Michigan Minds podcast: Finding the metals necessary for the energy transition

Morgan Sherburne:

Welcome to the Michigan Minds Podcast, where we explore the wealth of knowledge from faculty experts at University of Michigan. I am Morgan Sherburne, a public relations representative at Michigan News. I'm here with Adam Simon, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at University of Michigan. In this episode, Adam will be discussing how manufacturing the battery electric vehicles and other equipment necessary for renewable energy production requires more copper annually than we can currently mine. Adam, welcome to the Michigan Minds Podcast. Can you talk a little bit about your research and what you do?

Adam Simon:

So Morgan, thank you for having me. It's really nice to talk with you about this topic. I am a professor at the University of Michigan in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and my research and teaching focus on critical minerals, copper, gold, silver, rare earth elements, all of the minerals that we extract from the Earth and use for all types of technology, electric vehicles, solar panels, MRI machines, smartphones, computers, etc. And I focus on understanding how critical mineral deposits form and then use that information to help companies understand where to look to find new sources to replace the ones that we deplete.

Morgan Sherburne:

And can you talk a little bit about the necessity of the energy transition?

Adam Simon:

I'll start by saying that I think of two energy transitions. There's the energy transition in high income countries, so the United States, Canada, Japan, Korea, the European Union, Chile, all of the countries that belong to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. And our energy transition in high income countries is transitioning from fossil fuels, from natural gas, from coal, from oil to renewable energy resources. And that energy transition means that we build solar and wind and nuclear and hydro and other types of energy resources that do not emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The other energy transition is the one that is needed for global development. So if we think about the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, among those development goals is access to clean and affordable energy. And if we look at our 8 billion people around the world, there are about 6 billion people who want an energy transition from much less access today to access close to what we enjoy in the United States. And the magnitude of difference there is extraordinary. So for example, if you look at all 54 countries in Africa, the per person energy consumption per year is about one tenth of the per person energy consumption in the United States. So that's also an energy transition that I think sometimes gets lost when we focus on our own transition from fossil fuels to renewables.

Morgan Sherburne:

And would that energy transition, would that be involving renewables or is there a different process there?

Adam Simon:

Yeah, I think what people really would like to see for global development is that the access to energy for all people on Earth, it approaches the access to energy that we consider normal in the United States. And I understand that in the United States we have issues, certainly we have energy poverty, and we have people for whom energy is expensive. But the magnitude of difference between the United States and let's say, Nigeria, where population in Nigeria is expected to grow to 400 million people by the end of the century, in those countries, what we hope to be able to do is to allow them to essentially go from very little access to energy now and essentially jump past fossil fuels to using renewables. So rather than developing economically and increasing access to education and healthcare, et cetera, rather than relying on building natural gas and oil and coal, they can immediately adopt renewable energy.

Morgan Sherburne:

And in terms of the kinds of minerals that you study, how does that work intersect with these energy goals?

Adam Simon:

Yeah, so the energy goals require a substantial amount of new minerals in order to build out energy infrastructure. So if we think about the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, that calls for transitioning our power sector in the United States, so the electricity sector, which right now is overwhelmingly dominated by natural gas, still some coal, but coal is going away because of market economics that have favored natural gas. We still have a fair amount of nuclear and I think there's a lot of potential for increasing nuclear. So if we think about the U.S. and we think about transitioning our electricity infrastructure to renewables and our vehicle infrastructure, in the United States, we buy about 20 million brand new combustion engine vehicles a year. So every year, 20 million combustion engine vehicles roll off the lot and we want all 20 million of those vehicles to be battery electric vehicles.

And we want that to happen very quickly. At least when I say we, the Inflation Reduction Act wants that to happen within the next couple of decades. So if you look at 20 million vehicles that right now rely on gasoline or diesel and we transition those to battery electric vehicles, we need lots of critical minerals to do that. We need copper for all of the wiring in the vehicles. We need lithium and cobalt and nickel for the batteries in the vehicles. We need graphite for the batteries in the vehicles. We need iron for steel that is the structure of the car. We need aluminum that we can blend with iron. We need aluminum in the batteries as well. So we need lots of critical minerals on a per-electric-vehicle basis. And then if you sum across 20 million electric vehicles, just the amount of new minerals that we need is enormous.

