The Extracted Earth
What distinguishes life before the 19th century from the subsequent centuries? It’s the omnipresent machines! Suddenly, anyone could fell a majestic tree with the roar of a chainsaw or open craters to access the Earth’s deepest resources. We admire the ingenuity behind the invention of these colossal machines that help us to extract the most challenging ores, in ways that seemed impossible before. The power of these machines replaced the hard labor of many individuals, a feat made possible only through the discovery of fossil fuels.
While fossil fuels allowed humans to increase the efficiency and productivity of many complex tasks, they also disrupted the intricate planetary mechanisms that had maintained favorable atmospheric and oceanic currents essential for the flourishing of our species. In addition, the rapid consumption of these powerful energy sources also converted pristine environments into contaminated ones -full of toxic rivers and lakes, oxygen-depleted and polluted oceans, tired soils, and low air quality detrimental to respiratory health.
Currently, it seems that a growing number of people are acknowledging the link between these energy-rich fuels and the escalating climate troubles we are facing, marking a positive shift from just a few years ago. This heightened awareness has also inspired many to advocate for their ban, trusting the views of mainstream experts and the media, who contend that ‘renewable’ and ‘clean energy’ can easily replace them soon and stop the extensive pollution and ecosystem loss caused by these fuels.
Unfortunately, these optimistic assertions blatantly disregard the true nature of these energy sources, whose dirty secrets are conveniently concealed behind a thick veil of denial. While we’ve all witnessed distressing images of pelicans coated in black muck after oil spills or the vast craters and mountaintop removals needed by coal mining, we seldom see the equally alarming mining craters and endless toxic pollution caused by the extensive mining essential for these supposedly ‘clean’ energies.
In an attempt to unveil some of the hidden aspects of renewable energy, I have selected three examples, each paired with a significant characteristic that underscores its environmental challenges: the powerful magnets in wind power, the silicon for solar energy’s photovoltaic cells, and the thirsty nature of the lithium used for electric vehicle (EV) batteries.
Let’s begin with solar power, an energy source that has at its core a glaring lack of cleanliness and sustainability — the essential role that coal plays in its processing — a fact that often goes unnoticed in mainstream emissions assessments.
Silicon, the main component in computer chips, currently serves as the primary semiconductor material in approximately 95% of photovoltaic cells. Despite its relative abundance, silicon doesn’t occur naturally in isolation; it is extracted from quartzite, a rock that can contain up to 80% silicon.
The ingredient list for extracting silicon from quartz reads like a fossil fuel feast:
For one ton of silicon, you need:
2.4 tons of quartz
Half a ton of coal.
1/8 ton of oil
200 kilos of coke,
600 kilos of charcoal
300 kilos of wood chips.
The quantities and types of wood and carbon may vary, but what remains certain is that fossil fuels are quite essential for making silicon.
This process entails a chemical reaction called carbothermic, which, as its name suggests, needs two essential ingredients –heat and carbon. This implies that, at least for now, there is no way to manufacture photovoltaic cells without a carbon source, typically coal, which is one of the top CO2 emissions producers.
The preferred type of coal for solar cell silicon smelting is the Blue Gem — primarily found in Colombia and Venezuela. Unfortunately, its mining has displaced numerous indigenous tribes and contaminated their previously pristine water, soil, and air.
If you were to explain to the indigenous communities in Colombia that the coal causing their displacement and environmental pollution is the primary component of the so-called clean energy known as solar power, they would laugh in your face!
These people have never produced any emissions or toxic waste, and yet, they are the ones paying the price with their lives. In the meantime, people around the world are happy to install solar power in their homes, thinking that they are helping to reach the world’s path to sustainability!
It is certain that, at this point, a complete ban on all coal mining is not feasible due to its essential role in photovoltaic cells. However, some researchers, aware of the dirty secret behind silicon, are seeking alternative processes that avoid its use.
Unfortunately, these attempts have several disadvantages, such as subpar efficiency, exorbitant prices, and extreme toxicity –like those based on a combination of cadmium and telluride. Other alternatives include the much-touted flexible Thin Film solar cells, the amorphous, the Copper-Indium-Gallium-Selenium (CIGS), and the organic.
Now that we’ve unveiled the hidden aspects of solar power let’s proceed to the next energy source and its primary vulnerability. Wind power plays a pivotal role in the transition to renewable energy, contributing the most significant percentage to the renewable energy mix.
One of its key vulnerabilities involves the need for very powerful magnets in the turbine, essential for transforming the wind’s power into electrical energy usable by humans. Unfortunately, the most crucial source of this power is a diverse combination of rare earth metals — compounds whose mining leaves toxicity all around.
While magnets aren’t the only way to produce wind power, their high energy density and efficiency make them the increasingly preferred method. This power is provided by rare earths, primarily neodymium -usually combined with a wide variety of other rare earths like dysprosium, praseodymium, gadolinium, samarium, and terbium. A few, use samarium combined with cobalt, but the most common magnet type is a combination of neodymium, ferrite (iron oxide), and boron.
