Green Energy Reality Check - Jan 12

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dan_s
Posts: 34471
Joined: Fri Apr 23, 2010 8:22 am

Green Energy Reality Check - Jan 12

Post by dan_s »

Let me be clear: I am all for "green energy" and I am constantly looking for small-caps that will make a lot of money as $Trillion are spent on rechargeable batteries, EVs, wind and solar. What I'm not for is the incredible amount of BS put out by those that HATE oil, gas and coal. Below is a link to a very good and detailed report on the topic.
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Executive Summary:
As policymakers have shifted focus from pandemic challenges to economic recovery, infrastructure plans are once more being actively discussed, including those relating to energy. Green energy advocates are doubling down on pressure to continue, or even increase, the use of wind, solar power, and electric cars. Left out of the discussion is any serious consideration of the broad environmental and supply-chain implications of renewable energy.

As I explored in a previous paper, “The New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking,”[1] many enthusiasts believe things that are not possible when it comes to the physics of fueling society, not least the magical belief that “clean-tech” energy can echo the velocity of the progress of digital technologies. It cannot.

This paper turns to a different reality: all energy-producing machinery must be fabricated from materials extracted from the earth. No energy system, in short, is actually “renewable,” since all machines require the continual mining and processing of millions of tons of primary materials and the disposal of hardware that inevitably wears out. Compared with hydrocarbons, green machines entail, on average, a 10-fold increase in the quantities of materials extracted and processed to produce the same amount of energy.

This means that any significant expansion of today’s modest level of green energy—currently less than 4% of the country’s total consumption (versus 56% from oil and gas)—will create an unprecedented increase in global mining for needed minerals, radically exacerbate existing environmental and labor challenges in emerging markets (where many mines are located), and dramatically increase U.S. imports and the vulnerability of America’s energy supply chain.

Read the full article here: https://www.manhattan-institute.org/min ... lity-check

My TOP PICKS are for those of you interested in Green Energy:
Nano One Materials Corp (NNOMF)
Nouveau Monde Graphite (NMGRF)
Exro Technologies (EXROF)
and I have recently added E3 Metals Corp. (EEMMF) to my Watch List.
Dan Steffens
Energy Prospectus Group
dan_s
Posts: 34471
Joined: Fri Apr 23, 2010 8:22 am

Re: Green Energy Reality Check - Jan 12

Post by dan_s »

As recently as 1990, the U.S. was the world’s number-one producer of minerals. Today, it is in seventh place. Even though the nation has vast mineral reserves worth trillions of dollars, America is now 100% dependent on imports for some 17 key minerals, and, for another 29, over half of domestic needs are imported.

Among the material realities of green energy:

Building wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity, as well as batteries to fuel electric vehicles, requires, on average, more than 10 times the quantity of materials, compared with building machines using hydrocarbons to deliver the same amount of energy to society.

A single electric car contains more cobalt than 1,000 smartphone batteries; the blades on a single wind turbine have more plastic than 5 million smartphones; and a solar array that can power one data center uses more glass than 50 million phones.

Replacing hydrocarbons with green machines under current plans—never mind aspirations for far greater expansion—will vastly increase the mining of various critical minerals around the world. For example, a single electric car battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials. Averaged over a battery’s life, each mile of driving an electric car “consumes” five pounds of earth. Using an internal combustion engine consumes about 0.2 pounds of liquids per mile.

Oil, natural gas, and coal are needed to produce the concrete, steel, plastics, and purified minerals used to build green machines. The energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil is used in the processes to fabricate a single battery that can store the equivalent of one barrel of oil.

By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels—much of it nonrecyclable—will constitute double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage.
Dan Steffens
Energy Prospectus Group
dirtdauber
Posts: 21
Joined: Sat May 01, 2010 10:28 pm

Re: Green Energy Reality Check - Jan 12

Post by dirtdauber »

By the way, recycling of Lithium batteries is on the way. A small (tiny) Canadian company is well on the way to what they believe will be a very economic hydrometallurgical method of recovering a high 90s % of the valuable metals from Li batteries at a purity appropriate for reuse in cathode powders. Check out American Manganese, AMY.V (Canadian Ventures Exchange) or AMYZF over the counter. They will use a sulfuric acid based process they developed and patented to extract manganese from a low grade deposit in AZ, but the price of Mn fell too low for that deposit to be economic. But, the grades of Mn in batteries, along with Li, Co, Ni, Al are all highly economic. They plan to start by processing factory scrap, and later move to recycling batteries collected and broken by others. Right now, they are also setting up to pilot test equipment to blend their output directly into cathode powders.

Yes, I know that their main output will be sulfates, not the carbonates Nano One is planning to use, but NNO will not take over the industry overnight.

Has anyone on the board ever checked AMY out?
dan_s
Posts: 34471
Joined: Fri Apr 23, 2010 8:22 am

Re: Green Energy Reality Check - Jan 12

Post by dan_s »

E3 Metals has agreed to host a webinar for us on February 15. Prior to that, I am trying to get Ring Energy (REI) to host a luncheon for us the last week of January.

Recycling of millions if not billions of rechargeable batteries will be a massive task. It is going to take time and lots of money.

Get your questions like this ready for the CEO of E3 Metals.

I have not looked at American Mangenese (AMY.V), but I will add it to my Watch List.
Dan Steffens
Energy Prospectus Group
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