Mark Mills: The energy transition delusion: inescapable mineral realities 

Interesting that this “green transition” in Norway is mostly funded by oil and gas sales. It also validates what I’ve said for decades: Being “green” is a luxury of being “rich”. If anyone doesn’t believe that they only need visit a Third World country and see what priority is given to a clean environment.

Ironic that Norway's push to clean is funded by oil and gas!

This presentation should be given to the environmental classes in all of the universities, colleges, and school in the US. Thku very much.

Every politician in America should be required to view this presentation. Aspirations for no internal combustion engines after 2035 (California) are great, but then reality set in.

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

Excellent. Finally somebody pointing out that our puny human economic ideas will not bend the realities of nature just because we wish it really hard.

I want to hear more from this man. He speaks a great deal of sense.

Excellent. Thanks very much. This is important for us all to know.

What an interesting lecture by an excellent presenter, as a Brit it is heartening to see an American of the old school, charming educated and well mannered, more of that please and less of the film industry media style people we often see these days who I do not appreciate.

Appears to be an “inconvenient truth”

Speech title, “How I Invalidated Al Gores Life in a One Hour Speech”.

Thanks for the great work you do.

Given the importance of the data presented, I would appreciate legends showing what the various colors and line types or bars indicate. It is challenging to both listen to the auditory information while looking at something that is vague.

What bothers me about this situation is the fact that the news and media are all going about a recession which is understandable due to the war and pandemic but still the same media still publish articles about folks in the same economy pulling off hefty 6figure profit(Averg. 200k in barely 8weeks) in this downtrend how is that possible?

It is always a pleasure to listen to intelligent people. I have learned a lot.

This needs to be briefed to both houses of Congress.

Brilliant presentation, being in the industry, this is a very sound energy evaluation of our condition. Thank you.

This is just one of many great analysis that are showing up on the challenges we face.... If you understand this presentation and aren't moving to a farm and getting skills to grow food and supply your own energy you didn't understand what he is saying....

If built in obsolescence was abolished in a sustainable product initiative the demand on raw materials would be hugely mitigated.

I already had an outline of understanding through being fortunate in getting in front of other quality presentations and articles. Now with Mark Mills presentation I feel as if I have reached the level of understanding that is necessary to quell the absurd goals set by our 'political leaders and the many idiotic industrial influencers or leaders'. Thank you Mark, your presentation skills through your stance, tone and information deliver and easy to absorb summary with detailed explanations. Undoubtedly, a formidable presentation.

An excellent presentation.

Fantastic presentation. Thanks :-)

Norway has a population of 5.4M and 1.3M live in Oslo alone so much of the land is unhabitable because of mountains and cold. Only 3 percent of Norway's total area is arable land, and 30 percent of this can be used for grain production and vegetables. The rest of the area can only be used for grass production. This means for a small population infrastructure costs are small compared to say Germany which about the same size which has a population of 84M and 51% arable land. it looks great but its a microcosm not transferable to other places.

Gee, someone actually speaking the truth. My goodness.

The interesting fact he gave at the introduction about Norway's energy system I felt needed to be expanded on a little more. Their vast majority of renewable electricity is generated via Hydro power, & virtually none is with Wind & Solar! That is the reason it is so cheap in comparison to Wind & Solar in other countries such as the UK! as was indicated Hydro dam schemes last for at least 4 times the average Wind or Solar farm and are at least 4 if not 5 times as efficient! Also Norway exports well over half of its Oil from the North Sea and that feeds their "Wealth Fund" making them the richest per head of population by a massive margin, in the world!

It will be interesting to revisit this in a few years

Thorium MSR.........its the only answer. At one of the THEAC conferences, resource experts discussed that as planned for the EV and Renewables targets, that 400 million tons of refined copper metal would need to be produced in the next 27 years. Not including gigantic quantities of Lithium,Nickel,Cobalt and rare earths. Total environmental destruction,economic destruction and a treadmill that leads to one thing.......collapse of civilization.

Outstanding talk and presentation. Thanks for posting.

Looking at this as a first principles thinking is such a powerful and welcome analysis. The fact that Mark does this with eloquence and clarity only adds to the message. Excellent presentation.

Really high level presentation - thanks.

