A normal Honda Accord needs about 40 pounds of copper. The same battery electric Accord needs 200 pounds. Onshore wind turbines require about 10 tons of copper, and offshore approx. 20 tons. The world will need to mine 115% more copper than has been mined in all human history just to meet “business as usual.” This would meet our current copper needs and support the developing world without considering the green energy transition. Six new large mines need to come online every year by 2050 to meet global copper demand, but the problem is it takes about 20 years between discovering a new copper mineral deposit and getting a permit to build a mine. None of this takes into consideration the upgrades to the electrical infrastructure needed to “electrify: the world by 2050. In short electrifying the world by 2050 is a politicians pipe dream that will never happen.
There used to be school of thought called “effects based operations” where one considered planning and set goals based on the down stream and cascading effects of current or planned actions. Obviously our current crew of politico geniuses never heard of this.
What will the price of copper be in the near-medium future? A future the entirety of western gov’t seems to have settled on as vast electrification and “this is the way it’s going to be”?
https://cdn.ihsmarkit.com/www/prot/pdf/0722/Future-of-Copper.pdf
*Link has been posted a couple of times here at SDA… it’s not going away any time soon
“Key findings” are on page 9
Are the western governments going to discover the great copper lode which to this day has remained undiscovered? Not with their version of science, the past few years have shown their expertise in science, and the led time from discovering a copper lode and actual mining is 16 years. I imagine in tier 2 Canada that would be a minimum, when the potential investors would simply walk away and state that Canada doesn’t want to mine copper, it only wants to talk the talk and not walk the walk.
Re: the price of copper?
Home Depot has put ALL their rolls of wire behind locked cages. ALL of it. And you need an “Associate” to unlock the cage for you, and personally escort you to the checkstand … like a common criminal.
As I keep telling the wife … life was NEVER like this growing up in America. Not until our government began to systematically pay for the breeding and importation of a massive underclass of dependents.
Kenji, I just shake my head at the stupidity we see on display everyday. It was never like this when I was a kid, we also did not have “black” privilege or black people in our town.
In my reading, the world since we can measure, has mined 750 million tons of Copper.
This amount would need to mined in the next 10 years. Utter Fantasy of the FILTHY LIBERALS.
We can’t stick a shovel in the ground without mountains of Marxist restrictions on everything. this will never happen in Kanada.
Get rid of the Influence of Commie Fake EnvironMENTALists.
Yeah, so what, where are you going, h8ter?
Bombaclaat ya bloodclatt
Wow. Forty pounds of copper in a regular car is a lot on its own, five times that for an EV is crazy.
Science fiction has become much more lucrative than science since the communists decided to go green to seize the means of production.
Liberals in all three of our political parties are backed by their comrades in the Communist Party of China so there will be no big changes in reality, “canadian” institutions will simply get weaker and weaker, our standard of living will continue to fall, but if the right people stay wealthy they’ll keep the herd in line.
Liberal Republicans in the US will assist pedophile Joe and the Democrats to benefit communist China, but at least there’s some hope there that they could unshackle themselves from the Chinese.
To the unspoken question of “Are they stupid or evil?”, I reply with “Why not both?” In the battle of wits, you can not choose the cup they placed in front of themselves nor can you choose the cup they placed in front of you. Each is poisoned.
Why the Focus on Copper..??
A Minor issue compared to Power GENERATION.
Net Zero is to ELECTRIFY everything right.??
So.? where ya gonna get it from.??
Every major River on the planet is damned not just once but many times over.
so Hydro is for all intents, out of the game.
Nat Gas – Oil – Coal..?? yea We really SHOULD use them – MORE, but the mindless class would trash that.
Wind – Solar.?? Laughable at best – Useless for vast quantities of time and when it does produce.? its only at 10-12% of capacity – USELESS Landscape/Bird Chopping JUNK that destroys farmland.
So that Leaves Modular NUCLEAR.
Funny that, I don’t see any Climatard Org jumping on that particular bandwagon, nor do I see any place where this tech is being fully embraced.