Rare earth mining is far from being environmentally friendly. While these elements are not rare, they are sparsely dispersed within rocks, making their extraction highly challenging and resulting in the extensive destruction of vast land areas.
The two existing rare earth mining methods leave a long-lasting trail of pollution. The first one, known as the brine method, involves the insertion of PVC pipes to pump chemicals that flush out the earth. The resulting slurry then goes to leaching ponds to separate the metals.
The second method implies the removal of topsoil and its subsequent transfer to leaching ponds. In these, a series of steps using highly toxic chemicals, such as ammonium sulfate and chloride, are performed to separate the metals and finally obtain the rare earth metal of choice.
The frequent use of the term ‘toxic’ in the description of these methods is entirely justified — rare earth mining gives rise to hazardous mounds and reservoirs of wastewater that can continue to contaminate local waterways even years after the mine has been shut down.
According to the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, mining one ton of rare earths creates an equal amount of radioactive waste.
A Statista figure adds that in 2020, wind power used about 7,6000 tons of rare earths! It means that the areas near mining sites have to contend with toxic chemical pollution plus very difficult-to-manage radioactive waste.
The people who live around those areas, mostly Chinese, have endlessly complained about the lung-affecting awful fumes, the appearance of strange rashes, and the pollution of their waterways. These Chinese people, just like the Colombians and the Venezuelans, could laugh in the faces of any expert who told them that the super ‘clean energy’ called wind power is the cause of their ailments and polluted environment!
Despite the pollution these rare earths cause around the world, it is disconcerting to learn that according to Our World in Data, wind power currently provides only 2.2 percent of the total global primary energy, a term that only includes electricity, heating, and transportation.
This term misses two essential energy-guzzling sectors of our technological culture — the energy used for mining and manufacturing all the goods and services in our economy! This omission means that most energy calculations grossly underestimate the energy needs of our civilization, just like the pollution associated with the whole process.
Knowing that the amount of polluted soil — 7,600 tons — is equal to the mined one, we could imagine a hypothetical scenario in which there will be a complete fossil fuel ban that will increase wind power’s percentage in the energy mix from 3% to 50%.
A brief calculation shows that this wind power escalation would need 126,667 tons of rare earth — an astounding amount that will, unfortunately, leave an equal amount of radioactive pollution.
This alarming figure becomes even more concerning when we consider another Statista statistic, which indicates that the world’s reserves of rare earths amount to only about 103,000 tons — far from sufficient to meet the demands of my hypothetical wind power scenario. This shortage becomes even more critical when we factor in the numerous essential roles that rare earths play in our present technological way of life.
As we extract and destroy millions of tons of earth, these metals will become more and more difficult to find on land, increasing costs and the energy needed to mine them. Tech and mining companies know this, so they are now trying to obtain permits for deep-sea mining –believing that resources are infinite and that there is no unsolvable problem for the human mind.
This belief in infinite resources also applies to renewable energy and the batteries used to store it, including those that transform our most cherished technological devices into ‘clean’ forms of transportation. The stars in this effort are the very thirsty lithium-ion batteries that power an electric vehicle (EV).
Despite the number of new proposals for batteries without lithium, most have not been approved nor tested for up-scale trials -so for now, lithium will continue playing a role in car batteries. These batteries have a lithiated cathode and a graphite anode covered by different chemical elements. The most common batteries use a mix of nickel, manganese, and cobalt (NMC) in the anode.
The average NMC EV battery ‘ingredient’ list includes 25 pounds of lithium, 60 pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds of cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, 400 pounds of aluminum, plus some steel and plastic — for a total of about one thousand pounds!
So, what is the problem with lithium? As we will see, lithium mining uses a lot of water! Unfortunately, the driest places on Earth, like the Atacama Desert in Chile and other regions in Australia, tend to have high lithium concentrations, inevitably creating a water availability problem for the people in the surrounding areas.
Lithium’s mining currently covers the ocher and brown Atacama Desert in Chile, with hundreds of turquoise pools — some as big as 20 football fields — filled with lithium-containing brine emanating from ancient reservoirs in the substratum.
The two mining companies that operate in this desert, the Chilean company Sociedad Quimica Minera and the American company Albemarle, pump about 2,000 liters of lithium brine per second into these crater-sized ponds. To picture this, think of a desert with 52,500 average-sized Olympic pools ready to be filled with lithium brine each year.
The brine must undergo a procedure involving substantial quantities of water heated to temperatures of up to 80 degrees Celsius. Toxic chemicals act as dissolvers to isolate lithium from other metals, typically nickel and manganese. In Chile’s mining regions, lithium extraction usually consumes approximately 65% of the available water supply.
The above intense water use doesn’t tell the whole story –the pumping of brine from the substratum forces underground freshwater into motion, mixing it with the brine and causing an increase in the salinity of a high percentage of the freshwater. Even if the mining companies claim they are only drilling above the water table, the pumping can spread toxic chemicals to the aquifer, sometimes reaching extensive distances.
