Tuesday - May 14, 2024

 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. PDT

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"Can We Mine Our Way to a Cooler Planet"

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By: Dr. Jerry King, Geophysicist    

 

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ABSTRACT:

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The global economy must be decarbonized to limit global warming and climate change.  This will require the construction of a new, carbon-neutral global economy. There is no agreed-upon plan for accomplishing this, but there are many decarbonization scenarios based on a shared conceptual understanding of the elements of a carbon-neutral global energy and industrial infrastructure.  This new infrastructure produces electric power from renewable and other carbon-neutral energy sources.  Some of the electric power runs electrolysers to produce hydrogen gas for use as a substitute for fossil fuels and for the current industrial uses of hydrogen. 

 

Constructing a carbon-neutral economy will be mineral-resource intensive and require large increases in the mining of certain critical minerals.  Manufacturing lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) and grid-electric storage will require large increases in the mining of lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, and graphite.  The electric motors for EVs and the generators in wind turbines will require large increases in the mining and processing of rare-earth metals.  Solar panels will require large increases in the supply of gallium.  Hydrogen electrolysers will increase the demand for catalysts such as platinum and iridium.  Many elements of the new infrastructure will increase the demand for copper. 

 

This talk will summarize the global supply-chain issues for the key critical minerals and will detail the history of rare-earth mining and processing at Mountain Pass, California, and the status of lithium mining in Nevada.

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BIO:

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Jerry spent his career as a seismologist working on safety assessments for nuclear power plants and nuclear waste disposal facilities.  The latter brought him to Las Vegas in 1986 to work on the proposed Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste repository.

 

After retiring, Jerry became interested in the contentious topics of global warming and climate change, not knowing what to think about either.  Several thousand hours of study later, he has concluded that anthropogenic climate change is real and poses a significant threat to future human generations and to many other species. 

Jerry now lectures on climate change as a volunteer with Citizens’ Climate Lobby.  He remains active professionally as the chair of the Southern Nevada Chapter of the Association of Environmental and Engineering Geologists.

 

He holds a BA in physics (1973) from the University of California at San Diego and a PhD in earth science (1981) from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. 

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