Morgan Sherburne:

In a recent study that you published, you talked a little bit about the per-pound difference of copper in combustion engine cars versus electric cars. That was an interesting tidbit. Can you tell us that?

Adam Simon:

Yeah, so we published a study this year through the International Energy Forum, or IEF, and what we did is we calculated how much copper is required to satisfy the Inflation Reduction Act, the Paris Agreement, and other international agreements to reduce emissions. And if we look only at copper, which is the most important metal for the energy transition, copper is a metal that we need to generate electricity, we use copper to distribute electricity, we use copper to store electricity. So it really is the most fundamental metal probably after iron because we need iron to make steel for infrastructure.

So let's look at copper in vehicles. The average internal combustion engine vehicle that someone's driving today has about 20 kilograms or 45 pounds of copper in that vehicle, right? So if you think about going to the grocery store and buying a five pound bag of sugar or a five pound bag of flour, you've got seven to eight of those in your vehicle as you drive around Ann Arbor or wherever you may be. The average hybrid electric vehicle has 30 to 40 kilograms of copper. So now you're talking about 70 to 90 pounds of copper. So you're approaching the weight of a human. The average battery electric vehicle is 60 kilograms of copper. So now you're at about 130 pounds of copper. So to go from internal combustion engines to battery electric vehicles, you are increasing the amount of copper for every vehicle by a factor of three. And we want to do this within the next 10 to 15 years. And so what that then requires is the availability of that significant amount of copper very, very quickly.

Morgan Sherburne:

Do you have suggestions of how we might approach finding this amount of copper?

Adam Simon:

I think that historically the mining companies that extract copper and make it available have done a relatively good job of finding new copper sources to replace the ones that are depleted over time. Certainly mining companies have made mistakes, and I won't excuse them, but if we think about it only through the lens of copper supply, from 1900 through today, copper has just always been available. It's always been there. So if Ford or GM or Apple or Microsoft, if they need copper, they can simply rely on the market to provide that copper. And year-over-year, copper mining companies have been able to meet increasing demand. But over the last 125 years, the year-over-year increase in demand has been relatively small. I think over the last century, perhaps the largest annual increase in copper demand occurred in 1940 to 1941, and that was for wartime effort when the United States was rapidly building up military capacity to enter World War II, which I think most people would agree was a very good thing. And copper demand increased pretty significantly, and mining companies were able to meet that demand.

We're now talking about increasing demand much more than we did at the beginning of World War II. So mining companies globally, they see this, they're aware of this, they understand the various climate provisions written into legislation in the United States and the European Union and other countries. And copper mining companies have increased the amount of money that they're spending to search for and find new copper deposits. This is something they've been doing for at least the last decade. So for example, the amount of money globally that mining companies spend to find new copper deposits in 2025 will be probably five times more than they did in 2005. So they're responding to this increase in demand. The challenge is that the increased spending has not resulted in an increase in new discoveries. So over the same time period, what we see is more money is being spent to find copper deposits and fewer copper deposits are being discovered. And what that tells us is that we need new technology, new innovation in order to improve the success rate of making new discoveries.

And mining companies are also responding to this challenge. We hear a lot about artificial intelligence, AI and machine learning, ML, and mining companies have been employing AI and ML since before they became a thing to the average person. So they're hiring really bright people. There also are a lot of new startups that are employing new strategies, sort of thinking outside the box to find new deposits. In the study we published with the IEF, the good news is we estimated the total amount of copper in the Earth's crust across our six continents where we can mine, Antarctica's off limits, and we have enough copper, so we have more than enough copper for our energy transition. We have more than enough copper for the energy transition to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals. But what we don't have right now is the near term supply pipeline to achieve both of those. So what we need is we need to really think about how we allocate our use of copper so that it has the biggest impact.

Morgan Sherburne:

Is there any possibility of making up these shortfalls of copper in the short term through recycling, and then even in the long term, I wonder about all this constant production. Will we be able to recover copper from vehicles that break down eventually and things like that?

