Biggest copper mines produced 20% less copper in 2023
Posted by mushroomsarefriends@reddit | collapse | View on Reddit | 108 comments
Posted by mushroomsarefriends@reddit | collapse | View on Reddit | 108 comments
AndrewSChapman@reddit
The universe is stupid, that's the problem. Apparently we have to live like monkeys, not like the energy junkies that we've become.
RottenFarthole@reddit
Almost like we are the stupid ones for breaking that rule
thefrydaddy@reddit
Well, we've only known for like... nearly two centuries.
CamTak@reddit
This has been well known for decades. The US geological survey outlined the inability to mine enough copper for transition to renewables. It was a main talking point for nuclear advocates.
There literally isn't enough copper in the ground.
mushroomsarefriends@reddit (OP)
The nuclear advocates don't seem to want to acknowledge their own limits to growth though. More than half of France's nuclear power plants shut down in the summer of 2022, mostly because the river water was simply too warm for them to dump their waste heat into it.
On a global scale waste heat is thought to be responsible for about 1% of observed global warming, but that's little consolation when it's being dumped into your local river and the fish die and your air becomes humid. Any plants we start building now will take at least ten years before they come online, by which time there will be even less fresh water available for these plants.
BertTKitten@reddit
Jesus, I didn’t know that. We really are fucked 7 ways to Sunday.
TheCrazedTank@reddit
Which is why all the billionaires are squeezing all they can and building bunkers…
mem2100@reddit
I feel the need to keep saying this. Any bunker that is designed for long term occupancy requires a steady source of fuel. How can you power those bunkers? Because people are going to notice the wires running from your surface wind/solar farms. They will cut the wires and route the power for their own use. The ONLY low profile way to power an underground bunker is with Geothermal. But even so, you need a staggering amount of money for construction and waste heat management. Building such a facility cannot be done secretly.
Zestyclose-Ad-9420@reddit
Probably the idea is to hunker in the bunker during a protracted crisis and emerge when enough people have died for them to reassert power.
mem2100@reddit
That's fair. Say 3-12 months. But if it was me I'd have a damn arsenal with a shooting range down there. A few snipers and swat folks for training everyone. Surveillance drones as well. Because after the collapse - well - anarchy is universally ugly.
Zestyclose-Ad-9420@reddit
id say that being enslaved by militarised tech bros crawling out of a bunker is worse than not paying taxes but who knows huh.
mem2100@reddit
ROTFL - fair point. I read this Asimov short story: Nightfall
Makes me realize that the most precious thing we have is our accumulated knowledge. So: In addition to our seed banks, I'm thinking we need to put STEM 101 on titanium plates. Maybe 10,000 plates - double sided. The 20,000 pages that would say get you to 1940. In normal size font. Then another 10,000 titanium plates with 10X smaller font - easily read with a 10X eyepiece. About 200,000 pages that get you to 1980. And then another 10,000 plates using some sort of compression tech - the reader of which can be made fairly easily after Civ does a modest reboot. Those being maybe at 100X compression. Those 2 million pages get you to the present.
Zestyclose-Ad-9420@reddit
Ive also been thinking about information preservation. Instead of doing tech in chronological order i would first put how to make the optics, and then have the rest in microscopic lettering.
However Ive also thought that replication is just as important. Having 10 000 copies that can make more copies is more resilliant than having a handful of titanium plates.
mem2100@reddit
How would the replication work?
Zestyclose-Ad-9420@reddit
I have no idea. If we figure out how to store and encode information into DNA, then you would put onto the titanium tablet how to decode DNA. Then a cultures knowledge can be directly embedded into people.
mem2100@reddit
This sounds both clever and delightful.
Zestyclose-Ad-9420@reddit
here is an introduction video on the subject. cool channel too. https://youtu.be/uCbXxPBSMzs?si=A7JeOrh6s3lmisBa
mem2100@reddit
That makes the most sense.
Plus you could hide a bunch of optical readers and embed their locations in some of the standard size plates.
susmind@reddit
Memory of Mankind
MOM developed ceramic data carriers which conserves analogue text and images for unlimited intervals of time.
