June summary: zero carbon by 2030?

My highlight in June was the week spent in Cape Town with Amanda and Jon for Physical Separation '24 and Mill Circuits '24, both very enjoyable conferences, made even more enjoyable by the very unseasonable winter weather in Cape Town. 

A warm and sunny evening for the Physical Separation '24 sundowner,
with Cornish delegate Dave Goldburn of Holman-Wilfley

Our decision to hold these conferences in Cape Town, rather than in Falmouth, was vindicated by the awful train journey I experienced returning to Cornwall from London, where due to the usual industrial action the train was packed, with people standing in the aisles. So it will be good to be back at the Vineyard Hotel again in November for Process Mineralogy '24 and Critical Minerals '24 and to enjoy the amazing views each morning from the hotel bedroom window.

Luckily, when my flight was approaching Cape Town International it flew over Claremont and Newlands, with the same view of the mountain, but from a different perspective, looking over to the city centre. What a location for a conference!

Following the conferences Jon and I returned home to Luxembourg and Falmouth respectively, while Amanda took the short flight to Namibia for the SAIMM's Rare Earths conference, making the most of the pre-conference time to explore Namibia's amazing dunes. Her report on the conference will be published soon.

The following week Amanda was in Luxembourg, visiting Jon and family.

Amanda with her niece and nephew

The Cape Town conferences unfortunately clashed with the UK Mining Conference in Cornwall, which was held, as last year, in Falmouth. By all accounts it was another great event, attended by 370 delegates, with 30 exhibitors. Although I was unable to report on the conference, Carly Leonidas, the European Editor of Engineering & Mining Journal has provided an excellent report, highlighting how key UK battery metal projects are edging closer to production.

A packed Princess Pavilion, Falmouth

In June the race was on for the next Government, which will be decided on Thursday. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer's proposals for a publicly-owned company called Great British Energy to invest in clean and renewable energy are a central plank of Labour’s plans to entirely remove fossil fuels from UK electricity production by 2030, five years earlier than current government plans. But some energy analysts don’t think electricity decarbonisation as soon as 2030 is practically achievable as it would require the total installed UK offshore wind generating capacity to more than triple over the next six years. Solar electricity generation and onshore wind generating capacity would need to roughly double to replace the electricity currently provided by gas-fired power stations. 

According to the experts, and reported by the BBC, one of the biggest obstacles in terms of hitting the 2030 target is not the cost of installing new solar panels and wind turbines, but the practical difficulty, due to planning regulations and local opposition, of upgrading the UK’s electricity grid network. No mention here, however, of the obvious fact that when the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine, gas is going to be needed, along with the steady supply of nuclear energy, to keep the lights on (posting of 11 December 2023). Unless, of course, when the wind blows strongly, and the sun shines brightly, the intention is to store excess energy in mega-batteries or produce an attractive energy source, green hydrogen?

And as usual, there is not a single mention of where the critical minerals, necessary for renewables, will come from, or of the huge amount of energy needed to mine and process them.  As noted in the posting of 27 May renewable energy technologies, clean water, wastewater, electricity cannot exist without the most critical of metals, copper, which is likely to be the key commodity in the next few decades. Solar and wind farms, often spread out over large areas, require more copper per unit of power produced than do centralised coal and gas-fired power stations. Electric vehicles use more than twice as much copper as petrol cars do.

Although more copper is being recycled, it won’t be enough to cover demand, so the only alternative is to mine more and to develop secondary processing routes, as much copper and other critical metals are tied up in the tailings dumps of many years ago. It would be good to see some of the energy experts and politicians at Critical Minerals '24 in November!!