Mining for Net Zero: The impossible task

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Net Zero by 2050
The world aspires, as it must, to move away from fossil fuels to renewables for energy production and transportation as soon as possible. This notion is encapsulated in the United Nation’s mission of Carbon Neutrality by 2050. The roadmap for this is laid out in the recent Flagship report “A Roadmap for the Energy Sector” by the International Energy Agency (IEA, 2021).

This aspirational goal of Net Zero by 2050 has been signed up to by 137 countries, and in fact some countries have accelerated the timeline. Uruguay plans to achieve Net Zero by 2030, Finland by 2035, Austria and Iceland by 2040, and Germany and Sweden by 2045. The goal for vehicles is that 60% of them would be EVs by 2030. On August 5th, 2021 US President Biden set the target that 50% of the vehicles sold in the US will be emissions-free – not quite 60% but close.

These goals have been set by politicians based on policy advice, but are they achievable?

I would like to lay out just why they are certainly NOT achievable, and that most likely geoscience advice was not sought in setting these goals.

Perhaps politicians and policy advisors think that the minerals and metals needed to achieve Net Zero are lying around waiting to be extracted, but:

- many of our resources are being depleted,

- we are not discovering new major ones and bringing them to market quickly enough, and

- training of skilled geoscientists, particularly geophysicists, to find new resources in the 2030s and 2040s is in serious jeopardy.


Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge Prof. Simon Jowitt of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Simon kindly shared some of his material with me that I use in my own presentation.

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