Low-carbon technologies need far less mining than fossil fuels

If we want to build a low-carbon economy, we'll need to mine a lot of different minerals. To build solar panels, we’ll need silicon, nickel, silver, and manganese. We’ll need iron and steel for wind turbines, uranium for nuclear power, and lithium and graphite for batteries.1

This raises the concern that a move to clean energy might drive a huge increase in global mining.

It looks this way if you only look at the mining requirements of a low-carbon energy system in isolation. We’ll indeed need to dig out tens to hundreds of millions of tonnes of minerals every year for decades.

But zero mining is not the right baseline to compare it to. The relevant comparison is what we already mine for our current fossil fuel system. The alternative to low-carbon energy is not a zero-energy economy: it’s maintaining the status quo of a system powered mostly by fossil fuels.

When we run the numbers, we find that moving to renewables or nuclear power actually reduces the material requirements for electricity.

Let’s take a look at the data.