Deep within the world’s oldest and still active saltmine in Hallstatt/Austria the MOM archive is protected for at least 1 million years.
gofishx@reddit
Survival is actually where Anarchy seems to thrive. When everyone is forced to rely on eachother to not die, strict rules and hierarchies tend to make a lot less sense. It's when resources are plentiful and survival becomes easier that humans organize into ways meant to best extract said resources, leading to hierarchies meant to manage the distribution of said resources.
If you truly want to plan on surviving long-term, post-cataclysm, you will be much better off with a plan that involves taking people in and building a community than you will trying to lock yourself down in a heavily armed fortress. That's not to say defense shouldn't be part of your plan, either, but most people seem to think that a post apocalypse scenario will be 90% shooting at people. In reality, you will probably be happy to see other people who are alive, and you would most likely benefit more from combining your survival efforts than you would from robbing each other.
mem2100@reddit
There's nothing wrong with a hierarchy per se. You cannot "vote" on every issue. A natural hierarchy based on people's actual skills is a beautiful thing.
That said, I agree that trying to live by robbery is a bad strategy, one that is likely to abbreviate not extend your longevity.
gofishx@reddit
To some degree. There is a lot of benefits to be had from any well organized system, and that's always going to result in hierarchy. The problem is that it always leads to abuse at some point. But I'm not really making a statement on that, more that anarchy under the right conditions isn't inherently just a bunch of people going crazy, and times of crisis are when humans tend to be the most humane towards eachother.
TheCrazedTank@reddit
There is literally a cult among tech billionaires that they need to spread “their seed” as much as possible because they believe they’re genetically superior and their descendants will lead humanity…
WormLivesMatter@reddit
Bunkers on Hawaii could achieve effecient geothermal exchange.
mem2100@reddit
Smart. Very smart.
TheCrazedTank@reddit
No one said they were smart, in fact by all accounts they’re brain dead, selfish morons.
4score-7@reddit
Turns out, 8 billion humans, many consuming way more energy than they should be, really is “peak population”.
6894@reddit
France only had to shut them down because they cheaped out years ago and didn't build cooling towers. Turns out dumping the heat directly in the river wasn't a great idea.
PlasticTheory6@reddit
There are always going to be things that nuclear companies cheap out on. Which should tell you something about nuclear.
edapblix@reddit
Compared to oil companies that never cheap out on stuff or have giant ecological disasters in say the Mexico gulf
RollinThundaga@reddit
Which should tell you something about ~~nuclear~~ companies FTFY
elihu@reddit
Nuclear is similar to fossil fuel power plants in that respect. They both work by boiling water to turn steam turbines, and they both have a lot of excess waste heat that gets transferred to whatever body of water they're connected to. So, it's not great, but at least if we're replacing coal or natural gas with nuclear, it's not making the existing situation substantially worse.
Also, it's not a problem if the nuclear plant is able to exchange heat with a much bigger body of water, such as the ocean.
Having nuclear reactors right next to the ocean involves some other risks, but building a nuclear reactor near enough to the ocean to run pipes but not so close it's in the tsunami hazard zone doesn't seem like it's too much to ask.
mem2100@reddit
No one will be happier than I am to see us quickly increase our renewables by 18 fold. Because global totals for 2023 were:
wind 6 Petawatt hours (PWH)/year
solar is 4.3 PWH/year
total 183.2 PWH/year
We added 1.3 PWH in renewables in 2023 alone which was 40% of our total energy consumption increase (of 3.4 PWH) that year.
We still have a LOT of cold water on our northern coasts. If we (1) Designate an area as a Nuclear generation region (2) standardize on a design or two (3) commit to building a minimum (1,000+) number of plants and (4) construct an electron superhighway using Ultra high voltage direct current transmission lines - we could greatly accelerate the transition from hydrocarbons.
Colosseros@reddit
That's not how electricity works. But I love your optimism.
mem2100@reddit
Are you referring to my "superhighway" term? It was simply a turn of phrase.
The Chinese have built a 12 GW UHVDC line that is 2000 miles long. I am simply making the point that with a few lines like that we could put clusters of generation plants in places with low population density (South Dakota) and send the power to distant cities with high demand. The UHVDC part means that this can be done with much smaller transmission losses.
