The International Energy Agency, the world's pre-eminent source of energy information for governments, has entered the political debate over whether the U.S. should spend trillions of dollars to accelerate the energy transition favored by the Biden administration.
The IEA's 287-page report released this month, "The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions," is devastating to those ambitions.
The IEA assembled a large body of data about a central, and until now largely ignored, aspect of the energy transition: It requires mining industries and infrastructure that don't exist.
The IEA finds that with a global energy transition like the one President Biden envisions, demand for key minerals such as lithium, graphite, nickel and rare-earth metals would explode, rising by 4,200%, 2,500%, 1,900% and 700%, respectively, by 2040.
As the IEA notes dryly, the transition is a "Shift from a fuel-intensive to a material-intensive energy system." That means a shift away from liquids and gases whose extraction and transport leave a very light footprint on the land and are transported easily, cheaply and efficiently, and toward big-footprint mines, the energy-intensive transport of massive amounts of rocks and other solid materials, and subsequent chemical processing and refining.
In what may become the understatement of the decade, the IEA concludes that such long lead times "Raise questions about the ability of suppliers to ramp up output if demand were to pick up rapidly." The conditional "If" is a discordant qualifier given the IEA itself has endorsed, and nearly all its member states have already pledged, a rapid transition.
The clear consequence is that "Deployment of clean energy technologies is set to supercharge demand for critical minerals."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-not-so-clean-energy-transition-11620752282?mod=hp_opin_pos_3
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