Amazing lecture

I don't think I've ever seen a review of resources that's as free of political bias, as this is. Finally, I feel I'm being given adequate data, on which to make a viewpoint.

God Bless you, Sir! You have presented this topic in a clear and rational manner. Thank You.

Ignores the volume of cobalt used in petroleum refining, the massive electricity requirements of petroleum refining, opportunity (loss) costs, economies of scale, manufacturing improvements... and does not compare an energy transition with the alternative ("business-as-usual"). I mean _all_ the consequences. Yes, we'll need new mines, but it's something we know how to do. Many statistics presented here seem cherry-picked, with the least favorable trajectories given, rather than the spread, or likely future scenarios. Liberty ships, anyone? So is it all motivated reasoning? Surely not. But a lot of it is.

Great presentation

Mark seemed to confuse the annual rate of consumable resources like gas with the one off requirement for EVs. Evs burn electrons, while with gas you need to fill up your tank every week.

One point of contention: the projected 40x increase in mining demand assumes that our general consumption stays the same, i.e. that we - continue to buy new cell phones every other year and - a new car every 5 years - we are ok with having our cars sit around for 23 h per day doing nothing - that presumably our future construction machines drive around huge batteries rather than having power lines installed as a first priority on a construction site etc.etc. If we are serious about an energy transition, then this is about a whole lot more than replacing a combustion engine with an electric engine.

awesome presentation. thank you so very much.

First McKinsey and company says plenty of lithium for the transition to e-mobility. MIT says the same. Then look at the latest 60 Minutes story: “California’s Lithium Valley could power electric vehicle industry”. Add to that CATL is making lithium sodium batteries that will be in Chinese cars this year and confirmed by the car manufacturer. I’m all for arm chair hypothesizing - but that is all this presentation does - we will have more energy use in the future, and we already have cheaper ways to create it. But important to consider his arguments and do your research. Most importantly the US must not fall behind in this technology and the US military has made massive investments in green tech - it’s quiet, it’s distributed (not centralized - I.e. easier to attack), and it’s cheaper (not just drones but solar power of bases and EVs).

Simply an excellent review. I

Great presentation. This a sobering message. More should be presented about renewables energy transition vision: a) emissions from the 4000% increase from transition minerals consumption by 2040; b) the land area consumed by SWB deployment and mining; c) the impact on species; d) the water requirements; and e) the capacity of governments to undertake environmental reviews and permitting (ER&P) required through-out the energy transition value chain. Thank you Mark Mills and SKAGEN.

Great lecture.

Is anybody listening to this? Please let these thoughts prevail for the sakes of our progeny. Thanks Mark.

I've often wondered if we will have the resources for a clean energy transition. This has left me thinking that we can't. Mark Mills has clearly illustrated we can't. I believe Mark Mills has made the strongest case I've seen so far for a degrowth economy.

Excellent! The price of metals are very sensitive to supply. When I worked for Inco in 1979, a war in Congo caused the supply of cobalt to shrink and the price shot up to $30/lb.

Excellent stuff. Could you make this compulsory viewing for all the delusional politicians?

So...the argument that battery prices will decline as production scales is fallacious as input costs will actually rise due to organic constraints on supply

An extraordinarily erudite and sobering review of energy transition. Thank you...

Excellent presentation

Quite a few dramatic assertions without substantiation. I'm not an authority, but even with my limited understanding, I could see all sorts of problems and unmentioned possible alternative approaches. I appreciate that I am doing the same sort of thing. It's all very complicated, and I figure the market will make the ultimate decisions, although it is possible governments and vested interests may be able to distort market messages for a long time.

Fantastic. So well and so clearly put. A certain section of society will find this both annoying and worthy of censorship given that it clearly dismantles their religious fervour.

What battery would be needed to move those HUGE mining trucks around ?

This is the transition from fossil fuels to exotic special metals, not to water, wind, or sunlight. Also his observation of the transition from liquids and gases to solids is very sharp, I'm kicking myself for not seeing that sooner! This video is excellent thank you

Is there a place we can download the slides? These data are, by far, the best aggregation I’ve seen to date.