Other than that - what is it that I said that isn't - how electricity works?
mushroomsarefriends@reddit (OP)
Do we even have the capacity to build 1,000 nuclear power plants in any reasonable time-frame? It took us 18 years here in Europe to build our new biggest nuclear power plant in Finland.
mem2100@reddit
We did the Apollo program pretty fast, and we have way more knowledge and expertise on nuclear power today than they had on Lunar exploration rockets back then.
To be honest - there is a lot of stupidly clever people in the nuclear power space. For example, the folks who are building the travelling wave reactor for Bill Gates. All this cool tech that still hasn't come to market. Maybe it will, maybe it won't.
Shivrainthemad@reddit
Not really a shutdown, but a reduction in production to stay within safe parameters. Juste pour être précis
Johndough99999@reddit
Just wait till people realize how much copper is needed for each electric vehicle.
khoonirobo@reddit
The best time to start making new nuclear plants was 50 years ago. The second best time is now.
PlasticTheory6@reddit
It was never a good idea to make nuclear. Did you not read any of what mushroom wrote?
mem2100@reddit
Big Carbon is doing a bang up job of slowing the deployment of renewables. That won't change. A designated nuclear zone would be popular for the "dividends" it paid residents - think Alaska and their oil dividend.
PlasticTheory6@reddit
Renewables have seen tremendous growth. Nearly 1/3 of global electrical power generation now comes from renewables. Good news! However, this has had zero impact on the level of atmospheric greenhouse gases. It seems that nuclear and renewables were the wrong strategy, and we needed to directly shut down oil, gas, coal, etc.
Another funny thing about electricity is that it needs SF6 in its breakers and transformers. SF6 is great at preventing arc flashes which burn up equipment (and sometimes the poor souls who work on the equipment). It is also great at trapping heat. Take a guess at how great. 2x as effective as carbon dioxide? 10x? 100x?
From the EPA:
There is no way out. If you want to run a dishwasher, a washing machine, a car, a TV, you will damage the environment and that damage will eventually accumulate enough to kill you. I'm sorry.
endadaroad@reddit
And the best places to put them are on fault lines in tsunami zones. /s
Idle_Redditing@reddit
It takes far less for the weather to cause solar panels and wind turbines to stop any power output. They can't even go a single week with continuous output. Their output is constantly stopping without any warning.
OrangeCrack@reddit
False, this is easily overcome by dropping a giant block of ice in the water every now and then.
mem2100@reddit
The best thing about icebergs is that they can easily be towed.
Rob_Haggis@reddit
Even better, as we keep warming the planet, the Arctic/ Antarctic ice fields will drop giant ice cubes in without us needing to lift a finger.
Climate change solved.
WanderInTheTrees@reddit
Thus solving the problem once and for all.
txtphile@reddit
ONCE AND FOR ALL!
nopersonality85@reddit
Globle wobble?
AndrewSChapman@reddit
Absolutely. Ice is literally dropping into the water at the edges of Greenland. We just need to toe it using nuclear powered boats to our nuclear facilities.
Morganross@reddit
Modern plants don't have that problem at all. Once through cooling is illegal in some states here. You are talking about 100-year-old technology.
Lord_Vesuvius2020@reddit
Slight change on what you’re saying. I think there’s actually plenty of copper ore but the quality of that ore keeps decreasing. The fact that there is plenty of ore is true but the big problem is that mining it and refining it becomes increasingly unprofitable as the concentration of copper becomes less and less. But the bottom line is still that there won’t be enough copper produced to come close to satisfying the demand.
start3ch@reddit
Copper is 100% recyclable, this really shouldn't be an issue
Annual_Rooster_3621@reddit
yes, but a lot of it used for cabling purposes and its rarely cost-effective to strip the copper from cabling without melting/burning off the jacket releasing shittons of pollution.
I installed IT and AV hardware for a few years and now Im like Dr Farnsworth from Futurama with numerous “drawers where i keep my various lengths of wire” reusing cable is the best way to recycle it unfortunately and it’s rarely an option for most applications.
for their small footprint, in 2024, I find that AV and IT installations are some of the most wasteful construction investments around.