No. We have rivers that could accommodate more dams. The spin off economy would be tremendous.
How many years of gov’t studies does it take to have a dam approved in Canada?
About the same as having a copper mine approved? the average being 16 years.
Will the power be routed to the great recharging hubs in the cities via copper wire?
Count on copper being $50 / pound in the next decade if the current idiocy continues.
I’d suggest modular nuclear reactors as Steakman does above, which I do favor, however the temptation for the gov’t to sabotage this is great.
We need more engineers, technicians, physicists, electricians, etc in leadership positions across all levels of government.
We are the last people with any critical thinking skills and actual knowledge and aptitude towards figuring things out, designing and building them.
Too many bubblegum liberal arts pussi&s in leadership and politics that end up dictating how we live.
Marc, mostly I agree with you here. However, electrical transmission and distribution is done by aluminum conductor cables, not copper. Copper hasn’t ever been used for distribution cables. Too fragile, no mechanical strength, too valuable even a century ago. It’s always been aluminum. Look overhead. All those transmisson and distribution cables you see are aluminum, not copper.
Not that it matters. The demand for copper is projected to be enormous; more than actually exists. This is simply for use within appliances and electronics.
However, more dams are not possible. Sorry, Ive. All the sites in North America and Europe that are economic to build power dams have already been developed. The sole exception is the Lower Churchill, and that project is going nowhere.
Yeah, good luck with that. Site C was highly controversial and strongly opposed by the left and environutters, until they were all for it.
When it was proposed, it was surplus output, but now, it’s projected to only meet demand in a few short years. It was first proposed in the 70s, was approved in 2010(!) and is not quite finished yet.
In a very few short years, NOTHING will be built in BC, no new projects for power, mining, fishing, logging, roads and highways, because INDIANS. No more dams will ever be built on the Stikine, Skeena, Columbia or Fraser rivers. They have the topography for dams, but salmon and INDIANS means they will never, ever happen.
The future is clearly nuclear, if TPTB ban, prohibit, torture us from using hydrocarbons, that is their ultimate goal.
Dams? Not really. I don’t think the ZigZag Lake project on the Jackfish River will go ahead. Small “run-of-the-river”-type installations are basically what we’ve left, as told to me by a guy who use to run power plants.
The climate nutters are opposed to using any practical energy source, and instead want the world to be powered by wind, solar and batteries.
The latest propaganda can be found here: https://www.theenergymix.com/smrs-too-expensive-too-slow-to-meet-grid-decarbonization-deadline-ieefa/
What’s idiotic, is they should be following the process and cost control of the A1B and A4W reactors, which were standardized, and fails to recognize that as you build more of them, the unit cost comes down.
Nothing can be built without coal, oil and gas.
It’s not so much that the required copper can’t be found. It’s just that Mother Earth would have to be raped to develop the many more mines from expensive uneconomic developments that would be required for Net Nada. Sure as Sherlock can uncover, Gaia followers will rent their garments, gnash their teeth and cry out their displeasure about that.
The end result will be expensive, way short of requirements and rationed out to the anointed.
Mother Earth tries to kill me every Winter.
The realities of materials requirements and the near universal loss of development oriented governments in the western world confirm the impossibility of the delusion of “net zero”. It can’t and won’t be “approached” let alone achieved. The laws of physics determine energy realities not the grift of propaganda and politics. Energy density is the only thing that maters. Everything else is delusion and distraction.
I agree, John. Along with the enormous amount of mining, transporting, manufacturing, transporting again, field assembly, connecting to the grid, etc., comes a blast of CO2 emisssions like we may never have seen before. All of the “Green” activity would be fossil fueled, because you can’t use non-existing renewables to build a future renewables system. That is the definition of putting the cart before the horse.