Adam Simon:

Absolutely. So your listeners may be familiar with this concept of a circular economy, and I'm pretty confident that a circular economy is possible, but that's a hundred years out in the future. It's not my lifetime. And the reason is that globally, we, collectively, use about 26 to 27 million tons of copper every single year. So million tons every single year. Of that total, mining companies extract, meaning that they mine fresh copper from ore deposits, about 22 million tons of copper per year. So we've got about 22 million tons that's mined, and then about four to five million tons that are recycled. And that recycling is extremely important. That amount of copper that we recycle, if we assume into the future that we get better at recycling, then we calculated by the year 2050, recycled copper could constitute about 35% of global demand, which means that mining still has to meet 65% of demand.

And that's because when we manufacture technologies today, whether it's a smartphone or an EV, the copper that we put in those technologies, it's in those technologies for years to decades. When you see a wind turbine out on someone's property, that wind turbine contains a significant amount of copper and it's going to be there for 20 years, 25 years, 30 years. So what we see over the next 30 to probably 90 years is a significant increase in the amount of copper that we need to mine in order to build renewable energy infrastructure. And then 90 years, a hundred years from now, we can move toward a circular economy, although we probably don't get to a point where we never need new copper. And that's simply because some of the technologies we manufacture, the amount of copper in them is so minuscule that it's almost impossible to imagine they could economically be recycled.

We think about the little gadgets we put in our ear when we walk around campus to listen to NPR. At least that's what I always picture students listening to on campus. And right now, we don't recycle those. Those end up in a landfill. So at best, we think by 2050, we'll probably recycle 70% of copper globally, 30% will end up in landfills, and that 70% of copper that we recycle will be about 35% of global supply. So recycling is really important. We need to improve our ability to recycle. Certainly all of the copper in vehicles, that gets recycled now. So all of the copper that we think about that is in infrastructure such as vehicles and wind turbines and solar panels, we are recycling that. Copper in pipes, we are recycling that. But it's the little things that right now we don't recycle. So I think when people think about how much copper we need, there's a lot of wishful thinking that we can recycle our way to meeting copper demand, but it's just mathematically impossible.

I meet with people all over the world. I've been really fortunate to do research across seven continents, and I've visited now about 85 countries. And no matter where I meet people, there are what I think of as some universal truths. A universal truth is that when a parent raises their child, they want their child to have a life that is equal to or better than their own life. And that's true whether you're in Nigeria or California. And another universal truth is that we want to make the world a better place when we leave than it was when we arrived, when we were born. And if we all remember that there are these two energy transitions. High income countries want to transition away from fossil fuels and low income to lower middle income countries, they want access to energy close to what we consider normal. And remember, they're a factor of 10 less energy consumption than we are.

That in order to make those energy transitions possible, we have to have the raw materials to build the infrastructure. We're not going to manufacture vehicles without copper and rare earth elements and nickel and cobalt and iron. We just can't do that. We're not going to manufacture wind turbines without copper and other metals. We're not going to manufacture solar panels without all of the metals that we need for those. And those metals, some proportion will come from recycling, but we still will rely on mining those metals for at least the next hundred years. And I think this is where we have to have compromise, and really we have to have adult conversations that will acknowledge the potential for mistakes. But ultimately, if it's the climate that we want to win and mitigating human impact on the climate is the goal, then we have to accept that mining is going to happen and mining has to happen, and mining has to happen in the United States as well as other countries around the world.

Because the reality is that every time an individual or a group protests opening a new mine, then in essence they are completely supporting the status quo. It's that simple. If you protest opening a copper mine in Arizona, then you are supporting fossil fuels. There's no other way to rationalize that decision. So if people really want to see a transition to renewable energy resources, then what we need is we need the same people to support new mines across the United States.

Thanks, Morgan. I really appreciate you inviting me to talk about this important topic. And for any of your listeners who want to contact and talk about this with me, you can find my contact information on the university's website.

Morgan Sherburne:

That's great, Adam. Thanks so much for talking about this with us today.

Adam Simon:

Yeah, thank you, Morgan.

Morgan Sherburne:

Thank you for listening to this episode of Michigan Minds, produced by Michigan News, a division of the university's Office of the Vice President for Communications.