Shorttail0@reddit
Mineable silver is projected to be depleted in 2080, and it's a requirement for solar panels, microchips, and many batteries.
At some point mining landfills will be the way to go. I can't imagine how hazardous that would be.
start3ch@reddit
Mining is pretty hazardous. Theres all sorts of toxic and radioactive elements that you dig up along with the thing you want, then you use extremely strong chemicals to break down and split out the metal you want
RollinThundaga@reddit
Yeah I can't see how a landfill could add to that, especially when one of the most toxic superfund sites is a product of regular rainwater running through a mine
niardnom@reddit
The scale of copper requirements for a zero emissions vastly outstrips world supply. And while copper is recyclable, it is expensive, dirty, and high energy to recycle. While aluminum can be substituted in some use cases, it cant be used everywhere, particularly in high voltage marine environments, and is extremely high energy to process and recycle. So its increased energy requirements all around just to maintain the status quo. There does not seem to be a viable path forward without energy degrowth unless a technology miracle occurs. Simon Michaux has several good papers on this topic.
notam00se@reddit
There was an article from who knows where, talking about every country going green would require the current global logistics to be dedicated for copper, and it would just barely keep up. No shipping of food, resources, oil, goods, copper would exceed all of them.
Idle_Redditing@reddit
Maybe we should have listened to them. We should start listening to them now and listen to everything they say and take all of it seriously.
Texuk1@reddit
There are bottlenecks all through the system especially in precious metals.
phido3000@reddit
Olympic dam mine, which is one of the largest mines, on one of the largest copper deposits in the world, saw a 40% increase for 2024.
There are expansion plans to take it to over 500,000kt a year by 2030.
https://www.australianmining.com.au/bhp-advances-smelter-and-refinery-expansion-in-sa/
It's also one of the largest uranium mines, silver and gold mines.
whofusesthemusic@reddit
Copper, nickle, lithium, uranium , etc et etc. Any rare earth metal of element needed to transisiton to a curent state level of engery does not exist in the quantities needed on earth at this time.
The great simplificaitron will happen if for no other reason is we will be forced via our supply chains.
dumnezero@reddit
Copper containing infrastructure like cables and pipes:
Duc_de_Bourgogne@reddit
I read an article a while back stating that to support transition to electric vehicles we would have to mine as much copper now as we have since the beginning of humanity. Obviously impossible when yields are way down.
Erick_L@reddit
EV mandates around the world require hundreds of new mines in less time it takes to open a single one (on average).
krichuvisz@reddit
Copper is recycable. We need circular economy. We should have listen to those club of Rome guys in 1970. I fear, now it's to late. The limits of growth was in the bookshelf of every hippie person with self knitted socks, who smelled weird an we made fun of. Turns out, those guys were right.
elihu@reddit
Part of the problem as I understand it is that a renewable energy economy needs a lot more copper than a fossil fuel based economy. That copper can't all come from recycling because we need a lot more of it than is in circulation.
That said, I'm a little skeptical that copper availability is as much of a hard limit on renewable growth as it's made out to be. Aluminum could replace copper in a lot of applications. Aluminum may perform worse than copper for a lot of things we use copper for, but that's okay. If you give people a choice between an EV with a copper-wound motor with 300 horsepower and an aluminum-wound motor with 200 horsepower, most people will go for the copper motor if they can afford it. On the other hand, if the choice is between a 200 horsepower motor and riding an actual horse because those are the only available options, that aluminum motor doesn't sound quite so bad.
Granted the less driving people do the better; it's just an example. The same trade-offs apply to wind turbines, or electrical cables, or a bunch of other things that could be made a little bit cheaper and a little bit worse (or in some cases even a little bit better) out of aluminum.
alamohero@reddit
We quit using aluminum wiring in most applications because it was a greater fire hazard than copper.
elihu@reddit
It was (mostly) banned for house wiring, and yet electrical feed lines into houses, transmission lines, and transformers are often made with aluminum instead of copper.
