do next if it is to be successful something about it is going to be completely new so what I was suggesting is we take little bits from everything as a start
00:38:47
right and the idea was if we extracted resources and this includes recycling resources and biomass resources if we were able to extract resources and
00:39:01
then we agreed upon by each region we'll have a certain share and so this is the the collective thinking but then you've got the idea of free market which is the most efficient way of doing anything
00:39:14
so once you actually agreed on what resources go where then the system changes and then you have like a bottom-up approach where what we do with those resources uh it is down to innovation
00:39:27
so um from uh from a bottom-up approach we have our free market capitalist approach from the top-down approach we have a more Collective can we sort of share and and get along and remember that none of us really have enough
00:39:40
um and and to hold that all together as the social contract which agrees that this is the way we should do things we all have to be consent consensual but this is what we're going to do and this is why we're going to do it
00:39:53
so then we're gonna have to let go of things like consumerism and materialism that's going to hurt it's going to be ugly and it's going to be messy yeah I think a lot of us are
00:40:04
anticipating those Growing Pains or reverse Growing Pains uh thank you so much I think that's my time okay on well talk to me on on that tfl note
00:40:16
preparing for this call I had the impression you have one of the most interesting jobs um out there to be honest I think I I think um acknowledging the the last uh 50 years
00:40:29
after limits to growth this is kind of exactly where we are like what the the guys 50 years ago predicted kind of is happening around us and I don't think many people really connect the the politics my background is more in social
00:40:43
science so let me speak from that perspective um to what is happening in the geological and material world basically can you go into your three paradigms I think um when you were talking with Nate
00:40:56
Higgins um you mentioned the the three paradigms in in my words I would put them as they are groups of they are basically three different groups of people like good weather friends bad weather friends and maybe
00:41:09
weather forecasters yes you use different words um if you want to go into this there's now four groups um someone challenged me over a beer and yet there's actually four groups Society
00:41:22
will split into four groups that will interact the first group is what I call the cornucopians the ones who claim that there is no problem you know leave me alone give me my stuff
00:41:34
nothing will change now these people we've all met them people you cannot talk to you you simply cannot get through to them they will defend the status quo way of doing business as usual right to The
00:41:46
Bitter End up talk with these people so wave goodbye leave them to it and if they are successful learn how they did what they did right the second group is the group I
00:41:58
call the Vikings I don't have enough stuff but you've got stuff I'm going to take it from you thanks uh now we're seeing a bit of that at the moment at um at the geopolitical level
00:42:11
but I think it's good it's we're going to see some very human behavior why do the hard work of creating something when you can take it from someone else right that's group two I believe that won't last very long
00:42:23
but this will become apparent where that will perform well in the short term but in the medium and long term that's going to become very high maintenance especially when things like trust start breaking down
00:42:36
group three is um and the Vikings was the one we added so group three is the group of people who go okay the world has changed Society has changed
00:42:50
um never mind why it is or where we're going but now let's look at the practicalities in a short-term context like in the next season where do we get our food from our heat our energy how do we make sure the
00:43:03
people around us uh can live how do we make sure that Society won't tear itself apart in a in a like in a long emergency like like one damn thing after another uh so that's group three and they're
00:43:16
actually you know the salt of the earth that they're the people who will make sure that Society continues the fourth group I call the arcadians now the arcadians uh will look at how do
00:43:30
we make a genuinely sustainable society that is able to maintain their level of technology and knowledge we have now and things like human rights we all believe we have human rights and we're
00:43:43
all educated right that wasn't the case 500 years ago right and so if we go backwards we'll lose a lot of that so how do we maintain that how do we maintain a genuine high-tech
00:43:55
society that doesn't need fossil fuels has learned the lessons of climate change and has developed a more sensible relationship with the planet and each other so then you have something like the Venus Project but that might take 60 or
00:44:08
70 years to build that's not the sort of thing that is done next week so the arcadians will have to be working with the uh I call the realists group
00:44:20
three so group three and four are joined at the hip they will have to actually work together some people are actually working you know they will do work that only their children and grandchildren will see the benefits of
00:44:32
uh other people are looking at the Here and Now needs and so I see four groups it's just an idea this isn't a way of getting my arms around things but there's a whole
