The mining burden of new energy technologies is smaller than that of fossil fuels, according to a new report.
**From the article:**
Political fights over mining and minerals are heating up, and there are growing environmental and sociological concerns about how to source the materials the world needs to build new energy technologies.
The report’s findings add to a growing body of evidence that technologies used to address climate change will likely lead to a future with less mining than a world powered by fossil fuels. However, experts point out that oversight will be necessary to minimize harm from the mining needed to transition to lower-emission energy sources.
In the new analysis, the report’s authors considered the total mining footprint of different energy technologies, including the amount of material needed for these energy sources and the total amount of rock that needs to be moved to extract that material.
Many minerals appear in small concentrations in source rock, so the process of extracting them has a large footprint relative to the amount of final product. A mining operation would need to move about seven kilograms of rock to get one kilogram of aluminum, for instance. For copper, the ratio is much higher, at over 500 to one. Taking these ratios into account allows for a more direct comparison of the total mining required for different energy sources.
With this adjustment, it becomes clear that the energy source with the highest mining burden is coal. Generating one gigawatt-hour of electricity with coal requires 20 times the mining footprint as generating the same electricity with low-carbon power sources like wind and solar. Producing the same electricity with natural gas requires moving about twice as much rock.
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The mining burden of new energy technologies is smaller than that of fossil fuels, according to a new report.
**From the article:**
Political fights over mining and minerals are heating up, and there are growing environmental and sociological concerns about how to source the materials the world needs to build new energy technologies.
But low-emissions energy sources, including wind, solar, and nuclear power, have a smaller mining footprint than coal and natural gas, according to [a new report](https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/updated-mining-footprints-and-raw-material-needs-for-clean-energy) from the Breakthrough Institute released on Thursday.
The report’s findings add to a growing body of evidence that technologies used to address climate change will likely lead to a future with less mining than a world powered by fossil fuels. However, experts point out that oversight will be necessary to minimize harm from the mining needed to transition to lower-emission energy sources.
In the new analysis, the report’s authors considered the total mining footprint of different energy technologies, including the amount of material needed for these energy sources and the total amount of rock that needs to be moved to extract that material.
Many minerals appear in small concentrations in source rock, so the process of extracting them has a large footprint relative to the amount of final product. A mining operation would need to move about seven kilograms of rock to get one kilogram of aluminum, for instance. For copper, the ratio is much higher, at over 500 to one. Taking these ratios into account allows for a more direct comparison of the total mining required for different energy sources.
With this adjustment, it becomes clear that the energy source with the highest mining burden is coal. Generating one gigawatt-hour of electricity with coal requires 20 times the mining footprint as generating the same electricity with low-carbon power sources like wind and solar. Producing the same electricity with natural gas requires moving about twice as much rock.