If this whole net zero crap is intended to reduce CO2 emissions, the proponents will have a substantial wait time before the emissions CREATED by their “plan” are removed by the electrification of everything. One example of this is illustrated in a study done by Volkswagen comparing the life cycle emissions of a Golf Diesel Vs an e Ggolf. If you look at all the emissions from the start of aquisition of minerals required to build each vehicle to the vehicle being ready to hit the road, the e vehicle CO2 emissions are much higher than the Diesel vehicle’s. Once on the road, the EV begins to gain an advantage. At about 120,000 Km the lifetime emissions from the Diesel finally equate to the EV emissions (crossover point). Up to this point, the Diesel is “cleaner” than the EV. The study assumed that both vehicles would be recycled at 200,000 Km, but I am pretty sure only the EV would be toast at that point due to battery degredation while the deisel would probably still be chuggin’ along for years after.
So where am I going with this?
1) Pause the counter-productive pursuit of emission reductions by implementing “plans” that in the near term INCREASE emissions.
2) Given that there is a dismal history of climate model predictions upon which the net zero “plans” are predicated, we need to stop accepting the “climate emergency” narritive and get into encouraging pure scientific debate to stop blaming the modest and mostly beneficial recent warming strictly on CO2. Let’s not supress research about other complexities of the universe such as cycles of solar activity, influences from gravitational influences of other planets, etc, etc.
3) By all means continue research and responsible implementation of Small Modular Reactor technology
4) Promote adaptation planning just in case sometime in the future there may actually be a reason to act.
And that is Uncle Gerry’s rant for tonight! Go Oilers!
it is all irrelevant so long as the right people and politicians get the money. thats all it ever was.
Bingo. The added plus for the elites is the death of the despicable me/us/them; 90-95% are slated to die if the fantasies of the ultra-diabolical come to fruition.
Deagle.com used to have a population forecast for 2025 (use archive.com) that showed MASSIVE culling of populations across the western world. The USA is down to 99M from 350M. Here, Bananada loses at least 10M citizens.
This, very much this.
The amount of copper needed for hundreds of millions of EVs is a smokescreen. Our rulers do not intend for the general public to own cars, so none of that copper will be needed. Net zero is easy to achieve if the real goal is to reduce the total human population by 95+%.
What the bureaucrats in their galactic stupidity have failed to recognize is there are so many of them, they will be front and center for the cull. I am sure many of them think the new world order will be a paradise, not realizing they will be in the main the first to be lined up for execution.
Wind turbines need about 80 gallons of oil just for lubrication. The good, sythetic stuff. It needs to be changed every year. You can also factor in the hydrocarbons and energy needed for their fabrication, transportation and disposal. Many of the materials used to build wind turbines are the product of hydrocarbons. And the heavy equipment needed to do the above. Oil isn’t going anywhere even if you eliminate cars. At some point this green dream is going to meet reality about the time people start freezing and energy rationing starts being implemented. Then you will see the real purpose of the green agenda.
Find me a EV car charging station that has solar and wind powering it instead of the big diesel jenny running in a conveniently colored green box in the back.
Looking for support in those who also throw childish insults is no support at all. It’s a faith thing more than anything. If you’re aware of how ridiculously expensive and wasteful wind farms/towers are, you’ll get that it is currently a deficit.
Being a true believer will only get you so far. Also, we’re in AB so batteries and wind can only so much. Consider your message.
Basic Retard is a better handle.
Try addressing the topic, smooth brain.
The Inconvenient Truth often provides an opportunity.
For me, I’m going to buy more shares in my Tax Free Savings Account related to copper.
Pennies can add up quickly…
Yep, scrap copper prices be good:-)))
Open-pit Isle Royale and turn it into a lagoon…lotsa copper there. So much so that the USA stole the island from us.
“100’s of TONS per vehicle”? Who’s the nitwit here? Stuck in the Past? You can’t imagine the Past because you must have been hatched last night. Irrelevant…because for you History didn’t begin until the day you were born?
Yes, lets all return to the technologies of the late 1800s, such as electric vehicles, solar and wind, they don’t have any drawbacks after more than 140 years of research, as they have all been overcome by now right?
Hey Basic, build me a wind turbine or solar panel without using coal. oil or gas. Memo sport……it cannot be done.