00:44:44
spectrum of Solutions in solution space that talk to those four groups the most high maintenance is actually going to be the first group who claimed everything's fine give me some of your
00:44:56
food it's just a short-term emergency thanks so much Kenneth ask um for half a sentence uh jump in for the entire um electric power analysis in the beginning
00:45:09
I would mention the potential upside risk of or positive risk um of geothermal um Technologies advancing if geothermal or other Technologies
00:45:23
are really pushed by political and Industrial power I think there might be a slightly more optimistic analysis than you've presented so far but otherwise thank you so much
00:45:35
I've got geothermal tripling in size um Helsinki is looking at having all buildings in the future heated with geothermal um so that that's a thing so
00:45:48
um yes it's going to be effective there is a very deep drilling sequence that claims that if they drill deep enough they can get really really hot uh steam out they can generate
00:46:00
electricity if that is true uh then yes that'll work but now think about the logistics of drilling so many holes so deep how long will that take and how long
00:46:13
will it take to construct the Power Systems to do it then put that up against our need for our existing systems to run smoothly and even like a bad weather year is
00:46:25
enough to actually knock us our stock market on its knees right so that new technology let's say that works and it may let's say it does it will not arrive in time
00:46:38
um to save our glorious stock market so all our systems are quite fragile so now we've got an economic problem and our industrial capability will go with it thus we will see the disruption and
00:46:51
the reordering and the social um uh contract now my work on that note was was written to be made obsolete it was written for the express purpose
00:47:03
of calling out what I call the that I was seeing coming out of Brussels and the European Commission they were making some spectacular predictions that were clearly not practical and so I actually took all what they
00:47:17
thought they were going to do and that was actually the scenarios that I developed these guys have their hands on future scenario planning and they're delusional so my plan was to
00:47:29
shock them out of that delusion and at least have a conversation like yes she said let's do geothermal instead you know or something else or have some sensible ideas out there none of that
00:47:40
exists at the moment oh God I think we want to give a chance for our live audience also to ask some questions
00:47:53
so if you have so I want to thank you um Kyle Paul and Chloe for your questions and so if people from the audience have
00:48:07
questions you could go ahead and send them in the chat to Bud and initially there are a couple of questions that came in about specifically about ocean mining so you
00:48:20
know what your opinion about ocean floor mining is um and the opportunity for more minerals and also ecological and Justice risks and there's a I'll just I can there's a
00:48:34
paper that's quoted about the legal aspect of ocean mind and Mining and someone else asked about the seabed Authority's power to you know does it make sense is there a need to resist
00:48:47
that what what actions should people take around that um so yeah if you have anything about that danger Will Robinson
00:48:58
so yes there are deposits on the sea floor and some of them are quite rich but mining operating under sea water at depth is really really tricky like it's
00:49:10
really tricky um it's not easy to uh in fact it's easy to operate in outer space assault Water Street corrosive then you have currants and everything and so the logistics of actually mining off the C4
00:49:24
again it can be done but it'll only come up in very small quantities we're not going to deliver 24 million tons of copper to the market a year right but let's say someone works out
00:49:36
how to do that well they can get so much metal off the sea floor now to do that they're talking about for example like something like an open pit or even an underground operation that
00:49:49
will stir up so much sediment and all clouds of sediment and it will literally kill off what's left of the sea like in a large region around each mine and for it to be useful we're talking
00:50:02
about thousands of Minds so let's say someone does actually work out how to do this the question should they do it is well how are they going to limit the
00:50:16
ecological impact of ocean life considering most of the ocean life at the Plankton level is already deteriorating and crashing
00:50:28
an ocean acidification is a genuine problem how do you think mining under the sea is going to go to deal with those is I I would suggest that we don't do it
00:50:42
for that reason alone yeah that makes a lot of sense we have a question from Let's see we have a pre a question from
00:50:55
Brent do you think concentrator PV or thermal PV would be more scalable than regular PV from a materials and energy standpoint have you done any analysis of
00:51:09
mirror manufacturing at scale not at scale not directly I do know I did look at an analysis of a CSP plant that actually failed
00:51:24
uh and that they they were not able to by the time they could actually get their operation to to to go they could not deliver on their targets that they
00:51:36
had real problems in scaling up and and delivering power there were a whole lot of maintenance issues involved and um the cost of operation was exorbitant much more than they thought