The over-pumping of brine can also destabilize the structure of the substrate. This destabilization is usually combined with the general contamination of the area -causing everlasting damage to the whole ecosystem and its biodiversity. Many people in the area — predominantly indigenous — say that their current access to water has decreased by 80 percent, making agriculture very difficult and significantly affecting their quality of life.
In the second method, the topsoil is removed to access rocks like spodumene, a silicate-containing rock. This practice is a far departure from any environmentally friendly vision, as it entails excavating 20 to 30 million tons of earth annually at a single U.S. mining site. Alarmingly, this earth-disturbing process bears a striking resemblance to the environmental impact of coal mining in a few U.S. states.
An illustration of this type of lithium mining can be seen at the Thacker Pass in Nevada, a project that has began construction after a judge blocked conservationists and tribal leaders objections. In this location, the lithium concentration is approximately 0.2%, underscoring the company’s determination to obtain lithium, regardless of the expense and the collateral damage it will cause.
The mining company, Lithium Americas Corp, has chosen toxic sulfuric acid as the dissolver, and it is planning to acidify molten sulfur on site, trucking in the required chemicals from oil refineries by using 75 tractor-trailer loads a day, each one powered by fossil fuels. After this energy-guzzling process, there are still many other equally energy and resource- consuming steps to finally obtain the most important ingredient for an electric vehicle, the lithium battery.
It’s evident that the greenhouse gases produced by these intricate processes continue to accumulate, alongside the consumption of freshwater and the pollution of extensive regions. Once again, if we were to inquire with the local and indigenous communities in these areas about the cleanliness of EV batteries, they would laugh in our faces, much like the Colombians and the Chinese.
They are the ones who can empirically confirm the devastation of the land which can rival the one created by coal mining. Thacker Pass, while substantial in size, is just one of many mines in the U.S., paling in comparison to those in the Atacama Desert, Australia, and various other locations
The lack of current feasible and up-scalable options for replacing lithium in EV batteries means we will have to deal with it for a while. Despite the widespread destruction caused by its mining, the status quo climate experts and media keep bypassing the reality of EV cars, misleading people into thinking that the climate crisis is easy to solve with just a few behavioral changes.
A good example is the new green initiative announced by President Joe Biden and many EU governments, who have promised to replace all gas cars with electric ones by a not-very-distant date.
Let’s look at the reality of this objective from the point of view of lithium. The worldwide number of EV cars is barely 11.3 million — nothing compared to the 1.3 billion gas ones that still roam the world. The mining expansion required to meet this objective will be astronomical, and so will the increase in contaminated areas.
Mining Watch Canada, an NGO that tries to create awareness of the reality of mining, has estimated that
“Three billion tons of mined metals and minerals will be needed to power the energy transition — especially a “massif” increase of six critical minerals: lithium, graphite, copper, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth minerals.”
The above figure clearly illustrates the physical impossibility of sustaining continued mining of these materials, underscoring their non-renewable and environmentally unsustainable nature.
As minerals become scarcer and more difficult to mine — a reality that is already happening — mining companies are actively planning the move of these toxic endeavors from land to the ocean.
One of the regions proposed for this catastrophic enterprise is the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a mineral-rich area in the Pacific Ocean that spans 1.7 square miles between Hawaii and Mexico. The project appears even more misguided when considering that scientists have recently identified over 5,000 previously unknown species thriving in the seabed.
The labels ‘clean’ and ‘renewable’ protect these mining activities from much criticism so that nobody focuses on the spread of toxicity that these energy sources cause. In this way, the general public stays completely unaware of the vast increase in ecosystem loss and the further endangerment of many species, including the fantastic diversity of previously uncharted areas, like the one mentioned above.
The race to maximize Earth’s extraction relies on the assumption that our small blue planet — a tiny speck in the vastness of the universe — has unlimited resources. In addition, we also readily accept mainstream opinions that designate one energy source as ‘dirty’ and another as ‘clean,’ creating the illusion that adding this newly labeled ‘clean’ energy is the solution for the pollution that fossil fuels have already created.
How can anyone argue that approving a mountaintop removal mine at the Thacker Pass is a step towards cleaner and more renewable energy? How can anyone claim that polluting the world and the ocean through rare earth mining, leaving behind tons of radioactive waste and toxic slag, is clean? Do we really think the ecosystem loss that all this pollution is causing won’t affect us?
Even though it is already happening, we hope pollution doesn’t reach our region, leading us to maintain a ‘Not In My Backyard’ (NIMBY) attitude, thinking that the effects of all this extraction only affect distant communities. We don’t notice that all we are doing is adding to the pollution that fossil fuels caused, ensuring that we will end up with a completely gutted Earth, full of mountains of pollution and foul-smelling lakes.
Is that the ‘clean’ and ‘renewable’ future that we have chosen by accepting the continuation of our highly technological and consumerist society?