This is interesting. But one thing all of these Malthusian projections get wrong is the innovation that happens over time due to scarcity. The aluminum can has 80% less aluminum in it today than when it was invented in the 1960s. The upcoming shortages he predicts will actually will drive people to come up with new solutions that don't use nearly as much of the materials as the first versions of the products we use today.

Maybe 35 years ago, I was at a friend's house. Her dad had just purchased a used outdoor wood furnace/central boiler. He showed me the boiler and explained how it provided hot water for the house year round and heating in the winter. He said on average in the summer months, he would put one log a day in the furnace. In the winter months, he said that average increased to four. He had already calculated how many trees he would have to have for 50 years. Over the years, as solar and wind power became more popular, I often wondered if we don't lose sight of how much energy is "spent" due to the complexity of the "energy system" itself. The wood burning furnace itself had been produced "locally" using a relatively--compared to solar panels, for example--simple process. The total "energy cost" for producing and transporting the furnace, it seems to me, would be significantly lower than more complex solutions. And, I would imagine, the energy required for maintenance would be exponentially lower. And then there is longevity: that particular heater had already been used for years. It's still being used now. In a rural area where you have plenty of trees it seems to me that a wood burning furnace is, all things considered, a much more efficient and effective means of "energy transition."

As technologically-innovative humans are replaced by people with different kinds of gifts, the rate of scientific advancements could slow, even with the benefit of all the tools we have recently developed. Thus, demographic change could materially impinge upon the kinds of forecasts we have seen here.

Norway was already self-sufficient in hydro-electric electricity even before they discovered oil in the 1960s. The Scandes Mountains (where the name Scandinavia comes from) gave Norway , tiny in population, an endless supply of valleys to dam up and provide electricity. As far as Energy goes... Norway was born lucky. (I smiled at his reference to the sun setting early....in winter the sun sets much earlier in Norway ....and doesn't rise again for months up north in Svalbard.)

Thank you for a very thought-provoking presentation. I share many of your concerns about this aspirational technology transition. The question of whether or not we can ultimately make the math work -- from scale-up and management of supply chains to realizing compelling techno-economic value propositions -- remains to be seen. I do have a different point of view on some of the subtopics you covered in your presentation. I'll mention a few: 1) Batteries for electric vehicles (EVs): Techno-economic pressure is being brought to bear to expand supply chains for raw materials such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel. But in parallel, work is well underway toward EV batteries based on far more earth-abundant materials. One such objective, the development of sodium-ion batteries that eliminate requirements for cobalt and minimize nickel content, is well underway. In contrast to early-stage Li-ion battery development, the economic payoff for successfully developing such Na-ion battery technology is both self-evident and at least two orders of magnitude greater. There are no physical laws that dictate EV batteries must be constructed from scarce materials. Rather, each candidate battery chemistry has a host of potential nuisance problems that may or may not yield to highly focused research and development. Fortunately, there are many credible candidate battery chemistries on the table, and only one of them needs to succeed in a given application. 2) Li-ion battery technology: It has paved the way for early-introduction EVs, but as noted above, it faces very serious challenges with scale-up. But in my opinion, that's not the whole story. EV manufacturers are now talking about one-million-mile and two-million-mile Li-ion batteries, which would drastically reduce the cost of battery ownership for a typical 200,000-mile EV. This improvement in charging cycle lifetime was largely a by-product of R&D to seek out and eliminate parasitic effects (chemistry side reactions and damage to electrode morphology) that occur during rapid charging. Consumers want 400-mile-range EV batteries that can recharge in five minutes, and in response to that market pressure, the industry turned its attention to the rapid charging challenge. There were no physical laws that dictated the capacity-fade problems of early-stage Li-ion EV batteries, and some of the lessons learned about overcoming capacity fade in the context of Li-ion batteries are likely to be applicable to Na-ion batteries. 3) Rare-earth magnet materials (Nd, Dy): In both wind turbines and electric vehicles, rare-earth batteries are very helpful. But they aren't necessary. In EVs, induction motors can be used instead of permanent-magnet motors with an efficiency penalty of only a few percent. Likewise, the direct-drive generators used in modern utility-scale wind turbines benefit from rare-earth permanent magnets, but wire-wound electromagnet rotors can be used instead. 4) Copper price increases: In your presentation, you stated that aluminum can be substituted for copper when building transmission lines, but otherwise cannot replace copper. But aluminum can be used in a wide variety of power electronics applications as a viable substitute for copper. For example, large transformers are often built with aluminum rather than copper windings because of the resulting cost savings. Aluminum is also now being considered for the Litz wire windings of EV motors, and can be readily applied to generator windings (e.g. for utility-scale wind turbines), industrial motors, and building wiring (despite problems circa 1970 with troublesome aluminum/copper interconnections). There is no shortage of bauxite ore to make aluminum, and the required electrical power can now be provided at very competitive prices by renewables. 5) Recycling: Nearly any metal that is valuable can employ product design for recycling. Accordingly, once enough of these metals are in circulation, the demand for newly mined materials will begin to roll off. For example, once a million-mile Li-ion battery finally succumbs to capacity fade, the lithium metal inside the battery does not get "used up". This is in contrast to fossil fuels, where mining and extraction must go on forever. I'll leave you with this list of five things I view differently, but I can articulate others if that would be of interest. I would also be happy to provide literature citations and reference data for any of the above assertions if that is of interest as well. Thank you again for a stimulating discussion.