00:51:48
I think it's a great idea that the concept was a great idea but I think it's only half developed as in more needs to be done can it be scaled I don't know I actually don't I don't know I would
00:52:00
suggest the wrong question like instead of scaling it up scale our needs down and so if our needs shrink
00:52:12
and we instead of having like a massive grid that's got to be balanced you have a power grid office CSV plant that's actually tasked to one single Industrial Park that supports say like 10 Industries
00:52:25
that will work right so it says scale down what we need to match what we have yeah great um here's a question from Mark about
00:52:39
whether these forecasts are really theoretical or are they physically you know possible so that's a nasty question
00:52:50
right so what they are a practical it's a straight engineering calculation how many cars in the world how far did they go if they were EVS how much power would come off the grid at the end so
00:53:04
the size is practical the believability as in is this a sensible idea it very quickly shows that they're actually not realistic
00:53:16
and the whole purpose of the work as a show the current plan is a crap plan and it will never happen right and someone's got to come up with a better one I I presented the United
00:53:28
Nations last week and I said those exact words and then I showed up a chart saying showing that peak oil could be in our past currently peak oil is November 2018. we won't know if that really is
00:53:41
the date until we get to say end of 2023 um stop clowning around we need to be operational now and the existing plan has logistic
00:53:53
bottlenecks to just simply not viable so to answer your question it's theoretical as in I don't believe it will ever happen it's not practical mm-hmm
00:54:05
right and also it's based on the today's population or is it also based on the increased pop in increasing population on planet Earth it was based on 2018
00:54:18
population right okay right right and so the U.N predicts the power grid will be four times the size in 2050. right ho ho ho
00:54:29
yeah this is a wake-up call uh here's a question from Bud actually about uh ammonia it it is important to update a now analysis to ammonia as highly dense
00:54:44
and safe hydrogen carrier for use in internal combustion engines of All Sorts this is a game changer but that is as yet unknown in public circles do you do
00:54:58
you have any comment about that when I did my uh work a couple of years ago a lot of these things didn't exist or if they did exist they weren't defendable I needed something was actually defendable like a lot of people say that's not
00:55:11
practical unless I could get it off the market like when I the first generation of work that I did crashed because I was relying on on a lot of these what ifs right and so I had to go what was
00:55:22
actually commercially available at the time yes we'll come up with new ideas but each of those new ideas will come for example that will require a lot of ammonia how do you make that ammonia if
00:55:33
you're not going to use the gas industry uh so in other words the technology of using ammonia yes great good idea but what are the resources required to make it viable and then scale it up to usable
00:55:47
for say a task across the planet and so what would be the energy requirements and feedstock requirements to make that much ammonia
00:55:58
and how would you do it would you use uh um what I put forward is a very crude calculation and there's certainly more things we can do for example you could have a thorium reactor I love thorium by
00:56:11
the way uh thorium reactor is pure's job is to make hydrogen with the heat never mind the electricity the heat that comes out of a thorine reactor can be used to directly manufacture hydrogen
00:56:23
and we've got these big ass ships we don't need to put batteries in them we can go back to sale we've just got to scale down our expectations but our current expectations and strategic plans will do
00:56:36
nothing of the sort uh anyway so back to the ammonia I have read a few papers on it yet it looks interesting I haven't included any um um simulations in it I did one
00:56:49
simulation to show to illustrate the point and the people who need to get it have gotten it now they don't know what to do right and so the next work is now more solution based yeah
00:57:05
okay we have a question from Dr Tao actually from yay and so this is has a couple of different parts to it but the prohibitive material requirements you convincingly demonstrated seem to apply
00:57:18
for conventional batteries featuring relatively rarer elements like Cobalt lithium and nickel do you have plans to consider material feasibility of alternative energy storage systems such
00:57:31
as one the molten metal battery using metallic electrodes of magnesium and antimony with an electrolyte consisting of chlorides of magnesium sodium and
00:57:44
potassium two chemical cycle storage such as calcium oxide and calcium hydroxide hydrogen dehydration dehydration cycles and third
00:57:58
molten silicon thermal energy storage yes yes yes yes and yes and yes right so um at the moment this will surprise you that even after I presented this information after a year
00:58:12
in Europe they will not look at seriously anything other than lithium-ion chemistry they believe the future is lithium-ion chemistry in some form like all these new things like lfp uh batteries they
00:58:25
still require similar quantities of you know lithium nickel Cobalt manganese they're they're all the same elements now for the future uh it says we can make batteries out of all
