‘Clean’ energy still needs mining, but there’s a smarter way to do it
The image shows a chasm in the earth.
More than 2 miles across and nearly 2,000 feet deep, the mining operation in a social media photo has replaced any flora that might have once inhabited the now barren landscape. Nothing but soil and stone is visible until the horizon meets the sky.
In an apparent attempt to disparage the renewable energy transition, the post showcasing the image wrongly asserts the devastation was caused by mining for lithium – a key ingredient in electric car and grid storage batteries. In reality, the post shows a gold mine and is one of a suite of false claims about lithium mining USA TODAY has debunked.
While the post fails to accurately identify the lifeless pit in the photograph, it does highlight a real issue. The renewable energy transition – intended to stave off the worst of global climate change – is causing a precipitous rise in the demand for lithium, copper, nickel and the other metallic ingredients of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries.
Those materials have an environmental cost, but the potential harms from renewable energy mining should also be considered in context, experts told USA TODAY.
There is evidence that mining for renewable energy technologies demands significantly less mining per unit of energy produced than coal or natural gas − and that the transition will reduce energy-related mining overall. And experts told USA TODAY that harm from mining can be substantially reduced if concerted efforts are made to reduce metal consumption and implement long-needed reforms to mining processes.
That makes renewable energy-related mining the lesser of two evils in the face of a climate change trend that officials warn is on pace to cause global-scale ecosystem collapses and mass human displacement.
“It’s sort of a dire moment. We have to act. And that’s going to include some new mining, but hopefully, some avoided future (fossil fuels extraction),” said Alissa Kendall, a University of California Davis civil engineering professor.
The trouble with mining
The history of mining in the U.S. is imprinted on the landscape, which is stippled with at least 140,000 abandoned remnants of hard rock mining operations. Forty percent of western watersheds in the U.S. have been polluted by mining, and contemporary metal mining is the largest single source of toxic pollution in the country.
Mining for renewable energy technology has the potential to perpetuate this legacy both in the U.S. and abroad, said Scott Odell, a researcher at George Washington University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“I am really concerned about the mineral demands of the clean energy transition,” he said. “I do worry that we aren’t thinking about it enough.”
Odell’s research focuses on copper, a mineral that will be central to the renewable transition due to its use in electric vehicle batteries and drivetrains, solar panels, windmills and power grids. Copper is largely extracted from open-pit mines, which, like the gold mine in the social media post, can be enormous.
In addition to devastating area ecosystems, pit mines expose local communities to imminent harm, Odell said.
When excavating a massive pit, mining operations often hit groundwater, potentially exposing the area’s water table (and local drinking water) to contamination. Mining operations also consume a lot of water – a scarce resource in many areas – for wetting processes used to prevent “fugitive dust” plumes and the transportation of metal concentrates through pipelines.
Even after a mining operation has ceased, toxic waste materials are often left behind in “tailings impoundments” – giant repositories that need long-term management, Odell said.
The 2015 failure of a poorly engineered tailings dam in Brazil released 50 million tons of toxic waste and mud that contaminated a river used by hundreds of thousands of people for drinking water. In 2019, another Brazilian tailings dam (owned by one of the same companies as the dam that collapsed in 2015) failed. More than 150 people were buried alive in toxic waste.
The risks and burdens from renewable energy-related mining are also set to be unfairly distributed.
In the U.S., the majority of copper, cobalt, lithium and nickel reserves are located within 35 miles of Native American reservations. More than 50% of current and potential clean energy-related mines are located on or near Indigenous lands worldwide, according to a study published in Nature Sustainability.
Odell noted the potential impact on these communities is particularly outsized given that they traditionally “didn’t have a lot of carbon emissions to cause climate change.”
Joan Carling, the executive director of Indigenous Peoples Rights International, told USA TODAY that metals used for renewable energy technology are already being mined on Indigenous land without permission.
“While Indigenous peoples fully support the transition away from fossil fuel as a critical solution, Indigenous peoples should not again be disregarded and only our lands and resources considered important,” she said.
Reducing consumption can curb energy transition-related mining
Experts told USA TODAY the most effective way to minimize harms from mining is to avoid it whenever possible. That requires changes to infrastructure, policy and cultural norms to promote the conservation of resources and shrink the demand for new minerals amid the shift to renewables.
“My fear is that we’re looking at the clean energy transition as a way to allow ourselves to continue consuming the same way we’ve always done and call it clean,” Odell said. The reality is that “we’re consuming a lot of stuff unsustainably.”
Kendall estimates the demand for lithium, a material associated with its own suite of resource depletion, pollution and social justice-related concerns, will reach more than 480,000 metric tons per year by 2050 just to satisfy the U.S. demand for electric cars. This is more than twice the 2023 global output of the mineral.
But her research also found this demand could be significantly reduced if transportation systems in the U.S. are reorganized to minimize dependence on car ownership. Decreasing the average size of EV batteries in the U.S. and developing robust recycling programs would also shrink demand.
Due to the car-centric organization of American communities and transportation infrastructure (and the past investments and policies that drove that organization), car ownership is a basic necessity for many Americans. A 2020 survey found that 80% of respondents who used a car as their main source of transportation reported they had ”no choice” but to drive as much as they do.
More than 50% in this group said they wanted more transportation options.
