Ed, worth noting that the BHP bid for Anglo if successful doesn't solve the copper deficit issue. Mergers merely rearrange the chairs on the deck by ownership market share. The solution is a markedly higher and sustained copper price. This will 1. encourage copper mine exploration 2. make lower grade ore deposits more economic to exploit 3. encourage demand destruction via substitution and thrifting. Either way the lead time to bring on a new copper mine will be many years and as such the supply imbalance will not be swiftly resolved
Hi Ed as you mention Port Talbot / EAFs at the end, wondering if you came across an Italian company called Danieli on your travels? Fascinating firm, effectively a duopoly in the technology for the equipment behind DRI-EAF steelmaking process and market leader across most of the broader EAF plantmaking equipment market.
It is going to get worse before it gets better. At the rate the climate rules, regulation and taxes are going the deindustrialization of the West will follow. As resources became less available and restrictions of what to build and how to build force offshoring, leading to a transfer of wealth for owners and onshoring companies, protected only by treaties and interest rates, the developed world is turning into a developing world.
There is a vast amount of copper laid as phone lines all over the world. These can be replaced with fibre optic. These networks are being retired anyway and the copper could be recovered and recycled. I can't find a useful reference but I believe the quantities are enormous.
Perhaps you should look deeper at the next zero madness with other minerals like zinc, lithium, rare earths of which 90% is either in China or under China's control.
You find a gross shortage everywhere, and even if you open enough mines to get the copper, there aren't enough cable manufacturers and all of those that do have full ten year order books.
Then if you get past that, there isn't the qualified grid engineers to build the calculated 5 TIMES the current grid infrastructure for all the renewables
Nor does anyone look at the cost of renewables when you add in the much higher prices for raw materials to make the renewables, the cost of the extra grid cabling estimated a 58bn or the cost of grid batteries that will have to attributed to renewables or the excessive cost of producing hydrogen all of which makes renewables at least 3 times the price of fossil fuels.
Then there's grid capacity, winter peaks are about 55-60GW but with a mass of electric cars and air source heat pumps many estimate that peak winter demand will be as high as 135-150GW.
And no one backing renewables can answer this question.
"In mid winter, if we get a blocking high, when solar is near negligible and wind is becalmed and such a blocking high can last upto three weeks (see Feb 2010) temperatures plummet and rare get above zero and electricity demand soars, what is going to supply that peak demand consistently for three weeks or more?"
An industry-friendly book full of unabashed hopium cheerleading for the supersystemic destruction of natural resources through global corporate and state-corporate mining and production, promising more “magic” to solve the minor technical detail of collapse.
What other conclusion could there be? Your final words in the book are exactly that - summoning forth some preposterous notion of "magic" to reappear and keep all things bright and cheery in an eco-modernist reverie.
You've got some fine reportorial detail and technical information that got you access to these usually hidden redoubts of industrial destructiveness, but in service of what other conclusion than techno-optimism?
Ed, worth noting that the BHP bid for Anglo if successful doesn't solve the copper deficit issue. Mergers merely rearrange the chairs on the deck by ownership market share. The solution is a markedly higher and sustained copper price. This will 1. encourage copper mine exploration 2. make lower grade ore deposits more economic to exploit 3. encourage demand destruction via substitution and thrifting. Either way the lead time to bring on a new copper mine will be many years and as such the supply imbalance will not be swiftly resolved
Hi Ed as you mention Port Talbot / EAFs at the end, wondering if you came across an Italian company called Danieli on your travels? Fascinating firm, effectively a duopoly in the technology for the equipment behind DRI-EAF steelmaking process and market leader across most of the broader EAF plantmaking equipment market.
A magnificent and utterly fascinating book. I have already persuaded several people to buy it.
Thank you!
I was so intrigued by the Longest Journey chapter that I did a précis of it for a U3A group I run here in NZ.
Great to hear!
It is going to get worse before it gets better. At the rate the climate rules, regulation and taxes are going the deindustrialization of the West will follow. As resources became less available and restrictions of what to build and how to build force offshoring, leading to a transfer of wealth for owners and onshoring companies, protected only by treaties and interest rates, the developed world is turning into a developing world.
There is a vast amount of copper laid as phone lines all over the world. These can be replaced with fibre optic. These networks are being retired anyway and the copper could be recovered and recycled. I can't find a useful reference but I believe the quantities are enormous.
And more news today as Anglo looks like it wants to break its self up. All change in the mining world.
Loved the book by the way. A great read that combines history, mankind and science. Thanks.
Perhaps you should look deeper at the next zero madness with other minerals like zinc, lithium, rare earths of which 90% is either in China or under China's control.
You find a gross shortage everywhere, and even if you open enough mines to get the copper, there aren't enough cable manufacturers and all of those that do have full ten year order books.
Then if you get past that, there isn't the qualified grid engineers to build the calculated 5 TIMES the current grid infrastructure for all the renewables
Nor does anyone look at the cost of renewables when you add in the much higher prices for raw materials to make the renewables, the cost of the extra grid cabling estimated a 58bn or the cost of grid batteries that will have to attributed to renewables or the excessive cost of producing hydrogen all of which makes renewables at least 3 times the price of fossil fuels.
Then there's grid capacity, winter peaks are about 55-60GW but with a mass of electric cars and air source heat pumps many estimate that peak winter demand will be as high as 135-150GW.
And no one backing renewables can answer this question.
"In mid winter, if we get a blocking high, when solar is near negligible and wind is becalmed and such a blocking high can last upto three weeks (see Feb 2010) temperatures plummet and rare get above zero and electricity demand soars, what is going to supply that peak demand consistently for three weeks or more?"
Answers - None that are credible that i have seen
An industry-friendly book full of unabashed hopium cheerleading for the supersystemic destruction of natural resources through global corporate and state-corporate mining and production, promising more “magic” to solve the minor technical detail of collapse.
I'm quite surprised you've come to that conclusion if you've read the entire book. But thanks for reading it all the same!
What other conclusion could there be? Your final words in the book are exactly that - summoning forth some preposterous notion of "magic" to reappear and keep all things bright and cheery in an eco-modernist reverie.
You've got some fine reportorial detail and technical information that got you access to these usually hidden redoubts of industrial destructiveness, but in service of what other conclusion than techno-optimism?
I am not part of any industry being long retired, but I fail to see how you reached those conclusions from a careful reading of the book