00:58:38
sorts of things like there's a guy here in asanemi who's making batteries out of table salt it's like a version of the sodium battery but an evolution beyond that um I personally like the idea of the
00:58:49
zinc air battery or the fluorite battery fluoride as in what's in your toothpaste so my solution for the future because we've left it so late and there is a rare lesson in manners
00:59:03
coming for our Industrial Systems you know uh you know there's a there's a round of tough love coming and it would be funny if I wasn't living through it um so
00:59:16
my future Solutions is to develop something so simple that the average person could make it in their workshop so what if we were to get something like fluoride minerals and make
00:59:29
batteries out of that that we can actually put together and this guy I know has a lab where he's taking Industrial Minerals off the shelf and he's making batteries they're not very good batteries but the batteries here
00:59:42
mate he doesn't need someone from China to make them for him he's doing it right so we scale back our expectations of performance like a lot of those solutions that you rattle or sound I I haven't looked at all of them no but
00:59:55
they also sound very complicated like what is the complexity behind each one in terms of where do we get the materials from and where are they manufactured because most stuff is not manufactured here it's manufactured on
01:00:07
the other side of the planet and so we'll be required to develop stuff locally so we almost certainly have to become simpler and it is possible
01:00:19
right so so that list that you that you just said that that's remember was talking about the four different paradigms that's a list The Arcadian to be interested in right well I think I know probably what the
01:00:36
answer to to this is Philip asks how do you expect future mineral and or extraction rates will be affected by both declining quality of ores and the rising costs of energy to extract them
01:00:51
badly yeah um so uh hi Philip uh so what um we've got a series of Reserves at the moment but they're based around the idea that mining actually is used with fossil
01:01:04
fuels like all the energy like a power stations generally run by gas which is attached to a mine and that powers all the equipment and then we've got the truck and shovel Fleet which is run by diesel
01:01:16
so if we are going to increasingly poor resources we need more energy in fact there's a 450 increase in the energy consumption in the mining industry between 1973 and 2008.
01:01:30
so in that short period of time it's it's gone up so much and it will steadily go up so if we go into a non-fossil fuel world all of a sudden the technology that we've got at
01:01:42
the moment at least is not very good in terms of performance like they've got mining trucks right that are electric and they sound good but the metrics are performance like a
01:01:55
diesel fuel truck can run for 24 hours without refueling an electric vehicle truck lasts about an hour before it has to go and recharge right that like so it's like a PR this
01:02:10
is the start of the technology will it get better sure will it get better fast enough uh to know about that um so if we move into non-fossil fuel mining a lot of our existing resources
01:02:24
won't Reserve sorry or we downgraded resources and are just not viable and then we get to the point where all our rubbish dumps that are around us all of a sudden are much more valuable so what we call Recycling and Mining May
01:02:38
will merge into one discipline but but it won't deliver nearly enough metal to give us what we need right and so so that's that's what I'm saying is scale back our expectations on
01:02:51
all fronts in all directions and all things yeah yeah so then so Jamie asks what about the byproduct of the algae blooms as a
01:03:03
resource for energy okay I did look at that uh biofuels was the simple question was if we could take all the get um petroleum products jet fuel gasoline
01:03:16
Diesel and bunker fuel for marine and we we turn it into biofuel and I looked at using ethanol to make gasoline and jet fuel and soybeans to make biodiesel and bunker Fuel and the third thing I looked
01:03:28
at was algae and I was really surprised this this this came as quite a shock to me actually when I did it but the energy required to produce a portion of fuel of algae
01:03:42
was once uh it was ten times more than what actually came out of the algae it had a very negative energy return an energy invested ratio so someone's going to get that going so a lot of research a lot of research and
01:03:55
development and breakthroughs are required to make that viable much more energy is put in compared to what you get out and then you've got the problem of we don't have the actual space
01:04:07
in coastlines to make enough algal ponds to produce enough fuel to bridge in enough volume to be of use yeah okay well I don't think we're going to
01:04:22
be able to get to everybody's question today but um I have one or two other questions somebody asked Tom asked if you could direct us to some articles that present
01:04:35
this kind of information or in a similar form so if there's anything you could also just um send those to me afterwards and I can send them in the follow-up mailing or if you or if it's easy to post
01:04:49
something in the chat I just posted in a chat um oh Rachel Donald hello um I know Rachel uh so I just put in a YouTube of um
01:05:01
uh a a YouTube presentation I gave to the University of Queensland and that actually goes through a discussion of these numbers um as to other sources other people I actually don't know
