Fossil fuels are terrible for the environment. Is mining critical minerals any better?

As renewable energy gathers steam around the world, the harms of mining its mineral components continue to grow. On the environmental front, for example, there’s the destruction of Indonesian rainforests to mine nickel and the draining of precious South American groundwater reserves to obtain lithium. There’s also the human toll, which can be seen in forced displacement and child labor exploitation in the cobalt-rich Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as violence toward Indigenous people living on nickel-studded lands in the Philippines.

The devastation raises the question: Is the world better off just sticking with the status quo? With these factors, is renewable energy and clean technology any better than fossil fuels?

Whatever the answer, the comparison must account for the continued and additional coal, oil, and gas use that will happen in the absence of a mineral-powered energy transition. Not only does the status quo involve devastating greenhouse gas emissions that wreak havoc on the whole planet, but it also requires local ecological disruption in the form of fossil fuel extraction, which will continually expand as existing fuel deposits are depleted. Fracking and drilling for oil and gas can cause groundwater contamination, oil spills, and the uncontrolled release of planet-warming methane. And mining for coal, of course, is similarly destructive as other kinds of mining. 

While “there’s a lot of room for improvement with metals mining,” said Julie Klinger, a mineral supply chains expert at the University of Delaware, “look at the devastation that fossil fuel extraction has brought.” 

Indeed, the most mined resource today is coal, with around 8.7 billion tons produced in 2023 alone. We need fossil fuels in such large quantities precisely because they are fuels, continuously shoveled into power plants to generate energy. By contrast, solar panels and wind turbines require a fixed quantity of metals only during the construction phase—and once built, they can produce energy for several decades without additional inputs. Because of this, experts agree that the world will actually see a net decrease in energy-related mining if we replace fossil fuels with metals-powered technologies.

In 2023, a team of scientists and Deloitte consultants in the Netherlands projected future metal and coal demand under an ambitious scenario where humanity reaches net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. They found that, despite a more than sixfold increase in demand for energy-related metals—bringing the total up to just over 3 billion tons—total global ore extraction would decrease by a third because of the decline in coal mining. 

In any case, mining for energy transition minerals will likely only ever constitute a relatively small proportion of global mining activity. Mines cover less than 0.02 percent of Earth’s surface, but many of them are for iron and aluminum, which we need in ever-increasing quantities to build the world around us, regardless of where we get our energy. “That will dwarf anything that’s actually used for the energy transition,” said geologist Gawen Jenkin of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. 

Most importantly, perhaps, while fossil fuels can only be burned once, many minerals can in principle be used many times over. The Netherlands study estimates that we could slash energy-related mining demand by an additional third in the 2050 net-zero scenario if we were to massively upscale recycling of EVs, wind turbines, and solar panels. The fundamental issue, said Raphael Deberdt, a socioeconomic mining expert at the Colorado School of Mines, is that our economic system incentivizes as much extraction as possible in order to fuel infinite consumption. But shifts to reduce resource consumption—think electric buses and trains rather than SUVs, and reusing old solar panels and EV batteries wherever possible, for instance—and a circular economy that makes the best use of every resource would do wonders to ease the burden of mining.

There are other actions we can take to further reduce the adverse effects of mineral mining. For example, engineers can substitute materials connected to labor or human rights abuses with ones that can be more responsibly sourced; Tesla, for instance, has begun to equip its electric vehicles with iron-phosphate batteries that are cheaper and don’t require cobalt or nickel, which have been linked to environmental and social damage in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Indonesia, respectively. This reflects a broader shift across auto industries—with manufacturers like Renault and Volkswagen reportedly following suit—while iron-phosphate batteries are also becoming increasingly popular for general electricity storage. 

There are also many opportunities to extract minerals from the waste of existing mines that were originally built for different purposes. Research by mining and sustainability expert Tim Werner of the University of Melbourne has estimated that waste from a single Canadian zinc mine could supply several years’ worth of global demand for indium, which is used in solar cells, and there are already efforts to recover cobalt from old lead mines in Missouri. Nascent attempts to recover critical minerals from ocean water, plant life, and even asteroids have shown promise, though they are not developed enough to displace traditional methods.

In short, the mantra “reduce, reuse, recycle”—in precisely that order—retains its importance in an all-renewables world. The more of these changes we adopt, the more luxury we’ll have to choose where and how minerals are mined. “This transition needs to happen,” Werner said. “But we have to be really strategic, really smart, and really conscientious and responsible about where they’re coming from.”

— Katarina Zimmer, Grist

This article originally appeared in Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Sign up for its newsletter here.

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