Excellent presentation, thank you.

At 11:15 "...2,000 to 7,000 percent increase in metals to deliver the same vehicle..." these numbers make no sense. He is saying that an EV must weigh 20 to 70 times as much as an internal combustion vehicle or that there is a gigantic amount of wasted metal in the construction of EVs. There must be something much more complex about the numbers he is quoting. They must be trying to account for the amount of metal invested in creating infrastructure to support the EV manufacture, but even that doesn't make sense because such investments are amortized over very large numbers of vehicles so the per vehicle cost of that infrastructure is small compared to the vehicle itself. No, he's failed to explain the argument adequately and I suspect that a closer examination would show that there are large holes in it.

The fundamental elephant in the room that's ignored is FUEL. The mass associated with fuel. Pumping it out of the ground, transporting it to be processed and then to fuel the engines that convert the thermal energy into work at 16-60% thermal efficiency. Power plants on the high end and things with tires on the low end. These last 10-30 years. Over their life, the fuel mass consumed...is SIGNIFICANTLY greater than any mass that goes into the production of vehicles/gen sets, whereas the fuel is free for the life of wind and solar generators...and economies of scale are working in the favor of these new assets, while, at the same time, working against their counterparts. Supply and demand of key minerals will likely limit the transition speed but simple economics will continue to play out this transition. It's not going to happen over night.

From one Queen's graduate to another....well done sir!!

Thanks for this very, very competent and researched presentation. I note that the VW study, after 27:50, makes its assessment on SUV comparisons. It would be great to see comparisons for a Golf or a Polo vehicle size. Most EV's currently bought today are far heavier than their "space-equivalent" IC counterparts. Smaller vehicles have tendencially been acquired by poorer people. EV's currently are beyond the reach of that lower income group. Rich income groups definitely purchase much heavier vehicles, which have a far greater resource, energy consumption and emissions cost. The whole issue of carbon emissions, Ultra Low Emission Zones restrictions (ULEZ in London), rare minerals and the scrapping of vehicles that could run for another decade, needs to be looked at in a social, economic and environmental context. Governments and scientists are not doing this adequately - and the consequences for the poorest in society, and for the environment, will be disastrous.

Can you please add to the video description above: 1) the name of the host who appears after 40:00, 2) the name of the debater who appears after 40:30, and 3) the city/country in which this event took place?

Excellent and thought provoking presentation, thanks Mark.

Excellent presentation, as I've always said the only thing "Green" regards an EV is its colour!!!

“Leading star in ESG”…In other words, a guy who convinces companies that it’s ok to lose money as long as you can feel good about it.

