Quote:
Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist
I'll start by saying I think Canada should sell it's oil as long as people want oil. Unilateral supply destruction in a global commodity doesn't decrease consumption, it just makes it more expensive. I also strongly believe Alberta has future gold mine with oil sands for producing what will be heavily sought after carbon products that are most easily made with bitumen
Having said that, I always see people suggest mining for minerals for batteries as somehow equal to or worse than oil and gas from an environmental and ecological perspective. It's simply not. You also can't recycle O&G or coal. Vehicle batteries are very recyclable and there's already way more recycling capacity than batteries available. Sustainable mineral mining and recycling is orders of magnitude (perhaps 100's of times) less impactful than today's O&G exploration and extraction with regards to land use and water consumption.
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I'd like to see some peer reviewed sources on this. Please don't quote that T&E report, there were so many holes poked through that.
Unfortunately right now, the inputs for batteries are just as bad as O&G. Lets look at lithium production for example:
1) Lithium is energy intensive to produce and many areas do not the the electrical grid to support mining currently. They rely on coal to power their operations.
2) Most mining requires open pits which takes huge land acreage which impacts ecosystems.
3) From a social perspective a lot of mining is being conducted in places like the Congo which has been utilizing child slavery. Many of these mines have terrible human rights records.
4) Water usage. The brine which they extract lithium from underground aquifers.
5) The recycling process is not environmentally friendly. It releases toxins, and uses massive amounts of energy.
These are just the ones off the top of my head. I hope the technology can improve and I agree that the recycling rates are exciting and I hope that they can continue to become more efficient at reusing inputs. But to say the impact is not as bad as the O&G industry ignores the fact that the world runs on O&G. If lithium and other renewable energy intensive metals and minerals extraction are going to completely replace O&G, that footprint will dwarf O&G. The main reason most O&G is happening subsurface, not in open pits.