Wikipedia has an interesting article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminum_building_wiring
Apparently one of the big problems in the 60s and 70s was they used an alloy that wasn't suitable for the task and used fixtures that weren't designed for aluminum wire.
8000 series aluminum alloys were invented later, which are used for electrical wiring these days.
I had thought that aluminum oxide was the main problem, but the wikipedia article claims that wasn't really the main issue. (Aluminum oxide is a poor conductor, but it's too thin a layer to make a significant difference.) Galvanic corrosion, though, was a contributing factor.
ijzerke@reddit
Pretty much all copper gets recycled. But we need more every year to sustain the growing economy and energy transition.
Fickle_Stills@reddit
They're gonna ruin Lake Superior aren't they 😭
https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/public_lands/mining/Minnesota_mining/index.html
intratubator@reddit
r/realshittycopper
GrinNGrit@reddit
The next mines will be the landfills.
Ezekiel_29_12@reddit
Cooper is hard to replace in circuit cards because it's solderable, but in a lot of other things that use copper, we could use aluminum. We don't because aluminum is currently more expensive, but if demand keeps rising and copper production can't keep up, then the price of copper will rise, and we'll see people switch to aluminum. We could even see people replacing existing copper items with aluminum just so they can sell the copper into another use.
A bigger issue is that smelting fresh aluminum uses a ton of electricity with CO2 emissions. (If we had a tax on carbon intensity, I bet people would stop buying aluminum foil for kitchen use. Most of that gets thrown away, which is bonkers).
elihu@reddit
Nah, aluminum is actually much cheaper than copper. (A random commodities website I checked has aluminum at $2.63 per kg for aluminum and $9.60 for copper.)
I have trouble imagining printed circuit boards being made with anything other than copper traces, but for high-power applications copper is mostly used because it has better conductivity and is easier to work with, and it's often used when cost of raw materials isn't a big factor.
Long distance power transmission lines are already often aluminum. Big power transformers often have aluminum windings. There was an attempt in the U.S. to use aluminum wiring in houses for awhile, but it was quickly abandoned because the terminals tended to oxidize and then get really hot because aluminum oxide is a poor conductor. People didn't like their electrical outlets catching fire, so it was banned. There are probably ways to terminate connections safely, but it'd be tough to convince any home owner or regulator to approve it these days, even if the feed line to the house might already be aluminum.
I think some EVs use aluminum cabling for the high voltage lines from the battery to the motor controller. It makes sense there, as the aluminum weighs less and is cheaper for the same conductive capacity as copper, it just tends to be a little bulkier.
EV Motors could be wound with aluminum. You'd end up with a motor that's either bigger or has worse performance specifications. EV motors are usually absurdly over-powered and very small anyways, so I don't see that as a big loss.
Interesting discussion over on r/Ask/Engineers:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/10h5e16/why_isnt_aluminum_used_for_wiring_in_ev_motors/
dft_450@reddit
Dang you are just so wrong. Totally incorrect in every way.
LlamasBeTrippin@reddit
We will drastically need to increase the efficiency and amount of copper we can recover from waste materials, meaning better ways of separating actual waste and recoverable waste.
Recycling in the US is severely lacking, and it’s unsustainable. However we will reach a point where most easily mineable copper reserves are gone and most of the supply is currently being used, I.e. more copper actively used in technology, power generation and transportation, houses, etc. as we move to a more technologically advanced civilization. In this case we’re are kinda fucked even with highly efficient recycling methods; if we actually hit this limit in our lifetime, whatever it may be.
AnthonyGSXR@reddit
Time to mine dead volcanoes
HumanityHasFailedUs@reddit
Ya know. I’ve been reading a lot of this kind of thing the last few days. And ALL of it comes down to the same thing. Too many people, and too complex (read greedy) of a society.
Ekaterian50@reddit
Greed complex would be a great name to replace all countries titles with for now
HumanityHasFailedUs@reddit
Except that it’s human greed. It’s all of us, in some way or another. And there are billions too many of us.
For those of you in the post saying “aluminum” or “nuclear”, may I suggest r/climate- it’s much more appropriate for your hopium.