Interesting talk. For sure that shortages are baked into the cake, not only with lithium and cobalt but class 1 nickel and copper. It would be interesting to hear of any alternatives such as nuclear energy which didn't really get addressed as well as others fuels such as green ammonia (ammonia being zero carbon). The shortcomings with nuclear are the obvious cost overruns and the probably overblown public opposition, but they are most certainly clean, have close to 50yr life cycle (twice that of renewables) and provide gigawatt scale energy. There probably isnt enough uranium to build 10x as many plants (currently some 400 plants worldwide provide some 10% of total eneryg) but they certainly are a part of the mix we need. FOr instance Ontario the Bruce, and two other plants provide some 65% of the provinces total electricity generation. In contrast some 2700 wind turbines built since 2010 provide at best 7% of total electricity generation (an assuming at a cost of 3-4million each so roughly 10billion, Ontario probably could have built more nuclear capacity for that amount. And it is baseload and large scale. BTw the renewables still have c02 emissions, lots of steel and concrete and heavy equipment needed to build (so a lot upfront) but also a lot of storage is needed which no matter what it is will have c02 emissions. According to Sabine Hossenfelders video on renewables currently we have 34 gw of non pumped hydro storage. Worldwide there is 2.2 terrawatts of pumped hydro storage and what is needed if we use only renewables is 1 petawatt of storage (so 500x existing current pumped hydro).. Also the emissions of renewables with storage are some 350-407 kg of c02 per kwh and that comes near the lower end of natural gas energy generation (410-650 kg of c02 per kwh). Finally its worth looking at what the Japanese are doing, regarding the use of ammonia for power plants and possibly marine shipping as it is c02 free. Also liquid ammonia can be a hydrogen carrier as it has more hydrogen than liquid hydrogen but has similiar storage and transport properties as propane. There are already some 10,000miles of liquid ammonia pipelines in the US (Mostly for fertilizer purposes) Currently the world burns 7.6billion tonnes of coal - if we replace that with natural gas we can cut those emissions in half. Rather like the US emissions fell simply by natural gas replacing coal plants and no govt input. Contrast that with Germany's Energiewende spending 560billion in 20years and going from 84% fossil fuels to 78%. Had they built nuclear plants for that amount they could have been near zero and not dependent on foreign gas.

A superb lecture!!! Cheers from Australia.

29:19 Where EVs would potentially make a lot of sense is for things like taxis, food delivery vehicles, or maybe rental cars, that will get driven a lot more than regular household vehicles. At least where I live in Canada, age is a major factor in how long a car lasts, rather than miles driven, due to the corrosive impact of road salt. So if an EV Taxi can last 500,000 miles, which it might achieve after about 5-10 years of use, then that would be greatly reduce the CO2 used compared to regular gasoline vehicles.

Excellent. Finally, the real numbers. Why can governments not do this?

Excellent reality check. Thank you for the broad and deep review.

This talk imparts a good dose of realism. What's missing is acknowledgement of the supply constraints caused by global heating, flooding, soil depletion, ocean current alteration and ecosystem collapse. All of these will increase to the extent that we continue to burn fossil fuels and may increase at a geometric rate due to our exceeding tipping points. We are looking at dramatic and unavoidable whole system change. For that reason its too complex for any one person to grasp the whole detail and talk with any authority. We need a simple message. What needs to be acknowleged is that we will not be able to replicate society as it is currently organised. We need to save the best bits, in particular around health care, sanitation and sufficient healthy food. All man needs to live well is clean air, water and food, housing and physical security. If we reorder our expecations we can meet the challenge easily. Greed is our greatest enemy.

Regarding the emissions of EV against conventional cars current information has the crossover point at about 20000 miles and not 60000 miles which is a big difference. Does anyone have more information on this? There was a report commissioned by some car manufacturers which put the crossover at 50000 miles but that study was apparently shown to be false.

We all need to learn how to get by with 95% less stuff.

Amazing. More people should know about this.

Wow! Pretty scary stuff. Reminds me of my early 20's, when I read Paul Ehrlich's book, The End Of Afluence. I'm a techno-pessimist. I don't believe that human society, the way it is set up, is capable of using resources wisely. We have so many levels of privilege in our society, where the definition of privilege is much greater say on how resources are used and distributed. All too often, the ones making these decisions are the same ones who benefit most from them, while suffering the least negative consequences.

Excellent

Mark Mills, thanks I am mostly invested now in Commodities, Minerals, Fossil Fuels and so on.

Superb presentation of the difficulties in transitioning to clean energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by changing the source of energy. Excellent illustration on the efforts required to protect our environment.

Wow what a talk, many thanks! May not agree with the final final conclusions, but certainly points out the issues, clearly, of getting there.

Same folks that are fighting nuclear does not know about the mineral realities.