Kendall’s research team found that reducing U.S. car ownership by emulating the public transportation systems and pedestrian-friendly infrastructure of some European cities could slash annual EV-related lithium demand by around 40-70% by 2050. This strategy would also reduce U.S. CO2 emissions more quickly because public transit can be built up and electrified much faster than the private car fleet, she said.
Kendall emphasized that these benefits can be achieved even with a significant number of cars still on the road. Her research assumes, for instance, that car ownership rates in rural areas would remain largely unchanged.
But old habits die hard. While heralded as landmark climate change legislation, the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act explicitly allocates a minority of its surface transportation-related funds to public transit and passenger rail, according to advocacy group Transportation for America.
Under the Act’s provisions, states are permitted to spend additional money on public transit even if the funds are not specially earmarked for this purpose, but, even so, infrastructure law-related spending on highway resurfacing and expansion has outpaced public transit spending by $44 billion thus far, according to the group’s analysis.
This is the wrong direction when it comes to reducing mineral demand, according to Odell.
“At an individual consumer level, it makes sense for folks to be buying electric vehicles,” he said. But by investing in new highways, “We’re locking ourselves in for another, probably, two generations of folks who are going to have to buy cars. And that requires a lot of metal.”
An additional strategy for reducing lithium demand is to manage the size of EV batteries in the U.S., Kendall said.
In 2022, the sales-weighted average battery size for “small battery” electric cars in the U.S. was around 60 kWh – almost twice as large as small battery vehicles in the U.K., France and Germany, and more than twice as large as such vehicles in China.
Big batteries satisfy the U.S. appetite for cars that are also much larger than the global norm, Kendall said. They also reflect American concerns over limited EV charging infrastructure, as people “feel like they need longer-range (larger) batteries because they don’t have confidence they can stop and charge somewhere.”
For that reason, the development of a robust U.S. charging network could also help reduce lithium demand, according to Kendall.
‘Urban mining’ reduces need for new mining
Limiting the impact of a renewable transition means not just accepting staggering metal demand projections at face value and then starting to dig, Amanda Maxwell, a director of strategy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told USA TODAY.
Instead, “We should say, ‘Today the demand for copper looks like it will increase 50% by 2040. What can we do to bring that down so that we don’t need 50% more copper per year in 2040?’”
That means not only altering consumption patterns but also better leveraging metal that’s already been extracted. Unlike fossil fuels, which can’t be recovered once they are combusted, the metal components of renewable energy technologies can be recycled.
“We can really reduce the amount of virgin metal we need to mine just by using the old metal we’ve already got,” Odell said, noting that a lot of metal currently ends up in landfills. “We need to design our systems such that we have the capacity to recycle those metals.”
This process, sometimes called “urban mining,” includes developing innovative recycling techniques, building adequate recycling infrastructure and ensuring that consumers have a straightforward means to deliver their spent products to recyclers.
To help promote urban mining, products can be designed to be more repairable and recyclable. Additional research investments and policy interventions could support this objective, experts said.
Policy options include:
Proposed law would decrease harms from mining, advocates say
Even with robust recycling programs and significant changes in consumption practices, mining will still be necessary to drive the renewable energy transition forward, experts told USA TODAY. But new mining could cause less environmental and social harm if changes are made to conventional mining practices, they said.
In the U.S. and abroad, mining practices and regulations could be updated to ensure mining companies shoulder the financial burden of site maintenance and clean-up, Odell said. Mining permits could be contingent on a meaningful plan for site remediation, including the long-term management of tailings, and money could be set aside from the beginning to fund those efforts.
When Indigenous lands are involved in a potential mining operation, international Indigenous groups have called for the enforcement of “free, prior and informed consent” – the right for Indigenous people to decide whether to allow the operation and on what terms.
Odell said the U.S. could make the global renewable energy transition more socially just by increasing domestic mining operations so that Americans shoulder a more fair share of the environmental burden. To date, the U.S. has emitted significantly more CO2 than any other nation.
More: Can we count on renewable energy? Four ways wind, solar and water can power the US
While ecological harm from mining is unavoidable, policy designed to reduce the negative impacts of domestic mining has already been proposed, Jordan Brinn, a clean energy policy advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told USA TODAY.
Hardrock mining on U.S. federal lands is still governed by a law that was passed in the late 1800s, she said. This law does not require hardrock mining companies to pay for minerals extracted from federal land and also “fails to direct mineral exploration and development towards areas that are appropriate for development and away from sensitive resources,” a 2023 analysis from multiple federal agencies reports.
However, the Clean Energy Minerals Reform Act, an update to the old mining law, was introduced in the House and Senate in 2023. Its mandates include royalties for mineral extraction on federal land, dedicated revenue streams for remediation of current and past mining operations, stronger environmental standards and consultations with tribal entities impacted by potential mining projects.
The legislation has not been passed in either chamber, but Brinn is hopeful that concerns about renewable energy transition-related mining will help spur an overhaul of mining practices that have remained unchanged despite decades of activism.
“I think another positive way to think about this electric transition, especially the electric vehicle transition, is no one’s paid so much attention to mining in so long,” she said. But now, “In the clean energy industry, there’s a lot of attention being paid to mining. I say this is a positive thing. This could be the catalyst for the mining reform that’s needed to happen for literally 150 years.
“Because if we stopped making EVs tomorrow, the mining industry is not going away.”