Ekaterian50@reddit
I agree. Anything short of a time machine would not be monumental enough to potentially avert another major extinction. And even if you could do that it's hard to contend with our species as a whole because people get so irrationally devoted to ideas.
RLMNDNTCHT@reddit
I've thought about the time machine fantasy in the shower and came up to the conclusion that it wouldn't change anything. Countries will still race to exploit oil or else they would be enslaved by those that do.
Ekaterian50@reddit
Exactly my point. Even if we can time travel it would be next to impossible to try and convince every one of our sapien cousins to see a balanced and rational worldview.
endadaroad@reddit
Exactly what should be expected when the highest compensated people are the least productive. Here's to the private equity managers picking over the bones of civilization.
HumanityHasFailedUs@reddit
The millionaire and billionaire classes produce nothing but suffering and misery. They are simply put; cancerous parasites
MountainsAreBug@reddit
I think cancerous parasites would be offended by that.
HumanityHasFailedUs@reddit
And rightly so.
humanSpiral@reddit
US is doing a poor job at giving permits for mines in US too. More corruption to keep prices high, and restrict electification and electric motors.
Rygar_Music@reddit
Dang, how is the world economy going to keep growing if everything is falling apart?
IIIIlIIIlIIlIl@reddit
Lulz
sk8erpro@reddit
This is the wall between us and the green transition they were trying to sell us. Right in our face.
Slamtilt_Windmills@reddit
One of the things that bugs me the most about collapse is, should humans make another attempt at civilization, all the industrial raw materials have been removed from concentrated locations and distributed across the globe
IndieStoner@reddit
Yep. We climbed the ladder and broke the rungs as we went.
Pretty soon we're just gonna be on a giant pair of stilts lol and it's a loooong way down.
Smegmaliciousss@reddit
Same thing for fossil fuels. Every low hanging fruit has been collected and our descendants will have a lot of trouble doing space travel, for example.
Armouredmonk989@reddit
We aren't going to have any living descendants extinction is forever.
IndieStoner@reddit
Well, I won't have descendants, but yeah lol. Y'all have fun.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
Ezekiel_29_12@reddit
A lot of them have been concentrated in the process. It used to be that you had to smelt ore to get iron, but now we also have giant nuggets of iron all over the place. It's part of why iron is so heavily recycled. Only down side is that iron is heavy and centralized recycling requires you to move the iron to the recycling forge, which is a marginally significant cost because iron is so cheap due to centuries of accumulating it.
Platypus-Dick-6969@reddit
This guy knows about our problems.
tsyhanka@reddit
hmmm but I also see lines like "production [for 2024] expected to reach a new high of 22.9 million tonnes, a 3.2% increase from the previous year" (here). did we pass Peak Coppper or not? someone please enlighten me!
(on a related note, though, I just saw "Britons urged to dig out unwanted electricals to tackle copper shortage")
PopularWar730@reddit
While certainly a problem, we can use aluminum for things like residential wiring.
Before we have a massive shortage we will likely start transitioning things that don't need to be made of copper to use other more abundant materials.
ShareholderDemands@reddit
I can think of a whole lot of shit that doesn't need to exist that we could recycle.
We can do it now voluntarily or we can do it later when we're forced to during the great die off.
Your call folks.
StatementBot@reddit
The following submission statement was provided by /u/mushroomsarefriends:
Submission statement: Climate change is causing massive droughts in many countries, which is now making it hard to mine more copper in some of the world's biggest copper mines, which are already plagued by declining ore grades. Copper production is supposed to rise rapidly to facilitate the transition to green energy, but it now seems that copper production is more likely to crash in the years ahead of us.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1g203gw/biggest_copper_mines_produced_20_less_copper_in/lrk9ref/
Philostotle@reddit
Nobody could have seen this coming.
mushroomsarefriends@reddit (OP)
Submission statement: Climate change is causing massive droughts in many countries, which is now making it hard to mine more copper in some of the world's biggest copper mines, which are already plagued by declining ore grades. Copper production is supposed to rise rapidly to facilitate the transition to green energy, but it now seems that copper production is more likely to crash in the years ahead of us.