In other words, nuclearizing our power sector and hybridizing our transportation sector will take us a lot further than anything else.

China is already produced no hundreds of GWh of LFP batteries - no cobalt and no magnesium. Getting close to 300 miles EPA range from 75kwh packs. On top of this Redwood and many others are now ramping up battery recycling businesses: battery materials do not degrade (the ion intercalation rate decays but the chemicals are as new once recycled). Then there is the absolute limit of cars on our roads: very soo, most cities will valve without cars; mobility as a service will replace sole owner transport. The calculation is not linear.

Really impressive lecture. Thanks!

where do i get the presentation so i can see the sources quoted ?

per investopedia: “Unlike OPEC, U.S. companies are subject to antitrust provisions barring them from coordinating supply plans. Shale drilling incurs higher production costs than do the traditional vertical wells in Saudi oil fields. Shale resources also have steeper decline curves, meaning production from shale wells declines faster than from conventional ones. The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects U.S. crude oil production to peak in 2030-2035, while OPEC production is expected to continue rising through 2050.” I’m sure we are all sick of hearing about peak oil - but important to remember that fracking was disruptive technology that opened up new reserves in the US. Reserve information is published by the oil companies themselves and always validated by a third party engineering firm - any 10K filing from a publicly traded oil company contains this info. US alternatives to oil/gas/diesel are almost unlimited natural gas for CNG transportation or EV transport and Mkinsey & Co has said there is more than enough lithium to transition to EV tech. In the end, the consumer will weigh the cost/benefit and safety (price of an outlet in their garage with fairly stable electricity costs, to that of CNG fueling stations, and eurocap and NTSB say EVs are the safest vehicles on the road). The good news: no one needs to worry that they will be subjected to OPEC price fixing which regularly damages the budget of households and causes mass bankruptcies and job losses in the US OG industry.

Hi Mark, Could you look at the energy production potential of the new geothermal ‘Eavor Loop’, compared with the energy demand of mines, to see if these industries could use this more broadly adaptable geothermal system to reduce co2 from mining? Eavor Loops could be installed adjacent to mines because they do not require exceptional underground heat levels like conventional geothermal, nor do they rely on limited supply of rare metals. The capacity may not be there, but would be interesting it is, and I don’t have the background to run the numbers. The first Eavor Loops are currently in construction in Canada and Germany, and are a very clever, low key Canadian solution. And have there not been advances in small scale nuclear tech? Which could be a wise trade off until we dial down co2 and create other options, like a harm reduction approach?

Very good information that's left out of the main stream discussions of renewables. One thing I'd like to point out is that coal and wood are solids. So, it's not a 100% transition from liquids & gases to solids. One of the inconvenient truths for the Green movement is that coal will never completely go away. While it's possible to transition away from coal fired power plants, there are no green technologies that scale to replace what coal is used for in other industrial applications.

To summarize.... We've been sold a pig-in-a-poke. !!!!

Mark mills should be advising all western governments, his intelligence on these issues are second to none, what a fantastic presentation this was.

this should be required viewing for every politician responsible for energy policy. Mr. Mills has elegantly demonstrated the difference between politics and reality. The aspirations to move to an electric economy should be allowed to develop though market demand. The rational limits will be dictated by economics.

We also have to remember that the wind and solar plants that exist now are located in the most geologically favorable locations (we obviously put them in the best places first). So when we make estimates about future needs, we base it on a model that overestimates future performance. This is one reason Germany failed so badly at their transition, because they based future need on current output with no decay scale added. Doubling energy output will require more than double the current number of existing infrastructure, and that trend will grow exponentially. It's similar to the ore grade problem.

Dammit! Mindblowing...

Getting into commodities in a capacity similar to this was always my professional dream. Too bad it has all but passed me by. Nice job with the presentation.

Global transition investments may be growing, but are insignificantly tiny compared with what needs to be done. The latest podcast of The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe goes into this.

Interesting. deserves more than 25K views it's getting!

Car ownership is not as prevalent in Norway as in the US or Canada. Many of our relatives there struggle to pay to heat their homes and cannot afford to keep their cars charged.

My new favorite quote is "Crude oil is steak wrapped in bacon and renewable energy is lettuce!"😊