01:05:14
um I I actually don't know uh um who else is doing this precise work a few people are alluding to the same thing like they've started to do uh to do the math associated with the amount of minerals
01:05:26
that we need but as far as they know no one's done work quite like this uh the question from Rachel was lfp does not require Nicola Cobalt so let me find out what actually is in
01:05:38
that those exactly um because um I actually had each chemistry to come together uh where's working files Metals final reports quantity
01:05:56
um so I'm actually in the process of finding out the metal content for each one um just bear with me for a second um so each one so lfp lithium-ion phosphate
01:06:25
and so that's got that's lithium I think an iron uh but that's only a part of the actual um market like in in the market you've got ratios of um
01:06:38
your lithium you've got all the NCA plus you've got the nmc series that lfp and you've got solid state and LSP batteries are representing only a portion and they're basically lithium
01:06:52
and iron phosphates um but the other chemistries certainly do require nickel and Cobalt yeah and so and so so I've actually uh went through and actually calculated that
01:07:11
based on those chemistries hi Rachel how you doing um Rachel does some good work by the way uh she does a podcast called Planet critical check that out um definitely okay we have a question
01:07:24
from Louise about what what um what about the amount of finite water needed to mine that will become non-potable after mixing it with acids
01:07:37
you had mentioned about the ocean acidification and the process of seabed Mining and all of that um but her question is is even you know a little bit in a different direction damn good damn good point so as we're
01:07:50
grinding finer uh uh finer and finer uh we are using more and more potable water and it's harder to recycle uh potable water is becoming a resource that's becoming a
01:08:01
problem I did not include that in my numbers I just just included just the actual metal at the end but I've got a whole report on the limits of uh linking the mining of here
01:08:13
we are mining of minerals linked to the limits to growth so put that in the chat uh so so what what what you've alluded to there is a real problem um and if we increase mining a lot then
01:08:27
we're going to hit that as a very real problem hey you got something from Rachel hey what's this here's an idea for you category something else as data and electrifying transport that you'll find interesting
01:08:40
okay business presentation I will look at that mode so yeah and so so my work's pretty crude it's a really really simple calculation
01:08:53
it's not rocket science and it's to make a point and there's a million Solutions out there but we're not doing them right we're going after the things that won't work well we have one quest one closing
01:09:07
question you know you're seeing that the system the whole system needs to change and how soon do you feel this needs to change I mean and what is you know what do you
01:09:21
see as possible we we should have started 20 years ago which means that would have been a more sensible uh comfortable thing I think it's not so much as when is is when do we get a shock
01:09:34
that we think oh oh maybe we shouldn't do that then hmm I think for Europe in particular this winter will we address rehearsal and all sorts of things that were considered taboo at the moment might be talked
01:09:47
about in the supermarket in a couple of months time uh now the the process is something like this first we've got to understand the true nature of the problem and all its moving Parts at the moment we will focus
01:09:58
on one thing only I I often talk to environmentalists who who will talk about carbon pollution but then I'll ask them some basic stats about species die off and they have no idea what I'm talking about
01:10:11
right right and and that to me is a far more serious problem uh so we need all all the moving Parts understood the second thing we need to understand is what are the limitations of Any Given system or solution we might
01:10:23
put on the grout for the future and then third for the first time ever we can start to make a credible plan steps one and two don't exist at the moment there's just guys like me you know
01:10:37
shouting from the rooftops here we've got a problem do something do something yeah well I think this is probably inspiring um inspiring people into to take action on this subject to you know tell other
01:10:52
people what you've learned today so we want to thank you so much for coming and presenting today Simon really appreciate everything you've shared okay
01:11:06
uh here at Mir we are working to help educate the public and also while we are working on a solution to the warming of the planet so we invite you to visit our
01:11:21
website and we are an almost uh 100 volunteer staff with just a few paid student researchers at the moment so we encourage you to make a donation if you haven't or even if you have to consider
01:11:35
making another one or making a monthly donation which is also possible uh at mir.org forward slash donate and these donations help to fund the
01:11:49
materials and sensors for solar reflect reflector field experiments as well as basic expenses for the researchers um so we thank you for coming today next
01:12:03
mere talk will be on Sunday November 6th so please keep that on your radar screen and it's really wonderful to see you all thanks for coming
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